Name: Concerts at the Cadillac: Mr. Lucky & the Cocktail Party
Start: 2024-09-20T13:00:00-07:00
End: 2024-09-20T14:00:00-07:00
Location: Cadillac Hotel

Concerts at the Cadillac: Mr. Lucky & the Cocktail Party
At the Cadillac Hotel | 380 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
Friday September 20, 2024 | 1:00 - 2:00pm
FREE | All Welcome!
“The dean of postmodern lounge jazz swing singers” Mr. Lucky brings his ace group of local luminaries–The Cocktail Party–to the Tenderloin for a Concert at the Cadillac!
More Info: https://www.tenderloinmuseum.org/public-programs-2024-1/2024/9/20/mr-lucky-cadillac
Mr. Lucky has been a character on the San Francisco music scene for decades. Pierre Merkel got his start as a lounge singer haunting the strip of bars that served the after-theater crowd in the “Tenderloin heights” such as the Curtain Call and the Blue Lamp. At those bygone joints, Merkel would sing jazz standards in a sharkskin suit while mixing martinis onstage, and thus Mr. Lucky was born. His act “tunes up” the Great American Songbook with an energy informed by performance art as much as Ellington and Mancini.
His popularity took off from out of the underground during the swing craze of the 1990s, and Mr. Lucky has performed at practically all of San Francisco’s iconic venues–Bimbo’s 365, Club Deluxe, Flower Piano, etc.--except (until now) the Cadillac Hotel! Mr. Lucky’s longtime band, “The Cocktail Party,” was assembled in 1998 by Bay Area legends J. Raoul Brody and Ralph Carney. Today, the group features some of the Bay Area’s best musicians:
Joshua Raoul Brody: 'The Maestro' on piano,
Michael Groh: humming on guitar,
Randy “Ring-a-ding” Odell: swell on drums,
Joe Quigley: eclectic bass (Lisa Loeb’s ‘Stay’),
Jeff Hobbs: terrific on violin and cornet,
and…Jamin ‘Sudsy’ Barton: San Francisco’s hot-shot one-man-band on Theremin, saxophone, saw and more…!
Merkel’s intrigue extends beyond his musical persona: he worked for years as a private investigator in SF and is also an accomplished visual artist. But above all, Mr. Lucky is a lover of all things San Francisco, in particular the Tenderloin (and specifically original Original Joe’s on Taylor Street). Don’t miss this special performance of a San Francisco original at the Concerts at the Cadillac, presented in collaboration with the Tenderloin Museum as a “Sounds of the Tenderloin” live music program. Funding for this series is provided by Specified General Fund for the Museum Grant Program under the California Cultural and Historical Endowment.
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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.