San Francisco and its Manic Monday: when the music changes, so does the dance

The Cellar, SF

"The Jazz Diet will make you thinner, taller, smarter, richer, happier, hipper, leaner, meaner, keener, more attractive to members of every sex, and able to do those newspaper cryptoquote puzzles in one go." Genius Guide to Jazz

This is going to sound silly but at the current moment, I'm in lock down in my apartment due to a bomb scare. Being someone easily influenced by circumstance, the fact that Charlie Parker is spinning in the background and I'm reading about the birth of jazz feels like the opening scene in a movie, the flash back to another era.

The continuous discussions in the neighborhood have been about the supposed 'death of San Francisco culture'. And though I do agree that displacing what brings this city it's life is clearly a problem, I would like to think that this cultural malaise extends beyond our fair 7 x 7. Ask anyone about post-post-modernism and you'll find yourself deep at the bottom of the rabbit hole.

Billie Holiday, Monterrey Jazz, 1958

But the good news is that every culture experiences a small death before its renaissance. This history of jazz in San Francisco is one of those excellent examples of a creative phoenix rising from the ashes of gentrification, war, natural disaster and neglect.

There are roughly three periods of jazz in this city, post WWI, post WWII and then the 1960s.

Stanley Turrentine, Great American, 1980s

Personally, I have a love-like relationship with jazz. I love it for its intention and its history, I only like it because it is something far beyond me, from another place. But like the majesty of some types of music, it has a way of opening our perceptions. There was a theory I followed in college, that if you listen to Mozart while studying, it somehow managed to open your receptors or help your remember, or bla bla bla. Maybe it was purely psychosomatic but it seemed to work for me.

Jazz, on the other hand, with a glass of wine on a cold rainy night turns me into a creative genius. It shuts down my inhibitions. Has a way of setting me free.

"Men have died for this music. You can't get more serious than that." Gillespie

"It's like an act of murder- you play with intent to commit something." Ellington

Miles, looking cool.

Because Prohibition was virtually ignored here, clubs continued to operate throughout the night. Several black owned clubs in Barbary Coast became the main meeting place for young people after the war. Unmarried women and housewives frequented these clubs, smoking, drinking, dancing and flirting. "They sought to prohibit afternoon dancing to deny women their 'questionable pleasures" (SF Examiner).

There are theories that "Jazz" itself was a San Francisco invention, stemming from Rag time. with a New Orleans bent. According to Douglas Daniels, "Played properly, it impelled people of all social classes and ethnic backgrounds to mingle in cafes and saloons and to delight in the African rhythms by dancing to and singing the songs... The dances too, startled many Americans, who thought the hip movement that is essential to African and Afro-American dance was licentious."

When magnificent things are created, I always wonder what was the impetus? How was it that society was ready to receive such greatness, or in the case of Van Gogh, not ready at all for years?

Black Hawk

In reading about the birth of Bohemia here in the 1920s, "There were advantages, as there always are, to provincialism and cultural lag. The marketplace was far away. It was quite impossible to make a living as an artist, writer or composer in San Francisco, so the practitioners of the arts were in it for love, and they were mostly very poor indeed. This economic situation produced in Bohemia very like that of New York or Chicago from the 1880s to the First War."

As San Francisco slips further and further into the haves and have nots, and the mass exodus of artists and musicians leaving this city continues, I wonder: do I pack up and head east, or wait out this Black Period?

Sonny Payne, Lonshoreman's Hall, SF 1960

During Prohibition, it was relatively easy to eat for free here. If you knew where to look and at what time of day, you could get free produce from the farmer's market, free pastries from the cafes, and even in North Beach, for .25¢ you could get a full plate of pasta and wine. The early hangouts at this time included Izzy Gomez's on Pacific (famous for the city's best grappa), Casa Begine, and Myrto's. "People lingered after dinner, drinking, playing chess, dancing and singing all night."

By the time Jimbo's opened, the racial tensions were high. Before this, there was something magical about these clubs. Interracial dating was commonplace. White participation wasn't frowned upon. "There was probably less interracial tension and less prejudice against blacks in San Francisco than anywhere else in the world."

After the 1906 earthquake, the Fillmore district (left decrepit and dilapidated) was populated with Jews, Japanese and African Americans. The streets were decorated with Leola King's Bird Cage, Wesley Johnson's Texas Playhouse, Shelton's Blue Mirror. Jack's on Sutter brought in Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday.

Vernon Alley

The Fairmont

Jimbo's Bop City

World War II brought several changes to this city including both a massive African American migration (600% increase) as well as the slow destruction of the Fillmore district by Justin Herman. "As a result of the project's displacement of residents and businesses, its mixed and arguably discriminatory economic impact and its design, the redevelopment of the Fillmore is considered by most to have been unsuccessful and regrettable. Post-redevelopment, encroaching gentrification, and the physical decay of cheaply constructed housing complexes have led to a neighborhood of stark contrasts between rich and poor."

In the Tenderloin in 1949, the Black Hawk opened, one of San Francisco's most legendary institutions. Famous for albums recorded here, Black Hawk became the destination for those seeking the "Harlem of the West". Some of the most notable characters that have played here include Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Art Blakey, Art Pepper, Art Tatum, Gerry Mulligan and Jimmy Smith. Billie Holiday, Lester Young and Louis Armstrong all played their last West Coast gigs here. Sunday afternoons were open for emerging musicians, and it was here that Johnny Mathis got his start.

Doug Ramsay, "In the 1950s when the club was in its fluorescence, Count Basie set a new world record for compacting musicians by cramming 16 men onto the Back Hawk's little stand, adding Joe Williams and still finding room to swing."

To keep this list of stories short, one of the more influential ones I stumbled upon was a memory recounted by American sculptor Richard Serra. When he was about 16 or 17, he used a fake ID to go hear Mingus play. A hot night, the bartender had had a fan going until he decided it to noisy. Having turned it off, it caused Mingus to have "An apoplectic fit. He jumped over the bar and practically throttled the guy. 'That fan was one of my instruments,' he said. And it made me think, as someone who wanted to be an artist, that you had to pay attention all the time to everything that was going on, because everything was of potential use, if you could see the potential."

Monk, Gillespie, Wilson, Monterrey Jazz, 1963

Like I mentioned, I tend to romanticize things. I would have loved to have been here, been one of the sardines crammed into a stinky, poorly lit cellar, to watch the magic happen. Having grown up in bars, listening to jam sessions, it is contagious, the energy the musicians share on stage, the way they communicate through sound and vision, it has a way of grabbing you like nothing else.

"Musicians in the fifties were the very epitome of everything cool. Just the presence of Miles Davis and John Coltrane lowered the earth's average temperature by 2.4 degrees." Genius Guide to Jazz

"By the Be-bop era, jazz drumming had become as technically demanding as trying to undo a four-hook bra strap while driving a stick shift." Ibid.

A description of the Tenderloin in the 1930s, from the Spokesman: "Altogether the street is like the fairway of an enormous circus or carnival. Colors, lights, crowds, music, candy, hawkers, ballyhoo- everything is there but the elephants and the sawdust."

Dinah Washington, Masonic Lodge, 1959

But time changes all. Each club began to fall. No one

is really sure as to why the Black Hawk closed other than that one of the partners had decided to devote herself entirely to being Johnny Mathis' manager, but still it closed its doors in 1963. Though 222 Club opened on part of that property, what remains of that legendary club is a parking lot.

Doug Ramsey again, "During my years of labor at KGO-TV in San Francisco, I never passed the parking lot a block away at Turk and Hyde without regretting the injustice of a world that puts more value on the storage of automobiles than on preserving historical landmarks."

Helen Humes, Jazz Workshop, 1959

Having gone through the mourning process of losing the Attic (a bar not even remotely close to comparing to the Black Hawk, but still a place to congregate with similar people who are now without), I have that knee jerk reaction. How could something so monumental as JAZZ fade away, how can the city watch and allow for the displacement, shut down, death of all the things that keep this culture together? How can we look at the new SFJazz Center and feel that same revolutionary rebelliousness of the authentic jazz experience?

"But don't change a hair for me

Not if you care for me

Stay little valentine, stay

Each day is Valentine's Day." Chet Baker

I appreciate that "In a way the SfJazz Center is a rally cry against gentrification and for a new dialogue based on an old message of racial and economic inclusion," but I can tell you right now that I will never be able to afford a ticket to one of their events.

Still, creativity and culture cannot stagnate. They are life forces. If jazz did continue the way it was going here, it still would have petered out; death is inevitable. But that doesn't mean that it isn't paving the way for something new to come along. If everything impacts everything, and we can see a linear evolution, notice the ebb and flow in the history of this beautiful place, then I think we can have hope. Yeah, we're rapidly turning into Manhattan. The SFMOMA picked the absolute worst time ever to remodel. Famous and cherished murals are being torn down and replaced with hideous architecture. But in this Black period, I know we will find our voices again. We always have.

"When the music changes, so does the dance." African proverb.