By JASON OLAINE
Artistic Director, Fillmore Jazz Festival
Throwback is a term usually used in a positive way to refer to a bygone era that conjured great memories, which is what this year’s Fillmore Jazz Festival means to conjure up — positive memories of a time when all seemed right with the world: the mid-1990s.
The Bay Area music scene 20-something years ago was a melting pot that no one had tasted before or since. It simmered with a seasoning so potent and spicy, so seductive and sweaty, that it influenced artists and music around the globe. The genres didn’t need to have names — although some people tried to define the music as acid jazz or hip-hop jazz or jazz fusion or jump/swing.
The important thing was that the bands and the artists had names. They became synonymous with the scene and defined who you were, what you did and when you did it. Thursdays were the new Fridays. Mondays could be a Saturday. A handful of local bands — many of which are playing this weekend — were the hottest tickets in town, the artists recognizable and famous, the music infectious and seductive.
It was a time when everyone was listening to and performing with everyone else. Retro jazz was being influenced by Latin groove music and vice versa; rappers were riffing with saxes and horns; straight ahead beboppers were playing funk at midnight. And it was all good, as they say. The nightclubs were booming and new music rooms were popping up all over town. The cats would be out all night, running into each other, jamming with and sitting in with each other, forming new bands. You’d find them at familiar spots like Cafe du Nord or the Up and Down Club. They were upstairs at the Elbo Room, in the front of Enrico’s, in the back at Bruno’s, in the loft at Club 11, or on the patio at Jupiter — even at Yoshi’s living room-like venue on Claremont Avenue that played host to the first ever T. J. Kirk show with Charlie Hunter, Will Bernard, John Schott and Scott Amendola back in ’94.
It was the heyday for the Bay Area scene. And then, it vanished. The music never died; the scene just changed. The Bay Area still swings and grooves hard to this day, filled with amazing artists. We just want to tip our hats to that moment in time, that bygone era, that window in the past that was truly special and life-changing for many, on the stage and off.
So let’s enjoy some of the best of the best of that Throwback era. Let’s welcome them back as old friends. Just don’t call ’em old.
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