Craige Walters, who has a long history with Savoy Tavoli and has designed a number of local food and beverage spots, was tapped with updating the historic venue, while preserving much of its patina.
Craige Walters, who has a long history with Savoy Tavoli and has designed a number of local food and beverage spots, was tapped with updating the historic venue, while preserving much of its patina.
Dennis Hearne
The November night was crisp and clear as the Big Italian and I set off down Russian Hill for the new Keys Jazz Bistro. It had been 20 years since my husband, saxophonist and CIIS professor Alfonso Montuori, and I had strolled to a bona fide jazz club in our neighborhood. Anticipatory frisson merged with a rush of déjà vu.
Once upon a time, such a passeggiata was a near-nightly affair, whether bustling to one of my steady singing gigs or to take in the jazz elders. As the years passed, the club scene dwindled — victim to the vicissitudes of changing culture and commerce.
Since the Gold Rush Barbary Coast days, North Beach has been synonymous with jazz and nightlife. Tucked between Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill, Chinatown and the Bay, bohemian counterculture stubbornly survived here through decades of social flux.
But even before COVID, San Francisco’s most authentic European quarter seemed a bit down on its heels, with high rents and permit purgatory daunting small businesses, leaving a slew of empty storefronts, bars and restaurants. Just a few precious places — like Comstock Saloon and Doug Biederbeck’s Bix — kept the live jazz flame lit.
Then came the pandemic stall. You could almost hear tumbleweeds rolling down Columbus.
Now, in contrast to some other city environs, we’re having a rebirth. Parklets have popped up like mushrooms. Creative movers and makers are migrating in. Bands play in the streets. Tourists are back mingling with locals, slurping cioppino at Gigi’s, carbonara at Ideale, cappuccino at Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store and libations at Specs’ and Vesuvio.
Since the 1850s, the San Francisco seal and flag have depicted a phoenix rising, symbolizing the City’s resilient spirit. More recently, artist Jeremy Fish featured the mythical bird in his “Stay Strong SF” poster, created to support our bars during shutdown. The longtime North Beach resident estimates that “a year ago, Upper Grant was 40 percent vacant,” he says. “Now, almost every spot is rented, many to arts-related businesses. When you see how it’s gone in other neighborhoods, it makes you feel really lucky to be living over here.”
I’ll say. As a music-obsessed girl, raised in a jazz- and blues-loving household on the Peninsula, I got my first taste of North Beach as a child, on trips to Broadway for hearty family dinners at the Basque Hotel and Vanessi’s. The neighborhood’s siren song strengthened during high school pilgrimages for espresso at Enrico’s and poetry readings at City Lights. “Someday,” I mused, “I will live here.”
That vision came to pass in 1976, when, after two years at Harvard juggling Dean’s List standing with gigging around the Boston area at night as a singer/guitarist in a western-swing band, I needed a reset. Just before my Bay Area return, I’d had a jazz epiphany witnessing the phenomenal Rahsaan Roland Kirk at New York’s Village Vanguard. My jazz-singer future was about to begin.
By then, the glamorous North Beach scene my parents enjoyed from the ’40s through ’60s was no longer. The likes of Basin Street West, Sugar Hill, The Hungry I and Earthquake McGoon’s gave way to a grittier backdrop, with topless Carol Doda and Mabuhay Garden punks replacing Beats and cafe society.
But the area was still chockablock with clubs. I found an apartment on a tree-lined Telegraph Hill alley, just down from tenor titan Stan Getz. A part-time job trading vinyl at Recycled Records gave me access to a huge LP library. I could sit in with blues guitar shredder Joe Louis Walker at The Saloon one night, and vocal genius Bobby McFerrin’s Cadell Place jam the next. Saxophonist Hal Stein somewhat grudgingly let me into his instrumentalists-only San Francisco State improvisation class, but quickly realized I was serious and bequeathed me his weekly spot at tiny Peta’s on Columbus. I became a bandleader, sink or swim.
More steady gigs followed, including after-hours sets at Pearl Wong’s Great Eastern, where hospitality workers, jazz cats and Venetian Room stars such as Joel Grey and Sammy Davis Jr. savored whiskey from teacups and midnight chow whipped up by chef Peter Fang (of House of Nanking and now Food Network fame); and an every-Thursday spot at Sam Deitch and Ed Moose’s Washington Square Bar & Grill, which attracted regulars like Herb Caen, Willie Mays and practically every San Francisco mayor.
Nights off were spent at Keystone Korner, last of the world-class jazz clubs. This became my unofficial grad school. Along with the music, I learned the oral history and the ropes, hanging with a who’s who of jazz masters — Dexter Gordon, Art Blakey, Betty Carter, Elvin Jones — and earning a spot on the club’s marquee before it closed in 1983.
In 1988, I cofounded Mad-Kat Records, the first woman-owned indie jazz label on the Left Coast, and recorded my debut album, Live at the Jazz Workshop, during the brief rebirth of the historic Broadway venue that had showcased Dizzy, Trane, Miles, Mingus and Cannonball in the ’60s. Suddenly, I was getting global airplay and selling out at Tower Records.
KJAZ DJ Bob Parlocha suggested I deliver a copy of the LP to Jimmy Lyons, founder of the Monterey Jazz Festival. That same night, the impresario called and invited me to perform. It would be my first of eight appearances there. And so began a new chapter of my life. World stages replaced local ones. More albums followed.
As the tech boom raged in San Francisco, rents became impossible, musicians moved to less expensive pastures and the local club scene faded. I missed the old days, but I stayed — mentoring next-generation artists, representing music creators at the Grammy trustee table. And now I’ve got a front-row seat for North Beach’s renaissance. A trio of exciting new music venues in historic spaces emerged within a month last November: Lyon & Swan, Keys Jazz Bistro and Savoy Tivoli.
Renowned jazz guitarist, composer and recording artist Mimi Fox is a frequent performer at Lyon & Swan.
Descending the stairs into the posh subterranean supper club Lyon & Swan, you can almost hear the spirit songs of pedigreed ghosts from the past. When Sonoma winemaker/owner Mark Lyon was scouting locations for an urban tasting room to show off his Eco Terreno wines, he fell in love with a landmark edifice, located across Columbus from Francis Ford Coppola’s Sentinel Building.
During their remodel, Lyon and hospitality director Dawn Agnew discovered the venue’s storied saga. They just had to keep the basement performance space that has served as Jelly Roll Morton’s desegregated “black and tan” club; The Jupiter; Mona’s, the West Coast’s first lesbian bar; The Purple Onion, which hosted luminaries like Phyllis Diller, Richard Pryor, Maya Angelou and the Smothers Brothers; and Colombo & Sons accordion factory.
It was kismet. “Mark was the first winemaker to come out publicly as gay in the Chronicle in 1991, on the heels of the AIDS crisis,” says Agnew. “That he unwittingly inherited this building, with its history, is perfect because his life has been all about inclusivity and diversity.”
The soigné redesign by StudioHeimat creates a luscious ambiance in which to enjoy former La Folie chef Joe Ball’s exquisite cuisine, and impeccable service overseen by Matteo Villano. But what truly sets L&S apart is exceptional music programming, from Indian master vocalist Riffat Sultana and cinematic accordionist Rob Reich to soulful singer Michelle Jacques and guitar virtuoso Mimi Fox. Diners can also look forward to top drag performers, marquee jazz names and comedy headliners.
Bassist Ron Belcher, vocalist Kenny Washington and drummer Deszon Claiborne perform at Keys Jazz Bistro
Dennis Hearne
In November, Simon Rowe opened Keys Jazz Bistro in a space once occupied by the El Matador nightclub.
After combing other parts of the City, musician/educator Simon Rowe realized that North Beach was the place for his passion project, Keys Jazz Bistro. Specifically, a site on Broadway that in the 1950s was home to author and bullfighter Barnaby Conrad’s nightclub.
Rowe, an ambitious, amiable Aussie with impressive keyboard chops, knew some neighborhood jazz history but didn’t consciously aim to set up shop at a legacy location. “It was sort of by happenstance, when I was researching the address, and suddenly realized it was the El Matador,” he says. (If the walls could talk, we’d hear conversations of literary luminaries Steinbeck, Kerouac and Capote, as well as Hollywood habitués Eartha Kitt, Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe, set to the music of Carmen McRae, Vince Guaraldi and Sérgio Mendes.)
The Keys moniker is a double hat-tip to the piano’s 88 keys and to Keystone Korner. True to theme, the space is cosseted in black velvet curtains appliquéd with playful white instruments. Anchoring the stage are a 9-foot Steinway grand and a Hammond B-3 organ. Shades of black and blue evoke vintage Blue Note album covers. While dinner specials, bar bites and potent cocktails are on tap, the focus is squarely on music.
Intimacy is at the fore in the 150-capacity room. In soulful contrast to noisy jazz spots, Rowe insists on a respectful listening policy during show time, explaining, “Music is sacred and the experience of the artist making their music is paramount.” Rowe wants Keys to be a home for the Bay’s finest jazzers to develop their groove with four-night residencies, but is open to expanding his scope with headliners from further afield. “My whole aim,” he says, “is to create that magical, timeless bubble of rapture and joy around this art form.”
Following a four-year closure, Savoy Tivoli reopened in November and now beckons jazz enthusiasts once more.
Dennis Hearne
Savoy Tivoli
1434 Grant Avenue, San Francisco
The Beach is abuzz about the long-awaited return of Savoy Tivoli, the beloved 117-year-old bar on Upper Grant, one of the City’s first avenues of commerce.
Originally called the New Tivoli, the fine-dining establishment with a boarding house upstairs was owned for 50 years by Nick Finocchio. Today, the legendary hang for “hippies and Beats, punks and preps, ladies and gents” — as its tagline goes — is under the care of Paul Kozel, son of late, longtime owner Claire Kozel, and Tito Avila, a friend of Kozel’s from the startup world.
Excavations during the four-year seismic retrofit unearthed a trove of ephemera; among them, original menus featuring caviar and foie gras as well as a hand-painted sign now hanging behind the stage. A funky/glam facelift by designer Craige Walters — whose history with the place began at 15 when owner Freddie Kuh paid him $20 and two tequila sunrises to set up chairs in the Bocce Cinema in the back-room bocce courts — has preserved much of the original patina: golden palm trees, colorful Art Deco light fixtures, whimsical monkey and peacock murals.
Honoring the venue’s eclectic past — it’s been home to everything from Steve Silver’s original Beach Blanket Babylon to Allen Ginsburg to The Ramones — Avila says he envisions presenting diverse music, poetry slams, even art lessons with cocktails. Sipping a Manhattan to the groove of the Magic School Busk band at the grand opening, I spied a sign hanging over the old bar: “These are the good old days.” For that magic moment, I believed it.
