By Annelise Schouten and Dhalia Krishnan
On March 21st 2026, Dhalia (KZSC’s Hip-Hop Director) and I (Annelise, KZSC’s Jazz Director) sat down for an interview in the garage of Aft’s (Afterthought’s) childhood home in the Fillmore District, gathering around a few chairs while the many artists who make Stoop Sessions happen set up audio equipment. Members of The Top Chefs band including Aft, TJ, and Liam (Loveberry) came in and out of the space, sharing their experiences on the founding of the band, stories of past shows, growing up as musicians in the Bay, and what’s in line for this next year. Stoop Sessions, a live performance series taking place on the stoop of the Fillmore home, gives the stage to The Top Chefs band. Alongside a series of accompanying artists, the band creates content for their social media platforms (@stoopsessionslive and @topchefsband on instagram), all while giving the community a site for free shows and engagement. The Top Chefs’ March 21st show included sets by Bay Area legends like Nef Tha Pharoah, Frak, Kaly Jay, Ice Meez, Fahtmike, Rocky G, and Los Rakas, giving a community centered platform for local artists.
While Stoop Sessions as a content series formally began earlier this year, Aft and members of the Top Chefs community have been playing on the stoop and recording and mixing music in the home for years.
Loveberry, TJ, Alejandro, and Aft inside the home studio March 21st 2026, Photo(s) by Adam Dexter ©2026 – adamtookmypicture.com
Situated next to a deli and cafe, the space brings a wide assortment of viewers. From random passerbys, to Russian tourists, to fans of the Stoop Sessions, to friends and family of the musicians. The stoop truly fosters a sense of community and San Francisco pride that can often be lost to gentrification and the rapid changes of the city. As described in the interview, Aft, TJ, and Loveberry, among other members of the band, all grew up in the Bay. Being a part of youth music programs that strive to keep the culture alive, and that have bred a plethora of incredibly talented musicians. With this comes the act of fostering community and maintaining the presence of local artists in San Francisco.
With an upcoming album this year, the Stoop Sessions, as well as a series of shows all over the west coast, the band is gearing up for an incredibly exciting year.
Listed below are the musicians and artists from Top Chef’s March 21st Stoop Session
Band:
Trombone 1: Carlo Rabano
Trumpet: Ryan Ancheta
Trombone 2: Will Shannon
Saxophone: TJ Milan
Drums: Shawn Urbi-Tennie
Bass: Alejandro Lara-Agraz
Guitar: Loveberry
Keys: Diego Talbot
Audio: Mixed by Seed & Pasich
Visual: Carl SFC & Chat
Photos: Adam Dexter
Artists:
Nef Tha Pharoah
Frak
Kaly Jay
Ice Meez
Los Rakas
Fahtmike
Rocky G
The following interview took place in said garage basement, beginning with Dhalia, Aft, TJ, and I sitting next to a wide assortment of instrument cases, audio equipment, and food.
Aft’s basement: the interview space, Photo(s) by Adam Dexter ©2026 – adamtookmypicture.com
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision*
Annelise: So what’s the story behind this space?
Aft: Oh, this is my family’s house.
TJ: The childhood home.
Annelise: Wow, that is just so ideal.
TJ: Yeah, It’s actually super sick. Old Victorian kind of vibe. Yeah, it’s all great. We’re all kind of from this area. Or not this area, I’m from further south, but we’re all from the city. At least the core team is all from the city.
Annelise: And then if you guys could just introduce yourselves too.
Aft: I’m Aft, and I am the MC and frontman.
TJ: So I’m TJ, I’m the musical director and lead arranger for Top Chefs.
Annelise: So how did Top Chefs come to be? As a band?
TJ: So Aft definitely has more context on this just because it’s kind of started as his backing band. And, it was just kind of Afterthought and then band for a long time because he’s like the lead rapper we play with. And then, at some point I joined the band and Liam joined the band, kind of the modern iteration of the band all joined the band, and then everyone else went on to do other things, and then the current iteration stayed. But we played a show at the Chapel in SF and, I think it was just kind of like we were all going a little delirious, and a lot of the ideas we come up with come out of just straight delirium, because we’re just having rehearsal after rehearsal for this one, like a really big show. And, we just kind of started saying, “yes, chef” at the end of everything. And I think that’s kind of how it was born.
Aft: I think that… Wow thats crazy I think that actually is true yeah
TJ: It was just us going crazy saying “Yes Chef!” Yeah, because he (Aft) would cook a lot at every rehearsal too.
Aft: Yeah well, you know, Eytan started saying “Yes, chef”.
TJ: Yes. Yeah. And then we all kind of started doing it.
Aft: Then I would introduce him last and I would say “and the top chef on the bass”, and then it just became The Top Chefs. That was probably like five years ago now.
Annelise: And then with Stoop Sessions, this is pretty new, right?
Aft: Yeah. So the actual stoop concept is not new. I’ve been doing stuff on the stoop for years. And then I did a Tiny Desk audition in 2024 that was on the stoop and then we started doing stoop shows free for the public. But this new platform that we created that’s similar to On The Radar in terms of like, it’s just different artists on the same platform is only two months old. Or we started releasing them two months ago.
Dhalia: And how have you found the other artists you’re collabing with?
TJ: Kind of chaotically yeah, like the first session was all free. Like our homies all pulled up and we were like, hey, we’re trying to do this thing, it’s gonna be really special. We just called it “Media Day” for a second, so we could go on and get tons of content to post for like a couple months. And then the first one came out and hella people just started tapping in. First, like super small artists, like super local, and they were super juiced on it and they were like “I really see the potential of this as a platform”. And they would tell us that a lot. And so we put together another date except we kind of needed to justify our things. So we started charging people, like a small fee to, to kind of, keep up with our budget. And then, from there, it just kind of grew and grew until we just have kind of at this point, we’re still pretty early on, you know, we have some pretty f***ing crazy people coming.
Annelise: And who were some of those artists?
TJ: Of the small artists, Yogi Calhoon was an interesting one. That guy kind of propped this up for a second, for like the first session I want to say. And then, Baby Gas was huge. We had tap-ins from like Guapdad and LaRussell. And we were not necessarily able to accommodate everyone because we do need to kind of pace ourselves. But the growth and the name dropping has gotten a little crazy.
Annelise: And you guys are releasing an album this year. Correct?
TJ: That’s the plan.
Aft: That is the plan.
TJ: Working on it slowly but steadily.
Aft: I think like maybe a week before our first Stoop Session we had our first album session. And now it’s like we haven’t had another one since.
TJ: Yeah, they kind of collide with each other a lot. Yeah, but we’ve been, I mean, after rehearsal, we just kind of got manic and started recording sh*t.
Aft: Yeah, yeah, I think the goal is still, like TJ was saying, for a long time the band was mostly a live backing band and most of the music was just my music that’s re-interpreted by TJ and Liam. And now it’s like we’re trying to become a more actual band that does our own music outside of that.
Dhalia: Well you said you were trying to become a more cohesive band, do you feel like you kind of feel like it’s more locked in at this point?
TJ: Yeah at this point we’ve got a steady lineup, but it’s still a rotating cast.
Aft: I’d say it’s a band, but it is more akin to a collective. We’re a band because we make music in a unified sense. But, I would say there’s like 20 Top Chefs and they’re all equally Top Chefs. Like my dream would be, everyone plays a show all at once and you get 20 people in one band. You know, three drummers at once.
TJ: Four bass players haha.
Aft: Yeah, but the people who are in it are super locked in, and we’re building out a real team.
Annelise: And you guys are going on tour this year?
TJ: That’s also just hectic delirium. I think that really sums up the band, always hectic, always delirious. In a good way, like parenthesis positive. You know it’s good, it’s rough, but it’s great. Road shows are awesome, we just did a few in the PNW up in Portland and Seattle. And that was a brutal f***ng drive. We did it for two days, so we drove up 13 hours straight and it was all you (Aft) driving, like we shifted off for a couple hours in there, but you took the bulk of the driving.
Aft: Yeah.
TJ: So it was just 13 hours there, hang out in the hotel, play a couple shows, 13 hours back. You know, chaos. But it was a great time. We love being on the road, and we get most of our business done when we’re just kind of going crazy inside the car.
Dhalia: Do you have any places you’re looking forward to playing?
Aft: Santa Cruz
TJ: Yeah Santa Cruz is pretty good. We’ve got that potential at Yoshi’s, that could be fire, potential at Yoshi’s with Baby Gas.
Aft: Honestly I’m really excited to go back to the PNW and get some more time.
TJ: That would be sick. Hopefully we can set up a New York leg again. Yeah, but we’ll see if that materializes.
Aft: We played a wedding in October in New York.
TJ: We kind of set up a tour around that. That was fun and good, but also, you know, hectic haha.
Aft: But yeah, honestly, the road is just a great time for, like, we’re all friends, but we’re coworkers, so it’s like, in the car, you get time to really chill and be, you know, friends.
Annelise: And how did you all meet exactly?
TJ: It’s a funny story. I was fresh out of high school.
Aft: Oh, you had just got out?
TJ: Yeah. Well, actually, no, I was still in high school.
Aft: So like, like he was saying earlier, I already had a band with my best friends who are identical twins who play bass and piano. We were a band first, the three of us. And I was doing a bunch of shows, and I met Liam (Loveberry) who was our lead guitarist and audio person, doing a free show at People’s Park in Berkeley when they were doing the support People’s Park movement, in early 2021 or even 2020 maybe. And I met him and he was running sound, I didn’t know him at all, and he was like “oh I play guitar” and I was like “does anyone have a guitar in the audience?!” and obviously this is People’s Park so everyone has a guitar. So he played the guitar, and I was like “you’re tight”.
Liam (Loveberry) at the audio set up at the Stoop. Photo(s) by Adam Dexter ©2026 – adamtookmypicture.com
And I found out he was from San Francisco, he came up through the same youth program which is the DJ project. So he started playing shows with me, and I was just bringing him everywhere doing a show a day like, you know, random pop ups. And he was like, “yo, I’m doing this show Loveberry and Friends, like would you kinda like take half the set?” And we had a first rehearsal with him and our trombone player Will.
TJ: So also Liam called my homie, who’s a drummer.
Aft: Ah yeah Lucas.
TJ: Yeah. Lucas, who was like a friend of mine from high school.
[Liam (Loveberry) walks into the interview space]
Aft: Liam! Do you have two seconds to come tell this story?
Liam: Yeah I’ve got two seconds.
TJ: We’re talking about the Loveberry and Friends show. Yeah so you called Lucas and Lucas was like “I’ll ask if they need horns” because I remember Lucas came up to me, and I was like, “do you need horns? Will and I will do horns for you.” And, he was like, “I’ll ask”. And then you had that French horn player.
Aft: Oh, man.
TJ: So the horn section was saxophone, trombone, french horn. And there was one other guy.
Aft: Yeah Aiden was there.
TJ: Yeah, two saxophones, French horn and trombone.
Liam: He (TJ) used to play D&D with my little brother in high school.
TJ: I did haha, yeah, yeah.
Liam: D&D is basically the reason the Top Chefs exist.
TJ: That’s the great connector.
Aft: This is Liam. This is the Mr. Loveberry our guitarist and head audio chief of staff.
Liam: Pleasure to meet you guys.
Aft: I feel like you gotta tell the story about this.
Liam: So where we starting?
Aft: The Loveberry in Friends at the DNA Lounge
Liam: Yeah, that was probably one of the most, like last minute insane cooked shows I’ve ever done. But it birthed the Top Chefs. That one especially, I was given an opportunity to play at DNA lounge by the DJ project, which is a nonprofit organization out of 16th and Potrero. And there, you know, I got involved with them doing production. They have this really cool program that they teach youth how to make beats and scratch, basically be an old school DJ. So through that program, we got this show at DNA. They said they wanted a band, and I didn’t have a set band at that point, but I had already started playing with Afterthought. And so I was like, okay, I’m getting a group of musicians together and it would be cool to have Afterthought come on and do a couple songs, and then I’ll do a couple songs. And yeah, through that hullabaloo, I hit up my buddy Lucas Hanson to play drums, who then in turn hit up Thomas, who then in turn hit up Will, our trombone player.
TJ: The chain.
Liam: Yeah, and then Afterthought brought a french horn player and another saxophone player named Aiden. And then that show was kind of the first live show that resembled the Top Chefs and connected the circles together.
TJ: There’s a little story with that when we fed the crowd food. I think that’s another origin of the Top Chefs as a name.
Liam: Yeah you brought meat skewers.
TJ: So my grandma lives right next to the DNA lounge, like down the street. And, my Filipino grandmother just cooks all the time. So she had a bunch of barbecue skewers, and I went, and I got a couple, and I was like, “I don’t really want to eat these” because I wasn’t super hungry, so we just we put them on a chair in the middle of the stage, and they just had this beautiful lighting on them. And then just like at the end of the show, there’s like a mosh pit going on and somebody had madeline cookies.
Liam: It was Aft, he had this whole container of madelines.
TJ: Started tossing them out to the crowd. And then I just picked up a barbecue stick, and I just kind of held it out, and people instantly took the whole thing.
Annelise: And when was this? What year?
Liam: That was 2021, I believe.
TJ: Yeah, yeah.
Aft: What did I miss?
TJ: Oh, we were talking about the feeding at the DNA show.
Aft: Oh, we gotta bring that back.
TJ: I feel like we could get sued for feeding the audience meat sticks.
Aft: Well let’s not feed them meat sticks.
Liam: We’ll have to have vegan options.
Aft: Well at the Chapel show we threw oreos.
TJ: That’s true, that’s true.
Aft: Because I have this song called “Everybody Eats” and during it that’s when we gave out the food and meat sticks. Anyway, that’s the origin story.
Los Rakas performing at the stoop, Photo(s) by Adam Dexter ©2026 – adamtookmypicture.com
Dhalia: With all of you being from the Bay, what’s your experience becoming a band in the music scene here? I feel like there’s a lot going on in the Bay.
Liam: I started out doing shows at Blue Bear School of Music when I was like 12 years old. It’s a really amazing youth organization that helps kids get comfortable on stages. So from a very young age, I was put in groups with other musicians. And the cool thing about Blue Bear is that they would rent out real stages all around San Francisco. So by the time I was 16, I had already played at Bimbo’s 365 club, The Chapel, Bottom Of The Hill, like all of these really iconic, amazing venues and you know, it gave me the experience to be as comfortable as possible on stage. As well as working with other young musicians and knowing what to ask for and knowing how to come correct, so to speak. And like knowing how to come prepared. And then, kind of how that transitioned, once Afterthought and the Top Chefs all kind of became a thing. It’s really been a kill what you eat situation where we’ve done a lot of shows and we’ve just kind of, you know, for lack of better words, eaten a lot of sh*t. We’ve had some really amazing shows and then there’s a lot of shows where you’re showing up and you’re doing a crazy amount of work and you’re getting paid basically nothing. 100 bucks split between four or five people. One of the reasons why the Top Chefs is more of a community rather than a set band is because we work with so many amazing, talented folks and they all have their own things going on. I’ve got my own band, TJ has his own band, and a lot of the other members of Top Chefs, like Sunday has her own project. And so we’re kind of constantly playing this juggling act with our group and Afterthought’s group. Yeah, but as we’ve kind of stuck it out it’s been a cathartic long and hard, like five years that we’ve been together.
I think bringing live instruments to, you know, the hip hop community. I’ve always said that, you know, I grew up doing rock and kind of grunge stuff. And I mean, the community in that, I’m not trying to throw any shade, there’s amazing communities in every genre, but the energy that I felt at these Hip Hop shows that I started doing with Afterthought it felt like family. And also through the DJ Project at Horizon’s there’s such a deep and committed sense of community and people like to have fun at those shows. Like at the DNA show there were artists like Xanubis and Vazh who are alumni of the DJ project and just watching like 50, 60, 100 people just mosh crazy to songs that don’t even have 100,000 streams, like, people know these songs. Seeing folks get so excited about underground music I mean, I was sold, it won my heart. And so I was like, this is the route that I want to go down, the community here, the energy here, it feels like family. It’s so much fun when things come together, right? Even when we’re out there eating sh*t at People’s Park in the dead of the heat. It’s still a beautiful time.
TJ: I started off, I always used my instrument as a means of escape, you know? So I would just kind of practice all day as a kid in a very silly way. And, in high school, I got to the point where I was basically just skipping class and playing gigs, and that was a lot of fun. I moved to New York for a little while, and then I came back and the in-between, all that was just kind of this sort of constant state of growth and change that I’ve always had to kind of adapt to. Liam said it really well in saying that this group provides a lot of community and a lot of love, and generally the Hip Hop scene has a lot of community, a lot of love. And I really appreciate it.
Aft: I think coming from San Francisco, like I’m a little older than them, but when I was coming up it was super unique because like the era that I grew up, like San Francisco was super respected musically. Yoshi’s was still here and it was such a prominent space, and there were still lots of jazz clubs along the strip on Fillmore and Divisadero. There were just a lot of artists that I looked up to like I would see people shooting music videos etc, but then I realized as I got older, I’ve had a chip on my shoulder because I’m from San Francisco. And with artists in Oakland or Richmond or anywhere else in the Bay, we were just losing a lot of community spaces, a lot of venues, so I feel like being from San Francisco I always wanted to create that. Just in San Francisco as it relates to the rest of the bay like I see like HBK be crazy in the East Bay I seen just a lot of fixtures and factors of other places in the Bay Area like it felt the opposite in the city, like venues were closing, community spaces were closing, like orgs were closing, a lot were struggling and still are. But I think that now there’s an upswing again. A lot of people say, “oh, how do you feel about the YEE Section and Office Hours”. And it’s sick that if you’re a young artist with a label budget and you’re looking, it used to be, especially in Hip-Hop, RnB, and black music, like hey you’ve got to go to Atlanta, you gotta do the Atlanta circuit, you gotta go to New York and do the New York circuit. Or with soul you got to go to London, do the London circuit. Go to Nashville if you wanna do country. San Francisco, or the Bay Area, has never been a circuit city. But it’s like now there are people like we have artists from Detroit who came and did our Stoop Session, who do Office Hours with the YEE Section. So it’s like there are real reasons for people to come, which gives reason to keep the venues open, keeping authentic local artists as supporting acts on the bills. Obviously I care about my journey and my art, I care about our journey and our art and the band and everyone we work with, but more than anything I want San Francisco to win and for the community to flourish and for people to have opportunities.
TJ: A central theme and sort of core of the band is being anti gentrification and kind of trying to fight that force in our community. You know, there’s a lot of ways to frame that, but generally we try to use our music for political good, we’re organized with the DSA for example, United Playaz, a lot of community orgs. Plenty of charity work in there too.
Aft: I also think the big thing about us is one, our genre diversity, obviously like, ethnic, racial and just like, neighborhood diversity. Like most of us from San Francisco, we’re all for the Bay, we’re all from different parts of the Bay, we all went to different schools, different kinds of schools, like parochial, public, private, charter schools. We all come from different backgrounds. So I think that makes it inaccessible to everyone if you do it wrong but accessible to everyone if you do it right. And I think most of the time we do it right. I wish that my neighborhood was still majority black and working class people but that’s just part of living in the city. Obviously there’s systemic things that affect gentrification, but I remember when I would get hella mad about things like, “ah the Salesforce Tower” or whatever. And my dad was like “when I was young, we got mad about the Bank of America building. And, you see that’s like a staple part of the skyline. You know? And it would be f***d up if someone were to take that away from the skyline. And obviously, like Salesforce might represent something different but at that time, Bank of America was like a growing institution that was f****ng up a lot of communities. Same sh*t. And the Salesforce Tower is a part of the skyline. So that’s just what a city is, a city is going to change, they’ll repave the concrete, whatever. So it’s the energy that I feel like we’re protecting the most and the people that live here. But I think the thing that we do really well is we’re not anti moving because we’ve both lived in New York and I’ve done community work there too. So you live here and you love it, then this is your home. And we want you to be in this community and learn about the history. You know, we’re not trying to isolate or shun, you know, we’re trying to support and uplift.
Nef Tha Pharoah performing at the stoop, Photo(s) by Adam Dexter ©2026 – adamtookmypicture.com
Following the interview and Frak and Nef Tha Pharaoh’s joint set, we asked Frak about his experience coming onto the stoop.
Dhalia: So if you could just do a little introduction and tell us what it’s like to come out here and perform on this stoop with Top Chefs
Frak: My name is Frak AKA The Person, San Francisco born and raised. Actually Aft, whose victorian home this is, he calls me a mentor but I think it’s a mutual relationship. But apparently I was like a Hip-Hop teacher to him when he was just coming up. I’m not that much older than him but he was coming up as a youth and I was there and like working with youths in the Hip-Hop space. And then I moved to LA for a while, and honestly his organizing and bringing together Family Not A Group, which is our artist collective, made me want to move back. We started making a bunch of music in this Victorian house. Fillmoe, you know, local sh*t. And that really brought me back to San Francisco to my home. And I’m more interested in doing sh*t like this, keeping the city alive than moving somewhere else and trying to “make it in the artist game”. We have a lot to say as Bay Area artists, so it’s cool that we’re making it happen out here.
Frak performing at the stoop, Photo(s) by Adam Dexter ©2026 – adamtookmypicture.com
Big thank you to Aft, TJ, Loveberry, and the Top Chefs team as a whole for inviting us into their home/ space and giving us the time to conduct the interview. Additional thank you to Adam Dexter for the incredible photographs.