Live Music at The Annex – Lars Tergis Trio

Wednesday June 1, 5-7:30pm will continue our music series held at El Cerrito Natural Grocery Company Prepared Food Annex (The Annex) on first and third Wednesdays – “Neighborhood World Music Sessions at The Annex.” This show features Lars Tergis, Gopal Slavonic and Faisal Zedan. Weaving music form the Balkans, Spain, and the Middle East, this trio features gifted musicians, each with his own mix of cultures and influences, bringing us music from so many parts of Europe and beyond.

Lars Tergis- violin, oud, vocals

Gopal Slavonic – Flamenco guitar

Faisal Zedan – Arabic percussion

Lars Tergis was born and raised in San Francisco and started playing violin at 6 years old, learning the Suzuki method and playing Scottish fiddle. His family all went to Scottish fiddle camp and Lark in the Morning world music and dance camp where he first got into Balkan, Turkish, Arabic and Roma music. He played at the Renaissance Faire with the legendary santoor player Darioush Sami and many incredible dancers before traveling to Istanbul for a total of three years. There he found his wonderful teacher Husnu Tuzsuz, a Turkish Roman (Gypsy) violinist from the Ghazi Osman Pasha neighborhood in Istanbul, and Selim Sesler, a Turkish Roman clarinetist from Keşan in Northwestern Turkey. Lars now plays traditional and original Balkan and Middle Eastern music with his band Lars and in Charge, collaborating with some of the finest musicians and dancers in the Bay Area.

Gopal Slavonic trained at the prestigious ‘Fundacion de Arte Flamenco Cristina Heeren’ in Sevilla, Spain where he studied intensively with leading flamenco guitarists Miguel Angel Cortez, Jose Postigo, Antonio Carmona, Eduardo Rollabar, Tino Van Der Sman, and Joselito Galvez.

In his 29 years of dedication to flamenco guitar, Gopal Slavonic has returned to Spain to further his studies several times, most frequently to Jerez de la Frontera. Gopal Slavonic has performed with flamenco artists including Kina Mendez, Cerro Negro, La Fibi, Mark Taylor, Melissa Cruz, La Carola, Roberto Zamora, Pilar Moreno, Zahara, and Jose Galvez.

In 2008, Gopal Slavonic released his second CD ‘Dos Orillas’ and is the featured guitarist for Northern California’s Flamenco del Oro. Gopal was the featured guitarist in ‘Zahara Flamenco Al Andaluz’ at The Cowell Theater in San Francisco in 2010. Gopal currently lives in Oakland, California regularly performing and teaching flamenco guitar.

Faisal Zedan was born in Lebanon and raised in Syria.

An Arabic percussionist dedicated to preserving and teaching Arabic music and drumming, he has been teaching and performing Arabic and Middle Eastern music since 1991.

Faisal performs many Arabic music genres with focus on classical music and belly dance. In addition to Arabic and Middle Eastern music, Faisal performs Greek, Balkan and Eastern European music genres. Faisal teaches private lessons, workshops, seminars and music camps in the U.S. and abroad.

He has performed and correlated with many local and international artists both locally and throughout the United States.

We are proud to present this series in partnership with Modupue (Javier Navarrette), with support from the El Cerrito Natural Grocery Company. We thank BAY AREA NEUROINTENSIVISTS ( Dr. Moussa Yazbeck) for their generous unrestricted grant to support this series.

Javier Navarrette’s Modúpue Productions continues to bring live music to several venues around the Bay Area. Javier has been a professional musician and music educator in the Oakland Unified School District for the past 20 years. Over the past 2 years Navarrette has produced outdoors events that have proven instumental in enabling musicians to deal with some of the fallout of the pandemic and shutdown that followed. Most recently he has been curating “Modúpue Sundays at the Brooklyn Basin.” These musical productions ran from June–November 2021 at the new Oakland hot spot, the Brooklyn Basin, with internationally known, Bay Area musical legends.

SunJams is committed to funding children’s music education in underserved public elementary schools. Your donation will help support this ongoing program.

In addition, we need to raise funds to continue bringing you this exciting new live music program. All of the proceeds will go directly to our network of local musicians, each of whom have been severely impacted by the lack of events during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whether you donate $10, $100, or $1000 – any amount helps and will allow us to keep bringing music to our community! As always, your donation to our 501(c)3 may qualify as tax exempt.

COVID RELATED SAFETY MEASURES

Please be safe. Feel free to wear a mask if you prefer.

TICKETS

Tickets are encouraged, we are happy to offer you a reserved seat (limited seating available) if you RSVP with a donation that will go towards paying for the music. Tickets are NOT required for this venue, you can simply come in, order food and beverages at the Annex counter.