On Wednesday night, I went to Madrone Art Bar for Top Chefs Potluck, a monthly show hosted by the Top Chefs band. I originally discovered this band from their Stoop Sessions performances, and also caught their free show at the Band Shell in Golden Gate Park.

The star of this particular show was SundaY on vocals. She has an amazing voice and performs both original songs and amazing covers of singers like Jill Scott and Sade. She also works the room, pacing around making eye contact with each member of the audience, and even performs in the back by the bar for the people who are too cool to stand up front.

When SundaY isn’t singing, she steps aside and lets the the Top Chefs band shine with some pure jazz jamming. The “potluck” part of the evening comes when musicians and singers from the audience are invited to join them. This particular evening, a singer named Mahogany stepped in to perform “Valerie.” A rapper also joined and did a bit of freestyling, but I didn’t catch his name. They closed with a cover of “Just the Two of Us” and an encore of “Human Nature.”

I loved the show and plan to return for the next one. What surprised me was that Madrone wasn’t completely packed for such a great free performance. At one point, SundaY jokingly encouraged the audience to shame the friends who didn’t come out that night. So make sure you go out and support live music. The musicians in the Bay Area are fantastic and deserve a bigger audience.

The next evening, I went to check out The Mellow, the plant shop and coffee shop at Haight and Masonic. They recently began hosting live music Thursday through Saturday nights. Thursday evening’s performance was Changüísonico, featuring Kai Lyons on guitar, José “El Sinsonte” Andrés on vocals, and Einar Leliebre on percussion.

The group performed Cuban music and had great energy, and Kai offered a mini-history lesson between songs about Cuban musical traditions. José Andrés’s vocals were the highlight for me. At the bar I also met Lucien, who I recognized from the B3 Sessions at Madrone. I found out he organizes a jazz jam session at Woods in Lower Haight every Monday night, so I’ll need to stop by to check that out as well.

The Mellow could definitely use more support as there were plenty of empty seats relative to how great the show was (which is a theme of all of the local shows I attended this week). So keep an eye on the show calendar at https://nights.themellowsf.com/ and stop by for some drinks.

I went back to Madrone the night after to check out Ziek McCarter perform with a live band. If you are unfamiliar, he was the lead singer of a band called Con Brio, a band I saw perform for huge crowds at Outside Lands in 2015 and Montreal Jazz Festival in 2018. I also caught their 2017 New Year’s Eve show with some friends at Swedish American Hall. Ziek is very charismatic, has a beautiful voice, and I’ve seen him literally do backflips on stage.

Given this history, I was a bit surprised again to see the show wasn’t well attended. It seems that Madrone is still packing the dance floor for Motown on Mondays and various DJ nights, but for some reason live soul and jazz isn’t drawing a crowd, even when the show is completely free.

I’ve been stopping by The Deluxe periodically to see if its still busy since reopening earlier this summer. It’s still one of my favorite spots to just chill, have a whiskey alone, and disappear into the music. Although the venue wasn’t completely full on Thursday night, it was still fairly busy.

While walking down Haight earlier Thursday evening, they were tearing down the stage after Train performed in front of Mad Dog in the Fog. I was tied up with my fantasy football draft, but from what I saw on social media, the event was extremely packed.

So my takeaway from going to four underattended weeknight shows in 24 hours: San Franciscans are great at showing up for big events like Outside Lands and organized calendar events. But fewer people are showing up for some of the random weeknight shows at local venues where scenes form. You sometimes hear that people aren’t going to shows as much because the ticket prices are too high. But there is another way to enjoy live music, which is simply showing up to the weekly events happening in your neighborhood. The total cost of entry for the four shows I attended? Five dollars.