Songwriters Showcase with Jeff Berkley: Java Joe’s One Shot!
Three-dozen singer-songwriters walk into a nightclub …
That may sound like the set-up for a music-oriented joke about missing guitar picks or open bar tabs. But it’s exactly what will happen Sunday when Jeff Berkley hosts more than 30 of San Diego’s leading troubadours at the Jazz Lounge.
The lineup includes Gregory Page, Joel Rafael, Lisa Sanders & Brown Sugar, Shawn Rohlf, Lindsay White, Sara Petite, Sven Eric Seaholm, Gayle Skidmore and former San Diego Padres infielder Tim Flannery.
Berkley, a three-time 2026 San Diego Music Awards nominee, is one of Southern California’s most prolific performers, producers, tunesmiths and arrangers. Together with John Katchur and Dave Howard, he will revive an enticing format for Sunday’s concert, which is being billed as “Java Joe’s One Shot!”
That moniker alludes to Java Joe’s, the near-legendary San Diego coffeehouse where Jewel, Jason Mraz and a slew of other gifted area singer-songwriters laid the foundation for their respective careers back in the 1990s.
“Most of us were all young musicians getting started and Java Joe’s was like a giant clubhouse and a place to hang out. Java Joe’s contributions are immeasurable,” Page said in a 2023 Union-Tribune interview. Accordingly,
Berkley has invited an array of Java Joe’s veterans to perform at Sunday’s shindig, including Page, who begins a 19-date East Coast tour with Mraz on May 12. The lineup for “Java Joe’s One Shot!” will also feature John Katchur, Dave Howard, Calman Hart, Joe Rathburn, Robin Henkel, Bug Guts, Rob Deez, Billy Galewood, Aly Rowell, Cara Cormier, Stucky Leigh, Salinas Road, Craig Fisher, Chloe Lou, Kathleen Beck, Mia Gascon, Patch & Maggie, Croome Brothers, Bobo Czarnowski and JT Moring.
The “One Shot!” part of the billing is not a reference to alcohol, but to the open mic nights held at Java Joe’s in the 1990s at which each singer-songwriter did just one song, then made way for the next performer.
Berkley and his many musical pals will be saluting that tradition in what is sure to be a memorable but snappily-paced marathon of songs.
7 p.m. Sunday, April 12. The Jazz Lounge, 6818 El Cajon Blvd., San Diego. $35-$45. thejazzlounge.live
Miranda Lambert will headline this weekend’s Boots in the Park festival at Waterfront Park in downtown San Diego. (Mark Humphrey / AP)
“Boots In The Park,” featuring Miranda Lambert, Jordan Davis, Dylan Scott and more
True to the title of her 2005 breakthrough hit, “Kerosene,” Texas country-music dynamo Miranda Lambert knows how to fire up her listeners.
This holds equally true whether she’s singing up a storm or chastising fans for focusing on taking nonstop selfies at her concerts, instead of listening to her music.
An NRA member and an avid supporter of the LGBTQ community, Lambert is a straight-shooter who delivers expertly paced concerts. She headlines this year’s Boots In The Park festival on Saturday — just two days after earning the second highest number of nominations for the 2026 Academy of Country Music Awards.
“The most decorated artist in ACM Awards history,” Lambert is nominated this time around in eight categories. They include: Female Artist of the Year; Song of the Year and Songwriter of the Year (she is a double-nominee in both categories); Single of the Year; and Visual Media of the Year and Event of the Year (both for her collaboration with Chris Stapleton, “A Song To Sing”)
1 p.m. Saturday, April 11. Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific Highway, San Diego. $99-$299. tickets.bootsinthepark.com/e/sd-bitp-april-26/tickets
Mandolin player and singer Sierra Hull is a six-time Grammy Award-winner. She will perform April 15 at the Belly Up in Solana Beach. (File photo)
Sierra Hull, with Mason Via
In 2009, Sierra Hull became the first bluegrass musician in the history of Boston’s Berklee College of Music to be awarded the Berklee Presidential Scholarship, which covered all four years of her tuition and housing.
She’s also the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Mandolin Player of the Year Award, a feat she has accomplished six times.
Now 32, Hull is also an engaging singer and band leader who earned four Grammy Award nominations for her terrific 2025 album, “A Tip Toe High Wire,” and has her own line of Gibson F5-G mandolins. She handily won over the crowd here last summer at the 2026 Outlaw Music Festival Tour stop, where she memorably opened for Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Billy Strings.
8 p.m., Wednesday, April 15. Belly Up, 143 South Cedros Ave., Solana Beach. $30-$53 (must be 21 or older to attend). bellyup.com
Gypseas of Infinity
There are a handful of rock musicians in the nation who double as real estate agents, including Dandy Warhols keyboardist Zia McCabe and former Alice Cooper drummer Neal Smith, who last year told Rolling Stone he is proud to be “the only rocker/real estate agent in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.”
But San Diego singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Clayton Connolly may well be the only musician-by-night/real-estate-agent-by-day to write a song, “Pick Us,” that gave him the edge to beat out 15 other buyers competing to buy a home in Point Loma (which he slyly rhymes in the song with “home-ah”).
An Ocean Beach resident, Cameron is also the only musician/real estate agent I know of signed to Surfdog Records, the plucky Encinitas-based label whose roster includes Eric Clapton and The Stray Cats. Longtime Clapton band guitarist Doyle Bramhall III is one of the veteran musicians featured on Cameron’s Surfdog debut album, which he made under the name Gypseas of Infinity.
He bills the 15-song collection as a “sonic ceremony” and “musical medicine.” it mixes such lilting ballads as “Breathe” and “Symphony of Divinity” with the catchy, percussion-driven “Elementos” such drone-happy, trance-tinged numbers as “Letting Go Of Everything” and “Karma.” Those song titles reflect the spiritual bent of the lyrics, which Connolly sings warmly and earnestly.
7 p.m. Friday, April 10. The Template, 5032 Niagara Avenue, Ocean Beach. $15. obtemplate.com
Chuwi
A sizable number of talented and charismatic bands and solo artists have risen — due to their skill, tenacity, pluck and luck — from doing small club shows to performing in arenas and stadiums.
The Puerto Rican quartet Chuwi is about to experience the reverse trajectory, at least in a manner.
Last fall, Chuwi was the opening act on Bad Bunny’s international stadium tour. The group also joined him nightly to perform “Weltita,” their collaborative song from Bad Bunny’s 2026 Grammy Album of the Year-winning “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS”.
Chuwi teams siblings Lorén, Willy and Wester Aldarondo with their friend, Adrián López. Together, the four fuse indie-pop and salsa with with such traditional styles as bomba, plena and merengue. The band’s concert here next Thursday, April 16, will kick off its 2026 Primavera Tour.
8 p.m. Thursday, April 16. House of Blues, 1055 Fifth Ave., Gaslamp Quarter. $33.25. ticketmaster.com