There is a certain revelatory beauty in every open mic, in watching a rookie attempt their first public performance or a musician introducing you to their newest jam. In our area code, there is also a wealth of talent.

The 2010s were a golden era for open mics in the South Bay. Every week, one could attend several in downtown San Jose, along with a dozen more throughout the Valley. If things go according to plan, there will be even more of them this spring.

These days, Nirvana Soul Cafe aims to be the open mic lighthouse in downtown San Jose’s SoFA District. Starting this month, they offer a weekly line-up of open mic nights that will feel familiar to the former Caffe Frascati crowd. Beginning Jan. 12, local humorist Eli Schwartz will host the cafe’s comedy and poetry open mic nights (held on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively), while singer-songwriter Joy Hackett will host a music-based open mic on Fridays, with a showcase held each first Friday of the month.

Surely, at most open mics, you will hear something that you never want to hear again, but good hosts like Eli and Joy know how to move the show along. Comedian Ato Walker, meanwhile, is the kind of host who can also be the show.

Beginning in 2009, for four years Walker hosted his downtown weekly comedy open mic at Britannia Arms. He followed that with a weekly show at the Caravan Lounge in 2015, which he organized with comedian Rachel Warner (also Best Bartender, Metro’s Best of Silicon Valley 2021) and held right up to the shutdown.

There are few people in this scene more supremely comfortable on stage than Ato Walker. So it was a boon for the South Bay when David Williams, general manager of the San José Improv, connected with Mr. Walker to develop the first official comedy open mic to be held inside the historic theater. Being the boss of the largest comedy venue in a forty-mile radius, Williams eagerly explored the Bay Area comedy landscape, attending nearly every open mic from Sacramento to Santa Cruz. 

Ultimately, he felt the potential to grow comedy was strongest around San Jose. His dream was to finally bring an open mic to the 20-year-old Improv, and he knew that Walker was his emcee.

“I needed someone who truly represents the South Bay and Ato epitomizes that in every way,” Williams says.

On Dec. 8, the Open Mic at the San Jose Improv launched to a crowd of over 120 people. Williams and Walker hoped for 20-plus comics to sign up for a shot at a four-minute set on the historic stage, but their expectations were blown away when 65 comedians showed up from all over the Bay. The 18 comics who made the list were, in Walker’s words, “so good that they confirmed why it is so important to have an open mic at the Improv.”

The Improv’s next open mic will be held Jan. 12, but Williams says that if it gets any bigger, they may need to expand to twice a month.

Comedian Pete Munoz has been hosting the comedy open mic at Woodhams Lounge in Santa Clara every Monday for almost nine years. “We started on 408 [April 8th] in 2013,” Munoz says.

A San Jose comedy veteran, Munoz’s reputation as a quick-witted, no-holds-barred host has helped boost Woodhams as one of the most sought out and notorious comedy open mics in the Bay Area. Folks can sign up in person—show at 8pm.

Since May of 2021, Comedian Matthew McCarron has hosted an open mic at Off The Hook sports bar in Campbell. Like many hosts, McCarron was initially very concerned about the spread of infection, but performers have been good about masking, and none of the hosts interviewed for this piece were aware of anyone contracting the virus through open mics.

McCarron rotates hosting duties with other comics, like Mel Michelle, who hosts her own comedy open mic at Britannia Arms in Cupertino on Thursdays. Michelle has noticed that on the nights she hosts, there are more women comedians on the list—a trend she welcomes. Both shows begin at 8pm and folks can sign up in person.

Even with so many events mentioned, it is a pleasure to add the Caravan Lounge Comedy Show back to this list. Rachel Warner has confirmed that comedy will return to Wednesdays beginning Feb. 2 with a slate of rotating hosts—including Ato Walker.

If nothing else, there will be plenty of open mics to keep us all boosted this year.

Over the course of seven full-length records, San Jose skate punks Jonny Manak and the Depressives have built a reputation for living fast, playing fast and skating fast. None of that’s really changed—except for the fact that frontman and bandleader Manak has put down the bottle and picked up his skateboard. You can catch him shredding bowls, riding walls and having a blast at the Lake Cunningham Skatepark in the latest video, “Anybody Wanna Skate,” the title track from his band’s latest album, released in April 2019.

Jonny Manak
Sat, 9pm, Free
Caravan Lounge, San Jose

The Circus of Sin celebrates its third anniversary this Thursday at the Caravan Lounge. Featuring some of the South Bay’s wildest and most creative performers, this bawdy burlesque and variety show continues to draw a dedicated crowd. That’s thanks in no small part to the program’s debauched and demonic emcee, King Patrick—known for his wild costumes and unpredictable antics. The nudity, tall cans of PBR and general party atmosphere also bring people in the door. Be sure to carry paper money: The Caravan is cash only, and while the show is free, tipping is highly encouraged.

Sinaversary 3
Thu, 10pm, Free
Caravan Lounge, San Jose

Pixelated tones and PBR tall boys are on the menu this Thursday at the Caravan. Los Angeles-based synthwave producer Scott McClure brings his mix of stuttering, John Carpenter basslines, soaring Final Fantasy textures and Crystal Quest flourishes to 98 Almaden Ave. Sharing the bill is San Jose’s very own Dead Mall, the solo project of Maureen McCabe, who weaves together warbly, buzzing Casio keys, lo-fi hand claps and mournful, meditative melodies—all shot through with a healthy dose of VHS fuzz and slap-back echo. Basura conspirator DJ Bit presides over the evening’s festivities.

Elevate The Sky
Thu, 9pm, Free
Caravan Lounge, San Jose

Joan and the Rivers is one of San Jose’s most prolific and business-savvy punk bands. Instead of brooding in the studio for years, the local trio has kept the music coming in steady bursts. In 2018 they dropped three short EPs to satiate fans. Lost somewhere between the garage and the bar, JATR send dirty howls through the dead-end streets of the suburbs like a midnight transmission from KFJC. Part Rocket From the Crypt, part Doctor Demento, they don’t care much about the rules of genre or taste. And we love them for it.

Joan & The Rivers
Sun, 9pm, Free
Caravan Lounge, San Jose

How does a group of young rogues from the South Bay end up the No. 3 pick on a UK-based magazine’s listicle of the best new music of the year? Who cares? It’s fucking rock & roll! But for those keeping score, Classic Rock did name the fuzzed-out garage rockers Casual Vibes the third best thing in rockdom so far this year. Citing the band’s ode to good times, “Saturday Night,” the review enthuses, “This San Jose band are like a gold medallion laying on a pillow of chest hair in the dive bar of your mind.” Right on.

Casual Vibes
Thu, 9pm, Free
Caravan Lounge, San Jose

If you’re craving the sweet, electronic sounds of your favorite ’90s video game, Vector Hold has your fix. This solo project, fronted by San Jose musician Peter Rice, deals in blippy, 32- and 64-bit synthwave compositions. Much of the Vector Hold catalog is original material, though Rice has had some fun crafting covers of ’80s and ’90s tunes—all of which sound as if they could be part of the soundtrack for the Sega Genesis game Road Rash. Last year, Rice recreated the Rush songs “Subdivisions” and “Ghost of a Chance” as a tribute to the Canadian prog-rock trio. Rice will perform with the Caravan’s DJ Bit. (SP)

Vector Hold
Fri, 9pm, Free
Caravan Lounge, San Jose

When speaking with Fernanda Lira on the subject of heavy metal, one thing quickly becomes abundantly clear. The bassist, vocalist and co-founder of the Sao Paulo thrash trio, Nervosa, is positively stoked on the genre.

“It’s my life,” Lira says, enthusiastically.

She’s not exaggerating. Raised by metalhead parents in Brazil’s biggest city, Lira grew up listening to her father play bass in his own heavy group and Iron Maiden on the home stereo. By the age of 6, the young Lira says that she was hooked, and by 14, she was playing in her own bands and constantly scouring file-sharing sites for new tunes. It was through the Internet that the budding musician discovered Bay Area thrash—feverishly downloading albums by the likes of Exodus, Testament, Machine Head, Vio-Lence and of course, Slayer and Metallica.

These days, while she admits to liking plenty of other genres of music—including funk and the blues—Lira says that she has spent years listening to “only metal.”

She wasn’t just listening passively. It’s apparent that Lira was studying the craft, as well. Her group, Nervosa, has the sound, the look and the attitude of thrash down to a science. Check out the group’s video for “Death,” from their 2014 full-length debut on Napalm Records, Victim of Yourself.

Filmed in a graveyard, it shows Lira, along with guitarist and backing vocalist Prika Amaral and drummer Pitchu Ferraz, shredding—hard. Lira’s scratchy scream cuts a jagged line atop galloping riffs and machine gun drumming. The scooped, static-like tone of the guitar matches the black and white film. All three band members are clad in the thrash metal uniform of studded leather vests, T-shirts and denim. Lira’s eyes are wild and blackened with thick mascara as she whips her hair like a young James Hetfield.

The band’s current U.S. tour, which brings them to the Caravan Lounge on Wednesday, is their first stint in the States, and Lira could scarcely be more excited.

“It’s been like a dream come true,” Lira says, speaking on a cell phone from the road. “Some people don’t get it—but it actually is.”

There are a number of reasons that Lira is pumped to be touring America. For starters, it means her music will gain much wider exposure. While the Brazilian metal scene is strong and full of committed fans, she says that the actual opportunity to make a living playing in a metal band—or being a musician in general—is minimal.

But Lira isn’t just excited about making new fans and sharing her music. She is thrilled at the opportunity to be walking in the footsteps of her heroes. The Bay Area is often considered the hub of the thrash metal movement—as some of the sub-genre’s biggest names formed in San Francisco and Oakland in the ’80s. Southern Florida was also a major flashpoint for the movement, which fused the energy, attitude and politics of hardcore punk with heavy metal’s emphasis on technicality, heavy rhythm guitars and stylized screaming.

The result was a fast, aggressive and youthful music that was also challenging and fun to play. Plus, Lira notes: “You can head bang to death metal, you can head band to power metal, but mosh pits—the mosh pits are real at thrash metal shows.”

Accordingly, Lira says she “can’t wait to be in the Bay Area”—noting that most of the bands that she grew up listening to were from this area and Florida. “I can feel the metal vibe in the air. We’ll be playing on the same ground that all the other bands we love came from.”

Nervosa share the stage with Taipan, Evilization and Total Badass.

Nervosa plays on Feb 17, 7pm, $10 at the Caravan Lounge, San Jose.

Like so many creatives living in downtown San Jose, Ismael “Millhows” Villanueva had his epiphany at Cinebar. However, unlike like so many of his less-fortunate peers, the local musician was able to hold on to his inspiration—successfully preventing it from slipping away on a river of ice-cold Olympia and Jamo shots.

Millhows, as he prefers to be called, was DJ-ing at the Cine for a stretch—playing mostly soul, classic rock and garage records—when it hit him.

“I got inspired,” he recalls. As one-half of the garage-rock duo Dirty Pillows, who are currently on an indefinite hiatus, Millhows was no stranger to lo-fi licks. But in that moment, spinning records in the back of the bar, he began to make connections between the music of The Stooges and The Rolling Stones and those many soul, doo-wop and early rock & roll groups who had inspired the likes of Iggy and Jagger.

“It’s not a far walk to get from Otis Redding to Free or the MC5,” Millhows muses. “There’s a very thin line.”

Millhows is clearly having a blast dancing all over that line on his new project, The Jean Jackets, whose debut album, Money, The Hunt & Applause, is currently available for streaming on SoundCloud. His band plays Caravan Lounge on Saturday, along with Cola and Mother’s Worry.

“It’s basically a garage band album,” Millhows says of Money. Indeed, the record is no frills and lo-fi, and does sound as if it could have been recorded in a garage. However, upon repeated listens, it’s hard not to imagine the The Jean Jackets laying down the tracks to Money next to a baby blue ’56 Chevy Bel Air.

“Valentines Day” features wordless, crooning backup vocals, reminiscent of Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison while “Morning Light” kicks off with a descending, chromatic surf guitar trill—sounding a bit like a sloppy cover of Dick Dale’s “Miserlou.” And plenty of tracks on the album feature the stutter-step pianos, deliberate arpeggios and snapping guitar punctuation immortalized by ’50s hits, such as “Stand By Me,” “Blue Moon” and “Earth Angel.”

Millhows says any similarity between The Jean Jackets’ music and these quintessential songs from early days of rock & roll are due to his admiration for classic pop tunes.

“I feel like my generation, and the generation under me is not embracing the ‘pop song’ as much,” he explains. “A lot of the music I love are great pop songs. More than anything, I wanted to exercise my pop songwriting chops.”

The Jean Jackets play The Caravan Lounge on Friday, Sept. 5, at 9pm.

Kyle Langlois is ecstatic. “We’re at this record-breaking concert thing,” he says, raising his voice to speak over the boisterous discussion going on around him. “We just finished playing. Now we’re taking pictures with a wooden fish.”

He is talking on his cell phone from Chico, where he and the rest of his band, The English Language, just wrapped their set. The “record breaking concert thing” to which he is referring began on April 1, and has been going non-stop ever since at The Tackle Box—a venue in the small NorCal college town. The guitarist for the Portland-based garage-psych trio is clearly excited to have played a role in cementing the new Guinness World Record for longest concert, which was achieved at around 8:40am on the morning of April 17, according to the Chico ABC affiliate. It’s about 5:30pm when he answers his phone.

But Langlois is excited for another reason, as well. He and his band are making a homecoming trip to the city that spawned them. The English Language formed in San Jose in 2012. But despite building a strong local fan base, they decided to pack up and head to Portland in 2014 in search of cheaper housing and a stronger, more supportive scene.

They found it, according to Langlois. “The cost of living is crazy in San Jose,” he says. “We have a cheap house in Portland (complete with a basement rehearsal space and recording studio). Plus, there are more venues and more bands.”

Still, he says, the band is “stoked” to be coming back to San Jose, where they are slated to play their first local show since leaving for Portland, this Friday at The Caravan. “We’re going to get to see all our old friends,” Langlois says.

The group is touring behind their latest album, Happy Horror, a 13-track LP, which toggles between the freaky psych sounds, reminiscent of Thee Oh Sees and By Her Satanic Majesties Request-era Rolling Stones; the bouncy, fuzzed-out blues of The Count Five; and The Beatles—both from the British Invasion days and their more experimental years.

The English Language recorded Happy Horror entirely on their own at their home studio—with the exception of mastering, which they outsourced.

While Langlois says he is excited to see changes in San Jose’s scene—like the opening of The Ritz and Café Stritch—he maintains that The English Language belongs in Portland, even if living in the same house as his band in the same house can be trying at times.

“We couldn’t have done anything we’ve been doing without moving there,” he says.

The English Language plays April 24, 10pm, at The Caravan Lounge.