A group of Bay Area artists, including Grammy-Award-winning blues artist Fantastic Negrito, rockers the Stone Foxes, Tim Bluhm of The Mother Hips and Americana band Rainbow Girls have contributed songs to a new charity album that will benefit the homeless in San Francisco. The album, called Blanket the Homeless,…

Fantastic Negrito performs at The Fillmore in San Francisco on June 15, 2018. Photo: Karen Goldman. When 2014 began, Xavier Dphrepaulezz was a former musician. His mid-‘90s music career ended abruptly when a car accident shattered his wrist badly enough that it had to be fused and put him…

Photos: Karen Goldman SAN FRANCISCO — Fantastic Negrito, as an artist, lives up to the adjective in his name. The Oakland songwriter and his band lit up the Fillmore with grooves that made dancing irresistible Friday. The evening served as both an album release show—his sophomore LP, Please Don’t Be Dead, dropped…

Fantastic Negrito, “Please Don’t Be Dead.” When the last Fantastic Negrito album, The Last Days of Oakland, came out in 2016, there was a buzz that Oakland’s Xavier Dphrepaulezz could be the Next Big Thing after he had gone from busking at BART stations to a coveted NPR Tiny…

Every week, there’s a plethora of new music at our fingertips. Artists on platforms such as Spotify and Bandcamp are plentiful, and the radio offers a steady deluge of new singles, but who has time to sort through all that? RIFF does! We pooled our resources to find some of the best…

Photos: Karen Goldman BERKELEY — How do you review someone as good as Fantastic Negrito? The man is a master showman, and his music is incredible. Every time I’ve seen him perform has been better than the last, and Saturday night’s show at the UC Theatre kept that streak alive. But my…

Mavis Staples, Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers, Fantastic Negrito, Eric Burdon and The Animals, WAR and Malian duo Amadou and Mariam will perform at this year’s Stern Grove Festival. The free, 10-week summer music festival at Sigmund Stern Grove Park, a summer tradition, is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year.…

St. Lucia Looking back on my interviews over the past 12 months, the first thing that surprised me was just how busy I stayed: nearly 50 interviews of 10 minutes or longer, about a dozen more than 2015, which had seemed much busier. Interviewing artists is just one part…

Photos: Roman Gokhman SAN FRANCISCO — Temple of the Dog’s self-titled debut, their lone album, was released 25 years ago. It is as old now as Pet Sounds, Revolver and Blonde On Blonde were when it debuted in 1991. That is old enough to qualify as classic rock, as the age and…

Click to view the full map The 72 music performers at the 9th annual Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival next month represent at least 10 countries and 16 of the United States. Despite the absence of Asian and South American artists, as well as the classical penguin stylings…