Join bassist, composer, and arranger Saúl Sierra and his quintet at the 35th San Jose Jazz Summer Fest on Sunday, August 10, 2025 at 1 PM at the Montgomery Theater in Downtown San Jose for a performance that combines Saúl’s roots in Mexico City, the rhythms of Latin America, and the soul of jazz.
In this conversation, Saúl Sierra discusses his upbringing, the power of rhythm to communicate across borders, and how improvisation keeps his music fresh, rooted in tradition, and free. With material already brewing for two more albums, Saúl remains committed to honoring tradition while expanding its possibilities through music.
Born and raised in Mexico City, Saúl’s early musical education wasn’t found in conservatories—it was shaped by the city. He first picked up the upright bass before switching to electric to play rock en Español and rock covers with local bands. His interests evolved toward Latin music, which was hugely popular in Mexico City, encompassing Cuban, Caribbean, and folkloric styles that would later become an integral part of his artistic voice. Saúl returned to the acoustic upright bass while studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Since moving to the Bay Area after graduating in 1999, Saúl has been ingrained in the Latin jazz scene. A member and co-founder of bands like Vission Latina and El Tren Trio, his collaborators include Carlos Caro (percussion), Julio Perez (percussion), and Marco Díaz (piano/trumpet) —musicians who also perform on his most recent album, Caminos. With experience teaching Latin Jazz and music, Saúl also cites teaching as a source of creative inspiration, deepening his interest in cross-cultural storytelling through sound. His new album, Caminos, produced with support from a 2022 InterMusic SF musical grant, showcases diverse Pan-American rhythms and blends jazz with folkloric traditions across the Americas.
Creating Caminos was a deeply collaborative process. Saúl laid down bass tracks, then worked with his ensemble, encouraging both structure and spontaneity. While guiding collaborators on his vision of the compositions, Saúl also allowed freedom for personal expression. Ultimately, he believed gathering contributions from diverse musicians would strengthen the tone, rhythm, and authenticity of the project. Whether recording a Cuban changüí with seamless 4/4 to 5/4 transitions or grappling with the complex rhythmic structure of Mexican Son Jarocho, each track reflects a lifetime of listening, learning, and letting go.
Caminos draws influence from rhythms like Venezuelan merengue in ⅝, Joropo, and Peruvian festejo and landó, comparing them to Mexican traditions in both timing and harmonic tension. While he continues to rehearse and adapt Caminos for live quintet performances based on the energy of the performance, Saúl’s musical vision extends far beyond this album, incorporating pieces from Caminos into different sets. As a bassist, he believes it is his role to provide the nuanced foundation that allows these diverse styles to shine.
Jon Dryden is a pianist, composer, professor of Jazz Studies at SJSU, and one of the 2025 Jazz Aid Fund grantees, performing at the San Jose Jazz New Works Fest on March 7 in the SJZ Break Room. We had the chance to pick his artistic brain on topics from what inspires him, how he balances the demands of teaching with composing while still earning enough to live, and his hopes and dreams for the Bay Area jazz scene.
Producer Jesse Harris describes Dryden’s playing as “somewhere between Vince Guaraldi and Paul Bley.” Others have called it “melancholy with a touch of hope,” says Jon Dryden. We think it’s dreamy, emotional, and layered–like crying while sitting under a grand piano when you’re a kid but still feeling comforted by it.
Dryden says for the Break Room show, “I’m bringing in a few amazing musicians whom I love to work with from New York and Los Angeles. The performance will open with a new piece called “Circada” and will include the SJZ grant-commissioned piece, “That Would Be Telling,”
The ensemble features Dryden on piano, Ben Flocks on tenor saxophone, Scott Colberg on bass, and Benjamin Ring on drums.
Dryden says the title, ”That Would Be Telling,” is “from a key phrase in the British Classic Spy-Fi seriesThe Prisoner, a show I watched with my students. It’s one of the most amazing and influential TV shows ever made. The music in the show is excellent too.”
When describing his inspiration and process, he shares, “I love metaphors, especially when they are used in subtle ways that cross artistic and psychological disciplines. Concepts like these give me an unwritten emotional framework I can draw from musically.”
The television show presents an argument between the individual and the collective. “It asks, how much of each mode of thinking–collectivity and individuality– should exist in a society? Does a collective society lead to homogenization and surveillance states?”
Whether collective societies lead to homogenization remains to be seen. However, Dryden acknowledges that it’s nearly impossible to have a thriving jazz scene without one strong type of collective: community.
”I love what the SJZ Break Room isdoing, which is establishing a place to play, listen and mingle, he says.”
However, he admits that it can be tough to maintain the sense of community he experienced in New York, where most venues are located in a smaller geographic area.
“The Bay Area Jazz scene has many amazing musicians, but is so spread out that there’s no center where people can congregate.”
Community means so much, says Dryden, because “we need each other, and we need to be around people who are better musicians than us. What I would like to see much more of is more friendly competition–people kindly challenging one another to grow musically and to share ideas.” Without friendly competition, he says, creativity can falter.
A robust community not only provides a center of gravity where jazz-lovers and performers can congregate, commune, and compete, but it creates a place to network and radically imagine new possibilities. New possibilities inspire not only new works of art but also new music students, new venues, and new job opportunities–something sorely needed to sustain Bay Area musicians.
“The hyphenated life is a common career for most musicians,” says Dryden, referring to the multiple streams of income that he depends on in order to afford the cost of living in Aptos, to which he returned in 2010 to care for his dad after living and working for 19 years in New York City.
The way Dryden describes the New York City Jazz scene conjures up complex feelings, much like his compositions do. His words bring up feelings and images, like the melancholy yet intensely alive takes he gives to popular songs he covers, like Nirvana’s All Apologies. He mentions venues, all close to one another, in a relatively condensed space. Images of happy, dreamy couples and groups of people weaving their way into and out of vibrant jazz clubs all close together–“that’s hard to beat, even when you have small hubs like those in San Francisco and the East Bay,” Dryden explains.
Prior to returning to his native California, Dryden was “solely making a living as a performing musician/composer/arranger/producer. Since I moved back home to Aptos, I’ve added instructor and lecturer to those skills.”
Some working musicians, says Dryden, have their hands in a lot of pots because “many of us love a lot of different kinds of music.” No exception, he cites musical influences as diverse as Shostakovich, Scriabin, and Smith–Elliot Smith, that is. He also loves Prince. Dryden himself has collaborated with an impressive group of musicians–Michael Urbaniak, Patrice Rushen, and the Brecker Brothers, to name a few. He has recorded with several stratospheric megastars–Questlove, Norah Jones, David Byrne, Dave Chappelle, and John Mayer. And if those accomplishments weren’t remarkable enough, he has also composed for both Michael Moore and David Byrne–both heroes’ heroes.
He finds inspiration both in the incredible musicians he loves playing with and in his students. “They know a lot of things I don’t, and they have new music they’re listening to that I’m not aware of. I like to hear what they are into musically. Some of my students write pieces that aren’t anything like what I would come up with. I love to see that. Semi-consciously, I pick up their concepts and sometimes I work bits–no stealing, mind you. Just bits–into my compositions.“
While he wishes he could devote more time to composing, “teaching earns me more than half my income and consumes less time.” And still, he admits that he could not afford living in Santa Cruz County without his family house, where he lives. So, the multi-hyphenate grindlife continues, and while he doesn’t know the answer to the economic woes that drives musicians out of urban areas they can no longer afford, he does hope that “scenes will start to percolate in unexpected places.”
Dryden started piano lessons at five and began composing not long after. ”The compositions weren’t very good then, of course; but I have always associated performing and composing as one thing,” he says.
While he has strong ideas about composition and excellence, his view on interpreting music is more open-ended: “I like music to be whatever the listener wants it to be. One role a composer/songwriter can take on is making the personal universal.”
Check out the Jon Dryden Quartet at SJZ Break Room for New Works Fest, Friday, March 7 at 8p (Doors open at 7:30p). Tickets. Livestream.
In the courtyard of Mexican Heritage Plaza, accompanied by the gentle sound of a waterfall and a slow sway of a dense crop of palm trees, Jonathan Borca admits he’s often a bit too busy. And in a moment of reflection, he shares the fascinating reason why.
“I feel I have an existential window,” shares Borca. As a very proud advocate of San Jose’s East Side, he feels a deep connection to, and urgency toward, his community work. But even after 10 years in the nonprofit space, he’s still finding ways to grow.
“This is the first time where I’ve never had to compartmentalize who I am,” he says of his time at the School of Arts and Culture (SOAC), where he serves as deputy director. The role is quite the achievement for someone still in his 30s, but Borca’s nonprofit success is merely one dimension to his story.
His life is a tale of dualities. Born to a Mexican mother and Filipino father who met at Eastside Church of Christ near Alum Rock Avenue, Borca spent his earliest years in Japan before returning to San Jose at age 7. Raised by his mom and grandmother, he remained entrenched in the East Side until he attended Bellarmine College Preparatory through a yearly, merit-based scholarship.
“It was visceral to me, the gross inequities [compared to] where my homies went,” says Borca of the transition he experienced. “[You take] a 12-minute drive to Bellarmine’s campus, and it’s a completely different world: state-of-the-art library, multiple sports facilities, you name it.”
Fueled by a desire to help even that divide, he first got involved with nonprofit work in high school. While juggling course loads at the University of San Francisco, he commuted home to work 30 hours a week at YWCA Silicon Valley.
“This is the first time where I’ve never had to compartmentalize who I am.”
That fervent pace was burning him out, but a fateful meeting with Jessica Paz-Cedillos, co-executive director at SOAC, in early 2020 helped reignite faith in the work he was doing. “I felt her passion immediately and saw her vision as a leader,” he notes. “So for her, I leaned in.” In two years, he’s successfully led state-wide programs and grown SOACs sponsorship numbers, earning two promotions in the process.
Yet well before finding his place in such spaces, he was a confused kid trying to make sense of the world. “Coming from Japan and arriving in San Jose, I was a bit of a knucklehead,” he recalls of his childhood. His mom and grandmother tried desperately to figure out ways to ease his temper and channel his energy. He found a release in hip-hop.
First learning from the works of Arrested Development and Tupac Shakur, Borca used rap as a framework to better make sense of the paradoxical nature of his experience: “I used to think I wasn’t Mexican enough, Filipino enough, East side enough / Too private for public schooling / Too hood for private students,” he shares in his poem “Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá” (“Neither Here, Nor There”). His narratives are often woven into a jazz-centric framework, intimately shared alongside a lone piano or strewn atop a wall of sound when he’s spitting bars as the resident emcee of 7th Street Big Band.
The name “Francis Experience” is an invitation toward deeper connection with those listening. It’s also a reference to his personal journey of cultural acceptance. For years, he thought his middle name was Francisco, but later found out it was actually Francis. It was a call back to his Filipino side—and the father he rarely saw—reminding him of his layered story: Mexican and Filipino, Francisco and Francis, performer and community builder.
In 2019, he took his passion for the arts one step further by presenting his first “Francis Experience” event at Tabard Theatre. Rather than present a variety show, he chose to stitch together different musical styles and arts disciplines into a thoughtful, three-act format. The concept was also a bit of a thought experiment.
“The inspiration was really based on an assumption. We hear that life imitates art, but I thought, ‘Can art imitate life?’ ” he points out. “Just like I’m trying to chase the thread between different creative offerings, [I hoped] that people in the audience could find a thread amongst each other.”
He’s brought that same programmatic diversity to more of his events, including A Little T.L.C., a literacy event spearheaded alongside Oakland’s Akira’s Book Club, and “Colour Me Gold,” an affordable monthly series meant to empower small businesses and showcase local BIPOC creatives.
“Living in between worlds doesn’t have to be a deficit,” Borca goes on to share in “Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá.” “It can make you a bridge builder / It can birth new hues and add to your specialness.”
Though he may not have seen someone living the example he’s now setting, he’s making sure to be as visible as possible to those in his wake.
As a jazz bassist, composer, and arranger, Ken Okada has spent his life finding the groove. Unlike in other genres of music, in jazz, bass is the glue responsible for holding the group together. When composing music, Ken is less concerned with being credited with a beautiful melody and more so leaving room for other musicians to join and create.
Born in New York to Japanese parents, Ken also spent time in Brazil and New York in his youth as his family followed his father in business. His ear for music came from his creatively inclined older sisters, who played piano and influenced his taste in music. Video game soundtracks also inspired Ken. He began learning to produce music electronically and playing in multiple bands throughout middle and high school.
After attempting law school at university, Ken began sitting in with the historic Keio University Big Band, where a friend went. That was a huge turning point for Ken, who would soon dedicate his life to music while beginning a tech career, starting his businesses to support his family, and moving to the United States.
Over the years, Ken has composed music as part of the Ken Okada Group and performed in jazz combos and big bands featuring artists such as John Worley, Leon Joyce, Yankee Taylor, Destiny Muhammad, Eric Colvin, and Rick Vandivier and numerous jazz clubs and festivals around the world.
Most recently, Ken has recorded and performed with a percussion phenom, Yoyoka Soma, a 13-year-old Japanese musician living in America who went viral in 2018 for renditions of Led Zeppelin. Together, the group has released the album “Square One,” now available on Spotify and Apple Music.
In our conversation, we discuss Ken’s approach to jazz, his upbringing as a Japanese musician, the influences of jazz in San Jose, and his most recent project featuring Yoyoka.
Join Ken this Friday, 11/10, at 8 pm at the San Jose Jazz Break Room as the Ken Okada Group Featuring YOYOKA engages audiences with stunning rhythm, high-flying melodies, and original arrangements by Ken Okada.
