Tergis Circus Presents Welcome to Tergistan
Four San Francisco Native Siblings with their Four Bands for One Night
Friday, February 28th, 2020
Verdi Club, 8pm
2424 Mariposa Street, San Francisco
Tickets: $25
All Ages
Link to Tickets:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/
We’ve written about the storied Tergis family several times in the Glen Park News in our stories below:
Page seven of the 2010 Spring Glen Park News
Page seven of the 2009 Winter Glen Park News
Page 12 of the 2018 Spring Glen Park News
And, if you want to read more about the Tergis Circus, check out the press release below.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tergis Circus Presents Welcome to Tergistan
Four San Francisco Native Siblings Perform with their Four Bands for One Night
Four musical siblings raised in San Francisco and now world class musicians – the oldest, Athena Tergis, being a featured soloist with the Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra and former star of the acclaimed Riverdance – will all be coming together in a concert featuring their four bands for this one night only concert. The Tergis siblings, who play separately as artists on an international scale, are also known locally as a family indispensable to the San Francisco Bay Area music scene and reflective of its unique multiculturalism and diversity. Their enigmatic family was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006 and the Glen Park News in 2010 which said, “the Tergises are arguably the closest thing to a Renaissance family Glen Park has produced.”
Highly regarded in their respective musical worlds, each of the four siblings will be playing for one night only at the Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa St. in San Francisco on Friday, February 28th, 2020 starting at 8pm. Tickets are now available via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/
Lars Tergis, the oldest of the brothers, will be leading his band, Lars and In Charge, with his driving, gritty interpretations of traditional Turkish and Greek party tunes and his own original compositions. Benezra Tergis will be playing keys with Mobando, a Latin fusion band that has been moving dance floors since 2014 with its Cuban timba sound mixed with R & B and hip hop styles. Sean Tergis, who has toured both locally and internationally and currently produces the weekly San Francisco event, Balkan Sundays, now in its fifth year, will be bringing his band, MWE. Known for their loud, wild, and raucous affairs they draw entire audiences on their feet with their modern and eclectic Turkish and Balkan music. Athena Tergis, flying in for this special concert from Tuscany, Italy where she has lived since 2004, will be gracing the audience with her award winning fiddle playing. Each sibling will be performing with their own respective band as well as sitting in on each other’s sets.
Family gatherings have always been lively affairs in the Tergis household with these four siblings, all playing traditional folk music from a different part of the world, encouraged and influenced by their parents, Buck and Judy Tergis, a fiddler and folk singer respectively.
The eldest and only girl, Athena was named for their Greek heritage and plays traditional Irish fiddle; Lars is named after their Norwegian grandfather and spent years in Istanbul becoming a masterful Turkish Rom (gypsy) fiddler; Benezra’s name represents their Sephardic Jewish heritage and he rocks on piano/keys combining Afro-Cuban/funk and jazz influences. Sean, named after the Irish side of the family, tours internationally with Balkan and Middle-Eastern folk ensembles.
The name of the concert, “Tergis Circus” refers to an old family joke about the chaos of growing up in a house with four energetic kids: The siblings’ father, Buck Tergis, used to answer their phone, “Tergis Circus! Ringmaster speaking!” The Tergis family goes back four generations in San Francisco with Billy Goat Hill in Noe Valley being named after the sibling’s great-grandmother, Esther, who used to take her goats there to pasture. Legend also has it that their family owned the last cow in San Francisco.