The old Fillmore neighborhood

MO' BETTER JAZZ

Fillmore Jazz Preservation District:

Bringing Back the Good Old Days

by Ernest Beyl

   Back in 1948 a 16-year-old West Oakland kid who played clarinet borrowed an alto saxophone from his high school, blew into its mouthpiece and managed to push a breathy squawk out of the instrument’s bell. Three days later, after mastering a bit of elementary fingering, he played his first gig at a nearby recreation center. John Handy was hooked on Adolphe Sax’s 19th C. invention. It was the start of his professional life.
   Two years later he was on stage at Jimbo’s Bop City, a nightclub in San Francisco’s swarming Fillmore neighborhood — known as the Harlem of the West — and jamming with John Coltrane, who was well on his way to becoming a jazz legend.
   Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Erroll Garner, Chet Baker, Dexter Gordon and other well-known artists played in these African American clubs. After a few years in this jazz hothouse Handy went on to New York to play with mercurial bassist Charles Mingus — a jazz giant. Later he returned to San Francisco as a music teacher and performer, and the Bay Area has remained his home base. In 1965, Handy became a jazz giant himself at the prestigious Monterey Jazz Festival when his quintet played his surging, wildly expressive Spanish Lady.
   Today, only a few nightspots remain in the Fillmore that carry on the jazz tradition, such as Rasselas Jazz Club and Sheba’s Lounge, as well as the Boom Boom Room founded by the late bluesman, John Lee Hooker.
   The old Fillmore, chock-a-block with viable local businesses and alive with the sounds of jazz, was a cultural treasure. And that’s what it’s going to be again if SF city government, private investment and Fillmore neighborhood associations, as well as zealous jazz promoters and fans, have anything to say about it. The Historic Fillmore Jazz Preservation District, as it’s called, has been designed to set things right.
   With the soon-to-open $75 million, 13-story, condominium tower — The Fillmore Heritage Center — in the 1300 block of Fillmore, things are looking up. Developed by Em Johnson Interest, Inc., president Michael Johnson says 70 percent of the 80 residential condos are sold.
     The project also includes Yoshi’s, the renowned jazz club and Japanese restaurant; 1300 on Fillmore, an upscale soul food restaurant; the nonprofit Jazz Heritage Center, with interactive displays, screening room and library; and parking, all of which opened last month.
      Over a recent lunch to discuss this rebirth of this local jazz scene, Handy said, “Those old Fillmore days were magic for me. It was like a school of higher education in the art of jazz. Kids were invited to jam with the big names. And the audiences loved it.”
     Those old nightclubs, located North and South of Geary Boulevard, attracted African Americans, Asians, Latinos and Caucasians; those from the high life and low life mixed there happily. It was a “happening scene” before it was hip to use phrases like “happening scene.”
    Jazz was popular in the Fillmore as early as the 1930s, and by the 1950s, there were more than two dozen nightclubs with live music. Most were open after hours, but nobody was watching the clock. Jack’s Tavern on Sutter between Fillmore and Webster opened in 1933. Then along came the Club Alabam on Post Street, the Town Club on Sutter, the Long Bar and Minnie’s Can-Do on Fillmore, the New Orleans Swing Club and Jimbo’s Bop City, both on Post. By 1952, the Champagne Supper Club had opened on Post as well. Billie Holiday, one of the greatest jazz vocalists ever, appeared there in the 1950s near the end of her tragic life.

     Another talented youngster who grew up in Oakland wanted to be a clarinet player. When he was 10 his mother went to a music store to buy him one, but trumpets were on sale for $14. So at 16, John Coppola developed his musical chops on that instrument in the Fillmore nightclubs.
   Eventually he played on the road with Charlie Barnett, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and Billy May, but always returned to San Francisco, where he still lives. When asked recently about the old Fillmore neighborhood, Coppola said “Those were the days. It was fantastic. Young guys got to play before real audiences. This was still in the Depression and a lot of people were jobless but musicians could always get work because they made people happy.
   “Remember this? (he sings in a falsetto) — Grab your coat, don’t forget your hat. Leave your worries on the doorstep and just direct your feet, to the sunny side of the street.”
   Truer words were never spoken. Or rather, sung.
   “There was a place out in the Fillmore called the New Orleans Swing Club,” recalled Coppola. “Louis Armstrong played there, Jack Teagarden and Earl Hines too — I mean giants.
   “I played there for a few weeks. We were on the same bill as (Oakland vocalist) Saunders King and some stripper. When she danced we played the Johnny Mercer tune Strip Polka. It was a wild scene.”

   Before he died in 2004, venerated jazz bassist Vernon Alley often shared fond reminisces about the musical heyday of the Fillmore, where greats such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie often touched down to jam with homegrown guys and gals following a gig they’d headlined in the old Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel.
    Even before rock ’n’ roll, the city’s music scene was more than exciting. Though Alley realized that rock impresario Bill Graham got the scene, too. Graham not only booked big rock groups at his Fillmore Auditorium, he also featured important blues players like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker and jazz artists like Miles Davis, and Charles Lloyd who hit the big time with his Forest Flower (Lloyd’s extended, seductive work that also featured pianist Keith Jarrett and drummer Jack DeJohnette, now jazz household names).
    “There was a lot going on all over town. But for me the best times of all were those old days in the jazz joints in the Fillmore,” Alley once said. “Later, all the good joints closed. I was lucky; I played there when I was just a kid. Lionel Hampton found me out there (in 1939) and I went on the road with him. Then I played with Basie. But I always came home to San Francisco. I thought, ‘This is where I make my stand.’ I love it here.”

    John Coppola recalls that in 1952 he ran into the prodigiously talented Charlie “Bird” Parker at the musician’s union hall and took him out to Bop City: “Bird was in great form. His alto (saxophone) tone was lyrical, and bounced around loud and clear. Art Blakey, who happened to be in town, showed up and took over on drums behind Bird. I was afraid to get up on the bandstand with men like that. They kicked off a blistering Stompin’ at the Savoy; it was incredible. They played all night and at about six in the morning I took Bird home with me to Oakland, and my Italian-American father made us breakfast — salami, tomatoes, hot peppers, hard bread and red wine.”
   Of course, it’s self-evident that jazz is embedded in the African American experience — a long and corrosive chapter in American history. There weren’t a lot of African Americans in the Bay Area until World War II when they flocked here for good wages in local shipyards. Many settled in the Fillmore, and it became a vibrant neighborhood and a center for jazz culture. Small, locally owned businesses and dozens of nightclubs dotted the area officially known as the Western Addition.
   However, this unique neighborhood was later dismantled in the name of progress. The creation of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency in 1948 was in response to a national interest in cleaning up post-war urban blight. In 1953, a four-decade urban renewal project launched that, through a combination of state and federal laws and evocations of eminent domain, resulted in the razing of homes and businesses within a 70-plus block area (including swaths of Fillmore and Japantown) of the Western Addition that the Agency had determined slums or tenements.
   Many people, then and now, believe that the Agency’s project was ill conceived, disruptive and callous in its disregard for African American culture. “Gentrification is an extremely complicated idea — positive and negative, frequently more negative” says arts manager and Fillmore community activist Kate Dumbleton.
   A major player in the revival of the area, Yoshi’s, whose flagship is in Oakland’s Jack London Square, began in 1973 as a small sushi bar in Berkeley, and, after a few permutations, went on to become one of the world’s most respected jazz clubs.
   Opening night last month at Yoshi’s SF featured drummer Roy Haynes and a group called the Birds of a Feather Super Band with vibraphonist Gary Burton, saxophonists Kenny Garrett and Ravi Coltrane and trumpet player Nicholas Payton and others — a fitting start for the rebirth of the old Fillmore area.
   Knowledgeable observers believe the area will never support dozens of jazz clubs as it once did. African Americans were highly segregated in those days; hence, their entertainment was for the most part restricted to their neighborhood. That’s not the case now, as the city’s diverse population seeks out its entertainment and shopping at venues all over town. The planned Historic Fillmore Jazz Preservation District shows promise as a viable entertainment and shopping area for locals as well as visitors, and will bring added luster to San Francisco.
   The jazz focus is crucial to the success of this bold plan and the vitality of the historic neighborhood.
   “I wish we could have those great times back. Not only was I a lot younger but the music was so good,” said John Coppola, now 78 and still blowing his trumpet. “There are a lot of very talented young people here now and it would be great to bring back the Fillmore as cool as it was when I was a kid.”

     Ernest Beyl, regular contributor to the Nob Hill Gazette, is a long-time jazz devotee and once played boogie woogie piano.