Agonafer Shiferaw
Owner, Rasselas Jazz Club
San Francisco, CA
Featured in the recently published
Making it in America
Conversations With Successful Ethiopian American Entrepreneurs by
Peter Gebre; an excerpt quote is below:
"...It is the desire to create something and to succeed in what they do that motivates people to become entrepreneurs. It is not so much about making money or about one's profit margin; it is about seizing an opportunity and making something happen ..."
Articles on Agonafer Shiferaw:
Jazz West
March 20, 2002
Jazz Returns to SF's Fillmore Street
"... In the years following World War II, San Francisco's Fillmore District was alive with the sounds of jazz. Top jazz musicians of the day -- Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and countless more - made Jimbo's Bop City and other Fillmore area clubs part of their regular touring circuit.
When the bulldozer of redevelopment leveled much of the district in the early 1960s, however, the music fell silent.
Now the music of jazz is returning to the Fillmore as part of the city's ambitious new Jazz Preservation District. Early next year, there's a ground-breaking ceremony scheduled for the arrival of the internationally-recognized Blue Note chain of jazz clubs. And in mid-October, club owner Agonafer Shiferaw , who's run the intimate Rasselas nightclub a few blocks away at California and Divisadero for the past 14 years, opened his newest venue, Rasselas on Fillmore.
The new club is one of the key anchor points for the new Jazz Preservation District, which runs along Fillmore Street from Golden Gate Avenue north to Post Street (below the gentrified Upper Fillmore shopping area).
With the help of a sizeable loan from the city's Redevelopment Agency, Shiferaw has invested more than $1 million to transform the location at 1534 Fillmore Street (just below Geary) from its former incarnation as a neighborhood meat and fish market into an elegant lounge, nightclub, and restaurant with more than 6,000 square feet to stretch out and enjoy Ethiopian food, a full bar, and music from local and national jazz and blues musicians. He's taken a five-year lease with an option to buy the building ..." >> more
|
