SAN FRANCISCO’S ICONIC Fillmore Jazz Festival returns for its 35th year on July 6 and 7, promising a vibrant weekend of music, arts and community spirit. Spanning Fillmore Street from Jackson to Eddy, this year’s festival is back at full strength, presenting an impressive lineup across five stages and showcasing the talents of 25 local and nationally known artists.
Music enthusiasts can enjoy performances at three outdoor stages located on Fillmore at the intersection of California, Sutter and Eddy streets. Indoor concerts at Calvary Presbyterian Church and Jones Memorial Methodist Church offer intimate settings for more music.
This year’s festival — which attracts more than 100,000 people to the street every Fourth of July weekend — kicks off with a special concert honoring three Bay Area musical legends. “Remembering Calvin Keys, Bobby Hutcherson & Joe Henderson” takes place on Saturday, July 6, from noon to 1:30 p.m. at the Sugar Pie DeSanto Sutter Stage. The stage is named for a favorite performer from Fillmore’s days at the Harlem of the West, the theme of this year’s festival.
Renowned vocalists Paula West and Kim Nalley headline the Saturday lineup on the Mary Stallings California Stage, named for another longtime local with an international following. The Sunday lineup is a triple treat, with The Dynamic Miss Faye Carrol, Kenny Washington and Fillmore’s own Kim Nalley all performing.
For a complete lineup of performances and more details, go to fillmorejazzfest.com.
Members of the choir before the tomb of William the Conqueror in Caen, France.
By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS
Members of Calvary Presbyterian Church’s choir are on a two-week tour of Europe, taking the high-level musicianship of the Fillmore Street church to historic sites in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The choir joined singers from other choirs in commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day in the Normandy region of northwestern France. On Monday night they performed Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem, written just after the end of World War II, at the Abbey of Saint-Étienne, the burial place of William the Conqueror, in Caen, France. Earlier they toured Omaha Beach and the hedgerows of Pointe du Hoc and sang America the Beautiful at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.
“It felt sacred in all the right ways,” said Calvary pastor Marcie Glass.
Under the leadership of Calvary’s music director, Michael Conley, the choir will perform on Wednesday in Beauvais, France, and then on to Ghent and Antwerp, Belgium, over the weekend. They will conclude with a concert on June 25 in Amsterdam.
This is not the Calvary choir’s first European tour. Three decades ago, longtime music director Alden Gilchrist led the choir on a similar tour.
“A meaningful, memorable day touring the beaches of Normandy,” said Michael Conley.At the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.
Eleanor Coppola’s 2020 film was shot on Washington Street.
REMEMBRANCE | ELEANOR COPPOLA (1936-2024)
By ALISON OWINGS
The sad news spread fast among her friends: Ellie Coppola died.
She was 87, and died at home in Napa Valley on April 12.
For years she and her creative family lived near Fillmore Street, first on Webster Street and later up on Broadway.
Late in life, Eleanor Coppola – often known as the wife of moviemaker Francis Ford Coppola – returned to shoot one of her own films, “Love Is Love Is Love,” at the handsome Victorian house at 2561 Washington Street, just steps from Alta Plaza Park. The home of her good friends Carol and John Field, it was empty after their deaths, while the Field children determined what to do with it. The film was inspired in part by a memorial lunch her writing group held after Carol Field’s death in 2017.
“Love is Love is Love,” a trilogy distributed by Blue Fox Entertainment, never gained the acclaim of her earlier documentary, “Hearts of Darkness,” about her husband’s fraught in-the-making war epic, “Apocalypse Now.”
The Fillmore segment of “Love” contained a much smaller scale drama: that of a table of women talking with intimate honesty about a cherished friend who had died. It echoes in ways a lively bunch of Bay Area writers and artists who jokingly call themselves “the Ladies Lunch Group.” They still occasionally have lunch, if not as frequently as in years past. The group included Ellie — and cherished her, too. Many lunchers responded with shock to the news of her death, and with appreciation. The consensus: Ellie was kind, inclusive, considerate, generous, caring and unassuming. Only weeks before she died, she contributed to a fund to help one of the other ladies. Typical.
At her death, she was editing a documentary about her daughter Sophia Coppola’s film, “Marie Antoinette.” Eleanor Coppola was not finished.
FROM 2020: The backstory about Eleanor Coppola’s newest film
Alison Owings’ latest nonfiction book, “Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey from Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco,” will be published in September by Beacon Press.
IT WILL BE a night from the past, still relevant today. On Thursday, January 11, Sheba Piano Lounge will present “The Fillmore Eclipse,” a one-night evening of immersive theater that brings to life a familiar neighborhood story.
It’s a recreation of a 1950’s underground jazz club, called the Eclipse, at a time when Fillmore Street was alive with music but threatened by redevelopment. In the Eclipse, modeled after the legendary Jimbo’s Bop City, the music runs all night, but there is also a sense of impending doom for the club and the neighborhood. Actors mix among the audience and tell the story of the club, the music and emerging ideas about how to save the neighborhood — ideas that still shape the Fillmore today.
Harry Smith with one of his murals at Jimbo’s Bop City, circa 1950.
IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that a photo from the neighborhood is published in The New York Times. But today is that day. Alongside a review of Cosmic Scholar, a new biography of anthropologist/artist/filmmaker/mystic/music collector Harry Smith, is a photograph of Smith before one of the murals in the legendary Fillmore jazz club Jimbo’s Bop City.
Wikipedia confirmed: “The painter and filmmaker Harry Everett Smith painted the walls with abstract motifs and created a light show that ran to the music of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.” The entry added: “Admission was only $1, and musicians came in for free, but Jimbo Edwards always chose who he let in and who he did not: “We don’t allow no squares in Bop City. If you don’t understand what we doin’, then leave and don’t come back.”
Victoria Wasserman is bringing wine and music to 1870 Fillmore.
NEW NEIGHBORS | CHASE ROBERTS
There will be no jazz festival on Fillmore this Fourth of July weekend, but Victoria Wasserman is determined to bring music back to one block of the street. Wasserman is opening Vic’s Winehouse at 1870 Fillmore and turning the Wine Jar into a wine bar with music.
“I was devastated to see all the closures on Fillmore Street,” Wasserman says, “and given its rich history of music and culture, I decided it was time to fulfill my lifelong dream of opening my own bar.”
The new name, Vic’s Winehouse, has a double meaning. Not only will there be locally sourced wines not found in stores. The name also reflects Wasserman’s love for the late singer Amy Winehouse, and her music — jazz, R&B, blues and hip hop — will set the theme for the bar.
Wasserman previously led an eight-piece Amy Winehouse tribute band, “The Back to Black Band,” which played at the Blue Note in Napa and other venues. Wasserman sings and plays the ukulele, and her husband, Jacinto Castaneda, sings and plays bass and guitar. Both are rooted in the Bay Area music scene.
Most of the wines will be from small family-owned wineries in the Russian River, Sonoma, Lodi and Paso Robles. Happy hour specials will be offered daily from 3 to 6 p.m. Flights will be offered from Argentina and from Balletto Vineyards, a family-owned winery in the Russian River Valley that grows its own grapes on what was once the largest vegetable farm in Northern California.
Vic’s will also offer Argentine empanadas handmade and baked locally by Nuchal Empanadas, a family-run business in San Francisco. Brunch will feature its quiche and frittatas.
Wasserman says a familial and community spirit will be at the heart of her new venture, and that she hopes to create “a neighborhood place for gatherings and community events such as art exhibits and CD releases.”
Local favorite pianist Tammy Hall is featured in a new video on Fillmore jazz.
SAN FRANCISCO’S Fillmore District — known as the “Harlem of the West” in the 1940s and ’50s — was once a cathedral of jazz, its dozens of clubs inhabited by celestial beings such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker.
The Fillmore’s heyday marked an important chapter not only in jazz history but also in the Black American experience; its legacy lives on in the work of passionate artists who believe jazz — its freedom, movement and expression — is a state of mind, a way of life.
In a new video in its “Currents” series, the San Francisco Symphony tells the story of the Fillmore’s rich jazz history and explores its legacy.
Fillmore’s own Kim Nalley performing at the Fillmore Jazz Festival.
FOR THE FIRST TIME in decades, there will be no jazz on Fillmore Street this Fourth of July weekend.
The annual Fillmore Jazz Festival has
been canceled due to the coronavirus and the ban on large gatherings of people.
“Sister! I just want to cry because there’s no festival this weekend,” said jazz vocalist Kim Nalley, who got her start on Fillmore Street and has been a perennial headliner at the festival. “It doesn’t even seem like the Fourth of July without the Fillmore Jazz Festival. I can barely remember when I haven’t sung at this festival.”
Jason Olaine, the festival’s artistic director for the last decade — and also the director of programming and touring at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York — also lamented the cancellation of this year’s event.
“We will miss — terribly — the mass of humanity in all its colors and generations, tastes and sounds, that make up the Fillmore Jazz Festival,” Olaine said. “We take solace in knowing that when we do come back, we’ll all be safe and strong and seriously ready to party. That will be quite a weekend — when we can all truly embrace one another without fear and dance all day.”
Fillmore saxman Sonny Lewis performing at the street fair in 1992.
The festival was begun in 1986 as a way to keep jazz alive on Fillmore Street, once a thriving mecca of music known during the ’40s and ’50s as the Harlem of the West. Most of its clubs and joints were lost during the 1960s as part of an ambitious but ultimately misguided redevelopment plan, which bulldozed large swaths of the neighborhood.
The annual jazzfest began as a modest street fair called “Jazz and All That Art on Fillmore” and sponsored by the Fillmore Merchants Association. It was spurred by the self-proclaimed Mayor of Fillmore Street, Ruth Dewson, longtime proprietor of Mrs. Dewson’s Hats. She recalled approaching promoter Terry Pimsleur, who had earlier started the Union Street Festival, about creating a similar street fair on Fillmore, where new businesses were opening and trying to improve the struggling commercial strip. But she was rebuffed, told there weren’t enough people or merchants on Fillmore at that time to make a street fair successful.
“I told her, ‘Honey, you got one of me, that’s enough,’” Dewson recalled in 2011. “Right from the beginning, it was a success.”
Ruth Dewson helped start the Fillmore Jazz Festival.
After being held the first two years in the fall, the festival moved to the weekend nearest the Fourth of July. It has remained there since, until this year. It was expanded and renamed the Fillmore Jazz Festival in 1999, and grew with the neighborhood into the largest free jazz festival on the west coast, drawing more than 100,000 people and shutting down Fillmore from Jackson to Eddy Streets.
“Let’s celebrate in our own socially responsible ways this weekend,” said Olaine, “and look forward to the future. Here’s to us — the Fillmore community. I just love us!”
Kim Nalley has headlined the Fillmore Jazz Festival for years.
‘The death of my youth’
FIRST PERSON | KIM NALLEY
This Fourth of July has been a very emotional day for me.
For the first time since I started singing professionally, there is no Fillmore
Jazz Festival. I have headlined at this festival consecutively on the California
Street stage for more than a decade, and before that I played at the festival
here and there on non-consecutive years.
As one of the last and largest remaining free jazz festivals, it was very special because I saw people who otherwise might not necessarily have been able to afford to come to some of my concerts, as well as people who have been following me from the very beginning, plus other friends and family who planned their trips to San Francisco around this festival. I really looked forward to seeing everyone every year, and to seeing the babies in the front row grow up to be dancing toddlers and then sitting and listening as big kids.
I loved seeing all the dancers at the Fillmore festival —
not just the Lindy and swing and blues dancers, but also the Jamaican man who
jumped on the stage to dance with me when we did an Etta James song with a ska
beat. I loved singing “America the Beautiful” or “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as
the yearly anthem. And of course I loved working my way up and down the street
to see and hear my friends perform on the different stages.
I have enjoyed the largesse of the Fillmore merchants for
my entire career. My first paying gigs were in the Fillmore, I got married in
the Fillmore, I shop in the Fillmore, my kids went to daycare and preschool in
the Fillmore, and many of my closest friends I either met in the Fillmore or
they live in the Fillmore. My first album was produced by Michael Tilson Thomas
at the Alta Plaza on Fillmore and Clay. I got the news that my mother died
while singing on Fillmore Street.
Little did I know, when singing last Fourth of July, what would be in store for 2020. I have no idea if the Fillmore Jazz Festival will be able to continue in the future given the challenges of the coronavirus, and the need for sponsors and production, and all the many people responsible for producing any outdoor festival.
It almost feels like the death of my youth. And it certainly
doesn’t feel like the Fourth of July without the Fillmore Jazz Festival. I know
as a country we are facing much more difficult problems than this, but I cannot
help but mourn.
Happy Fourth of July! I hope better days are ahead and
that I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places.
FILLMORE’S ONLY remaining joint — the Boom Boom Room, hard by the Geary Street bridge — is closed and may not reopen without an infusion of fresh cash.
“We are faced with permanent closure without emergency funding,” says owner Zander Andreas in a fundraising campaign seeking to raise $60,000. “The survival of our intimate and iconic San Francisco live music institution depends on you. Our rent is massive and compounding. Our vendors are breathing down our necks. Our repairs and utilities are unfunded.”
Andreas said the actual emergency need is $150,000, but that he hopes the GoFundMe campaign “will get people discussing the urgency of our need to keep this institution alive.”
Fixtures and furnishings being removed from the Clay Theatre.
DEMOLITION OF THE interior of the 110-year-old Clay Theatre on Fillmore Street began today, with workers hauling out the seats, the projectors and the popcorn machine.
Landmark Theatres, the company that operated the Clay in recent decades, has instructed its staff to leave the building empty by the end of the month.
The theater closed at the end of January, but ongoing discussions between building owner Balgobind Jaiswal and the S.F. Neighborhood Theater Foundation — which had offered to buy or rent the theater — had given supporters hope the Clay might continue as a nonprofit.
Those negotiations have proved unsuccessful and the landlord’s agent, neighborhood resident Pamela Mendelsohn of the Maven real estate firm, has been showing the space to other potential tenants.
Interior furnishings of the Clay Theatre being removed and hauled away.
THIS LAVISH oversized limited edition book brings together a collection of favorite photographs and stories from the pages of the New Fillmore. It tells the story of an ever-changing small town in the big city with a rich history and a strong sense of community.
Available exclusively at Browser Books on Fillmore, or order online.
THIS DOCUMENTARY — filmed entirely on Fillmore Street — tells the story of longtime Fillmore resident Kelly Johnson, who used a new California law to end his life on his own terms.
