There was a subterranean connection between abstract art and jazz. In 1946 a group of Bay Area artists formed the Studio Thirteen Jazz Band: David Park on piano, Elmer Bischoff on trumpet, Charlie Clark on clarinet, Wally Hedrick on banjo, Conrad Janis on trombone, Jon Schueler on bass and Douglas MacAgy on drums.

The depressed young White existentialists identified with the condition of the Black musicians of blues and jazz music, as Norman Mailer explained in his essay “The White Negro” (1957), and in turn the young White folks were influenced by jazz improvisation.

During World War II San Francisco was a center of what jazz historians called "the Great Revival" of traditional jazz, i.e. of the "Dixieland" style that had almost disappeared in the rest of the country. The Dawn Club, an old "speakeasy", was the place where the most famous of the San Francisco jazz bands played in 1941: the Yerba Buena Jazz Band. Turk Murphy formed his own band in 1949 and in the 1950s became a regular of clubs like Peggy Tolk-Watkins' Tin Angel and Turk's own Easy Street.

Returning from World War II, Bay Area native Dave Brubeck organized the Dave Brubeck Octet with San Francisco musicians, then formed the trio that in 1949 recorded for a local record label (Jack Sheedy's Coronet Records, which later became Fantasy Records), and finally the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951 that became a staple of San Francisco’s Black Hawk nightclub. The vibraphonist Cal Tjader, raised in the Bay Area, pioneered Latin-jazz when he organized in 1954 the Modern Mambo Quintet, featuring Cuban players, and benefited from the "mambo craze" of the late 1950s. His pianist, Vince Guaraldi, born in San Francisco, was another champion of Latin-jazz in a trio with guitar, bass and no drums. During the 1950s the jazz scene shifted to North Beach, in particular to the Jazz Workshop opened by lawyer Art Auerbach in 1956, and to the Fillmore, a largely Black neighborhood, where Black entrepreneurs opened clubs such as Jimbo Edwards' Bop City and Charles Sullivan's Fillmore Auditorium (1954). The latter introduced many New York jazz musicians to San Francisco since 1954.

San Francisco also found the spiritual successors to Henry Cowell. The California-born Harry Partch, homosexual son of missionaries who had spent many years in China, studied composition in Los Angeles and in 1923 turned to "just intonation", away from the twelve-note octave, which during his nomadic rail-jumping hobo years evolved into a microtonal scale of many more tones to an octave (up to 43). The performance of his music required custom-built instruments capable of playing non-tempered scales, such as the 72-stringed "kithara" that he built at Big Sur in 1938, the "chromelodeon" of 1945 (a modified pump organ) and the 44-stringed harmonic canon also of 1945. Finally returning to California, in 1953 Gordon Onslow-Ford helped him to set up a studio in an abandoned building of Sausalito's shipyard, Gate 5, where he composed the ballet "The Bewitched" (1955), and he was then able to perform major compositions such as "Eleven Intrusions" (1950) and "Plectra and Percussion Dances" (1952), some premiered live on Berkeley's KPFA radio. While living on a houseboat, Partch rapidly built an enthusiastic following: his first performances at the Opus One in 1954 were sold out.

Henry Cowell's pupil and fellow homosexual Lou Harrison returned to the Bay Area in 1949 after a nervous breakdown in New York, and, influenced by Harry Partch's treatise "Genesis of a Music" (1949) on just intonation and, in general, by the Bay Area's ethnic Babel, incorporated a vast repertory of world styles, notably the Gamelan of Indonesia, into "classical" compositions such as the Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra (1959) and the Concerto in Slendro (1961). Harrison and his partner Bill Colvig, an instrument builder, organized a gamelan orchestra for Mills College.

In 1955 Anna Halprin (the wife of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin) founded the Dancer's Workshop in Marin (just north of San Francisco) and began her pioneering experiments in dance improvisation which borrowed elements from Allan Kaprow’s happenings in New York. One of her first students was Simone Forti (until 1959), who then moved to New York and in 1961 stunned the dance world with her minimalist "dance constructions". Warner Jepson composed pioneering electronic music for their performances as well as for choreographer Welland Lathrop.

In 1957 film-maker Jordan Belson, one of the people inspired by "Art in Cinema", began collaborating with composer Henry Jacobs at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. For two years they produced a series of "Vortex Concerts", concerts of electronic music accompanied by visual projections.