Autumn is a special season for jazz in San Francisco. The weather at other times of the year variously drives one indoors for warmth, a good enough reason to seek shelter in jazz. But in the autumn, mostly gone is the bone-chilling summer fog that pours into the city from the cold Pacific Ocean. Not yet are the winter rains that soak damp alleys. The days and nights are crisp and clear, good for being out and listening.

It's a time of harvest. The glass temple of the San Francisco Jazz Center, SFJazz, planted on the corner of Fell and Franklin Streets, begins a season that runs onward through winter into spring. Just two blocks away on a dark stretch of Fell is Mr. Tipple's Recording Studio, hidden below the bright Civic Center streets otherwise holding the San Francisco Symphony, Opera and Ballet and the domed grandeur of City Hall. There is no actual Mr. Tipple, and there is no recording studio; both are fanciful inventions that create mystery and start conversation. But there are craft cocktails, Asian-based food bites, and jazz.

One enters a small reception foyer, then a heavy drape parts to reveal the club inside. It's small and remarkably stylish: a small corner bandstand, a dozen or so tables and seating at a bar lit from underneath. Comfortable yet secretive, not quite a speakeasy. An upholstered room off to one side is called the Opium Den Lounge. It is a club in that it conveys a sense of membership in the esoteric and covert. Veteran and emergent performers anchor the dates, supplemented by such prominent visitors as trumpeter