Concerts at the Cadillac: Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers
Performing as an extended 10-piece ensemble for an extended Concert at the Cadillac!
At the Cadillac Hotel | 380 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
Friday August 11, 2023 | 1:00 - 2:30pm
Free | All Welcome | Mask Wearing Required
Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers opens a second season of TLM’s Sounds of the Tenderloin live music series with a extended set & ensemble for a very special Concert at the Cadillac, the long-running concert series geared to the residents of the historic hotel that is also the physical home of the Tenderloin Museum!
Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers got their start as a band in the late 1980s performing at The Blue Lamp, a long running Tenderloin dive bar that catered to the theater crowd and a hard crowd of local regulars. Ever since, Lavay and bandleader Chris Siebert have cultivated the big band sound in SF, and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers often feature an intergenerational mix of players, the more senior of whom had roots in the Fillmore’s robust jazz scene and who form the bedrock of the jazz community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many years and career milestones later, Lavay & her band still hold a lot of love for the TL, and on August 11th they’re going to play it out loud at the Cadillac Hotel for an extended Concert at the Cadillac with an extended horn section to create an extra large big band sound.
Concerts at the Cadillac is a free concert series open to the public that, since 2007, has provided high-quality music for the residents of the Cadillac Hotel and San Francisco's Tenderloin District. The Tenderloin Museum honors the longevity and resilience of this unique series by co-presenting select concerts that animate the neighborhood’s undersung cultural history through live music, the mission of TLM’s ongoing Sounds of the Tenderloin series of public programs. These monthly Friday afternoon performances bring live music to the Cadillac’s spacious lobby, which hints at the grandeur of the historic building when it was constructed in 1907 and now features the Patricia Walkup Memorial Piano, a meticulously restored 1884 Steinway Model D concert grand piano. Focused on jazz, Latin, and classical, the Concerts at the Cadillac’s programming features local, working musicians steeped in an instrumental or vocal practice, brings live music into the home of Tenderloin residents, and is “dedicated to the power of great music to uplift and inspire.” Many of the performances have been documented with high quality audio and video, creating a vast archive of full length concert videos that reveals the hotel’s dedication to its live music program and traces a loose network of the city’s most talented musicians and ensembles, many of whom have returned to perform for the series multiple times. Check out Lavay Smith’s prior performance at the Cadillac from 2016 at this link!
Funding for this Sounds of the Tenderloin live music program is provided by Specified General Fund for the Museum Grant Program under the California Cultural and Historical Endowment.