After a 20-year run, the historic music venue Club Fox held its final Blues Jam in February, marking the end of its pioneering open-mic blues events. The club’s self-proclaimed “jam master,” Vince Caminiti, who curated the shows, walked the Pulse through the program’s history and what led to its imminent curtain.
An “essential seedbed” for aspiring blues musicians, Club Fox’s Wednesday Blues Jam was where Kid Andersen, Mark Hummel, Kenny Neal, Tommy Castro, John Nemeth, and Terri Odabi, among many others, went on to become notable blues musicians, Caminiti said. Some found one another there and formed bands, like the Ol’man Brothers Band, which has played at Club Fox recently.
Caminiti, now 75, started his career in music at age 14. Having traveled “all over the U.S.” when he was younger, Caminiti attended and studied numerous blues jams across the country.
“I have the kind of ego that says I can always do it better,” Caminiti said, “I was a little dissatisfied with what I saw around.”
Indications of a failing blues jam, Caminiti explained, include long breaks between performers and significant audience movement.
“They’re kind of a throwaway gig for most bands and most venues,” the jam master said. “For venues, they’re better than nothing. For the band, it was a gig.”
Caminiti said the jams at the Club Fox venue, formerly Little Fox, began in 2006 after jam master George Schoenstein “pissed off the bar” at a different venue and needed a new location. Not long after, Caminiti, one of the frontier jammers, started helping manage the jams. At successful jams, he noticed, a big name was almost always involved.
He wanted to replicate that template, but understood that to draw a person or persons of greater notoriety, he’d have to pay them, which was a conflict because the venue “wasn’t giving me squat.”
The solution he drew up was to seek sponsorships from local businesses. Gelb Music was one of the first to agree, Caminiti said. They covered the cost for about half a year, which was just enough to get him “up and going,” pay the opening band, and book a guest band to close the show. That way, the jam sesh could be sandwiched between two sure-fire great acts.
Blues Jam at Club Fox was not your run-of-the-mill open mic event. Caminiti didn’t let just anyone play, he said. If he knew someone to be a “rank amateur,” he’d bar them from the opportunity. Having read about “head-cutting” sessions in Los Angeles, he said he wanted his jams to be competitive, a “who could play better than the next guy”-kinda style.
Among the jam master’s priorities, he knew he had to ensure the opening band would get well-paid.
“Fortunately, on the Peninsula, there are a lot of well-heeled people,” Caminiti said, implying that generous tips, beyond sponsorship money, made the openers’ performance worth their time. Some headliners left with $1,000 in tips, the jam master said.
Immediately, the sessions “took off,” Caminiti posited, as the aughts saw a big audience for blues, evidenced by the rise of the San Francisco Blues Festival and the popularity of blues radio stations. For this reason, the venue saw “great musicians,” not only for the host band, but among the jammers as well.
“They weren’t just players,” the jam master said. “They were students of the genre and really devoted to it.”
For this reason, the sessions shone, as Caminiti considered himself the jam chef, and his artists the ingredients, who were of rather high quality.
“Nobody plays at Club Fox who doesn’t deserve to,” the jam master said. “Even my bands I haven’t let play there, we were just not good enough.”
The sessions survived two club closures. The first one was 16 years ago, when the club changed ownership and its name from Little Fox to Club Fox, and then again, for exactly 365 days during the COVID pandemic.
When Caminiti took over the blues jams, he said there were only three others going on in the region: one in San Jose, one in the East Bay, and one in San Francisco. There were hardly any, but for good reason, he said.
“Some band would try to start one up at a venue,” Caminiti said, “but it’s very, very hard to get people to keep coming in… pun intended, the bar wasn’t set very high.”
Nonetheless, three factors contributed to the dilution of Club Fox’s jam sessions. Dozens of venues started hosting them, which stratified jammers and audience members; the demographic that Caminiti said loves blues started to age; and the talented musicians outgrew the jams in rising to become headliners.
For the first reason, Caminiti explained that up-and-coming players could “roll out of bed and go to a blues jam down the street, they don’t need to go to Redwood City.” In San Jose, where he lives, there’s at least one blues jam a night.
The COVID pandemic had a serious impact on the jams, the master noted, at first in a good way, leading to a “really notable jump” in tips, even virtually during livestreamed shows. But as the pandemic softened, Caminiti said, the club could never rebuild like before, as attendees and performers were concerned about “going into a closed room in a club and having people breathe on them.”
The rise in popularity of streamed music, instead of live, also contributed to the demise of the sessions, the jam master added.
“I started seeing fewer and fewer jammers show up,” Caminiti said. “When the chef looked in the fridge, there were no ingredients, and I did not want to do something mediocre.”
“What made it special in the beginning wasn’t gonna be special anymore,” the jam master added.
Suzanne St. John Crane, the president of the Fountain Blues Foundation that holds the oldest blues festival in California, laments the loss of the Club Fox Blues Jam, saying “a jam of that quality leaves a void.”
“I’m sad it’s not a jam anymore, because it’s been one of the best blues jams for musicians in the Bay Area,” St. John Crane said. “But again, I’m excited about the fact that there are so many blues jams in the South Bay now because the model has been successful.”
The Fountain Blues Foundation president is optimistic about the revitalization of the popularity of Blues with the success of the 2025 film “Sinners” — which is set in the Jim Crow South at a time when Blues music swept the U.S. She looks forward to the foundation’s upcoming 43rd festival on June 27 and 28 at Plaza de Cesar Chavez in Downtown San Jose.
Blues musician Carmen Ratti recalls attending the Club Fox Blues Jam as far back as 2008, though he said he didn’t start performing until 2014 because he was “a little intimidated.”
Since then, Ratti has gone “from A to Z”: fronting the Carmen Ratti Band, featuring Jill Dineen, which has been signed to a record label, is touring the Bay Area, and will have its record released on May 13.
Caminiti was instrumental to Ratti, as he “kind of took me under his wing” and “barked at me when I was too loud.” The jams felt to Ratti like “playing like a team,” versus “going onto a basketball court where everyone is concerned about shooting from everywhere.”
He hosts his own blues jam at the Longboard Bar in Pacifica, located at 180 Eureka Dr., on the second, third and fourth Thursday of each month.
Amy Lou Gibbs, whose two bands, Amy Lou’s Blues and Amy Lou and the Wild Ones, used to play at Club Fox’s Blues Jam, said, “I don’t even know where to start” when asked about the loss of the jam nights.
“It really was a pro jam,” Gibbs said, “It felt like church, it was a community. But you know what… nothing lasts forever.”
Not everyone in the Blues community is utterly torn over the end of Club Fox’s jams.
J.C. Smith, the lead guitarist and singer of the J.C. Smith Band, said, “it’s not that big of a loss because there’s a jam session every night in the Bay Area.”
“You can throw a rock and hit a jam session,” Smith joked.
While he acknowledged Club Fox has superior music, lighting and decor, he appreciates the value of jams in general for the opportunity they offer to “go out and cut loose,” and for turning “a lot of people that would be classified as terrible into good musicians, because they have a place to hone their craft.”
“People’s egos get brushed, you know, especially musicians, they have the fragile egos like myself,” Smith said of the humbling nature of jam sessions. “I just don’t cry. I just break shit.”
The decision to call the show was a really hard one for Caminiti, who reflected on the two decades of talent he had curated and attracted, and, more meaningfully, on the community that had flourished through his events.
“It’s hard to keep from choking up,” Caminiti said.
He paid homage to his personal honor of playing with “the pick of the litter” in the blues world, which helped him become a better musician. Moreover, the community building that gave “so much joy to so many people” was “addictive” and “hard to stop.”
“In all of my years of playing, some of my best moments were there,” he added. “That’s a hard thing to lose.”
Caminiti admitted there could be a world in which he hosts a Blues Jam, but periodically, and with a different model than before.
“That might be a way to still fertilize the local scene,” the jam master said with hope.
Until then, blues jams can be found up, down and all around the Bay Area.
Swig bar at 561 Geary St. in San Francisco has hosted a jam every Sunday for 30 years, from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Gardino’s Restaurant & Bar, located at 51 N. Santa Cruz Ave. in Los Gatos, also has a jam every Tuesday and Wednesday from 7:30 to 11 p.m. In Campbell, Little Lou’s BBQ at 2455 S. Winchester Blvd. hosts a jam from 6 to 9 p.m. every Thursday. In Santa Clara, on the first Friday of every month, Woodhams Sports Lounge at 4475 Stevens Creek Blvd., from 9 p.m. to close. Narrative Fermentations at 101 E. Alma Ave. in San Jose also has a jam from 4 to 7 p.m. every Sunday.
Club Fox will continue to host blues music at its venue on Wednesday nights, just without the open mic component, featuring artists like Grace and The Grit on April 22.
With no shortage of events and the urgent need to support live music to keep it alive, St. John Crane dares everyone to “get off your couch and go see a band!”
