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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.
Eleanor Coppola shot her new film at 2561 Washington Street.
By ALISON OWINGS
The
audience gasped.
Eleanor Coppola’s triptych, “Love is Love is Love,” comprised of three shortish California-based films, was having a solo showing a few weeks ago at Dolby Laboratory’s splendid theater in downtown San Francisco, her purpose partly to thank people involved in the production. The longest and final of the three, “Late Lunch,” opened simply with an exterior view of a house.
Located at 2561 Washington Street, between Fillmore and Steiner, the fancifully handsome Victorian was home for decades to neighborhood notables John and Carol Field and their children Alison and Matt. John, an architect, remodeled the rear of the house, fashioning a soaring solarium and library and a rustically sophisticated kitchen; while Carol, among other accomplishments, baked and breaded and simmered, creating recipes that often made their way into her Italian food-themed cookbooks.
John and Carol died within three weeks of one another in 2017. Now, in “Late Lunch,” the house re-appeared, a touchstone for many in the audience to the Fields’ years of hospitality and friendships.
Thus,
this October evening, the gasp.
As it opened, the first of the 10 actresses in the film began walking up the familiar front wooden steps to the landing. A door opened into the living and dining room — more gasps — to reveal their home had been converted into a movie set — an especially cozy movie set. The gasps turned to tears as the plot unfolded, especially for Carol’s women friends.
An
email exchange with director Eleanor Coppola provided the backstory.
How did you and Carol and John meet?
“Francis [Coppola, my husband] and I met John and Carol in 1969
when we moved to S.F. from L.A. We bought their house a few blocks away on
Webster Street, which was a small Victorian that John had renovated in his
stylish good taste for his family.”
When the Fields moved from Webster Street to 2561 Washington Street, the two families, their children about the same ages, stayed in touch.
Carol and John Field died within days of each other in 2017.
“I found myself asking Carol to recommend a pediatrician, where to buy kids’ shoes, where she bought her groceries, etc. She was super helpful and always had the best information. So much so that when Francis bought City magazine (a publication about what was going on in the city at the time), he began asking Carol to write articles about where to get the best bread, the best meat, etc. Her articles were terrific, and I think may have been the beginning of her food writing. We remained friends over the years.”
“Then our family moved to the Napa Valley in 1977 and we drifted out of touch. Some years later I joined a writing class that met once a week in Marin and there was Carol, part of the group. We reconnected. In the writing group, we often made an altar in the living room of our instructor’s house with photos of people we were writing about, or objects from seasonal nature walks we took together for inspiration before sitting down to write.”
“I was feeling isolated living in the Napa Valley and, along with a friend, hosted a number of weekends at our ranch for 10 or 12 women from near and far to talk about their lives, aspirations and whatever was on our minds. We’d hike, eat from the garden, etc. I was very interested and often surprised by what the women were willing to reveal about themselves. I found that women in a group with no men in the room spoke differently than when there were men present. I always wanted to try and capture that experience on screen.”
How did the idea for the movie come
about?
“At a memorial lunch [for Carol] I had that feeling again, with just women attending, who talked so openly together and so fondly of Carol. I decided to write a script. I set it in the house where the lunch was held.”
The lunch was co-hosted by Carol’s daughter-in-law, Camilla Field, at her home a few blocks away, and Carol’s daughter, Alison. The film centers around a candid reckoning at a lunch the deceased woman’s daughter has for her mother’s best friends. In fact, Eleanor planned to shoot the movie at Carol’s daughter-in-law’s house. Camilla was willing, but she and Matt have two children of their own, and a family of four on a movie set meant “attendant problems for a movie crew.” Camilla suggested 2561 Washington Street, which was then empty, pending a family decision to move in or sell.
“It was perfect for our production needs. Of course I had
visited Carol and John there numerous times. I have fond memories of going to
the Fields’ house to watch the Academy Awards with Carol and John and their
friends. Carol was a huge movie fan and we would always have the ballot printed
out and guests would make their picks for the awards in advance. At the end,
we’d count up who got the most right. Carol always won. So I was
especially touched to be able to shoot a movie in Carol’s house in the very room
where we watched the movie awards. It was a miracle that it worked out.”
The 10 actresses on set in the Fields’ house, which was empty after their deaths.
Friends in the audience gasped again at certain scenes —
especially when the daughter gives each of her mother’s friends a scarf from
her collection, which is precisely what Camilla and Alison did at their
lunch.
“Late Lunch” is indeed an homage to Carol Field, but the
director said her movie is more about women’s friendships.
Rosanna Arquette, Nancy Carlin, Polly Draper, Maya Kazan,
Elea Oberoin, Valarie Pettiford, Alyson Reed, Cybill Shepherd, Joanne Whalley
and Rita Wilson filled the bill, but not each was planned for the part.
How did the casting work?
“I wrote the parts for the women with specific actors in mind, but when it is actually time to cast there are always many variables. I was able to get some of the actors I had envisioned, but since I was casting 10 women, it was impossible to find all of actors available at the same time.” A casting team brought her up to four candidates to interview for each of the parts. “Amazingly, the actors came together as an ensemble stronger than I had originally imagined.”
What happens now?
“ ‘Love is Love is
Love’ is in the hands of a sales agent who is strategizing as to how
best to get it to its intended audience. It may be sent to a film festival
or two, it may or may not have a theatrical release. It may go directly to
streaming. I await the fates.”
Since the movie wrapped last April, John and Carol Field’s house at 2561 Washington Street starred in another act: a difficult family decision not to move in, but to sell. The house was spiffed and staged, and sold in three days.
Alison Owings is a neighborhood resident and the author of three books. She is currently writing a biography of Del Seymour, “the mayor of the Tenderloin,” a study about homelessness.
Countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen at Glaze on Fillmore Street.
CULTURE BEAT | PAMELA FEINSILBER
At only 25, opera singer and neighborhood resident Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen has already had a head-spinning career.
Cohen graduated from Princeton in 2015. Just two years later, he was one of 12 artists to join S.F. Opera’s prestigious two-year, performance-oriented Adler Fellowship Program, which is what brought him to San Francisco.
He made his S.F. Opera debut this summer in a major supporting role in Handel’s Orlando. By then, he’d already held the limelight in an important tryout for future stars: the Metropolitan Opera’s National Council Auditions Grand Finals, in March 2017. New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe saw several good singers onstage, but “only one complete artist,” noting that Cohen “stood clearly apart from the pack.” He was one of six winners.
Cohen is a countertenor. Singing above the vocal terrain of a tenor, he and the other 50-some quality countertenors working today perform music written in the 17th and 18th centuries for castrati — men castrated before puberty so their voices would remain high. After the practice was banned, much of that music lay dormant for a couple of centuries. When Baroque music made a comeback, the high, pure, sonorous countertenor tradition was born.
Among its most lauded practitioners, Cohen will be performing here early this month in two programs: “The Future Is Now,” his final Adler Fellows concert, with the S.F. Opera orchestra, at Herbst Theatre on December 6; and as a soloist in Handel’s Messiah, with the S.F. Symphony, at Davies Hall on December 13 and 14.
The 16th Annual Another Hole in the Head Film Festival, brought to you by the fine people at SFIndieFest, gathers a scintillating collection of the best of the genres of sci-fi, horror, fantasy and just plain odd films currently out there, along with the now traditional rescoring of a classic.
The fest is running now through December 15 at the New
People Cinema in Japantown, and there’s not a dud in the program.
A still from the opening scene of The Navigator, filmed in the neighborhood.
FILM | CLASSICS SHOT LOCALLY
Atop the crest of the hill on Divisadero Street, looking north between Pacific and Broadway, a car slowly makes a U-turn, then stops on the opposite side of the street. Buster Keaton filmed almost exclusively on Hollywood lots, but traveled to San Francisco to get this one shot.
The first five minutes of The Navigator, from 1924, are among the funniest in the entire film. The opening gag introduces Keaton’s character to us as the rich bachelor Rollo Treadway, who wakes up with the bright idea that he should get married — immediately. The caption card reads: “He had completed all the arrangements — except to notify the girl.”
Treadway instructs his chauffeur to take him at once to his girlfriend’s house. The car starts and does a U-turn and stops across the street. Treadway exits clutching a hopeful bouquet of flowers and marches up the brick-lined steps. His girlfriend, played by Kathryn McGuire, is caught off guard by Treadway’s epiphany and rejects his offer of “Will you marry me?” with a “Certainly not!”
Dejected, Treadway slinks back down the steps to the street below and quietly informs his chauffeur that he won’t be needing the car; instead what he chiefly needs is a nice long walk to clear his mind. He then walks back across the lonely street to his own mansion.
The hilarity of this scene only works due to its extravagance. In seconds, we learn that Rollo Treadway is a young man with more dollars than sense, coupled with a keen inability to read a situation. The fact that the chauffeur is not surprised in the least to be instructed to drive his boss a mere 180-degree turn across the street paints a picture of the blissful wastefulness of the young millionaire. Keaton’s brilliance was his ability to create a character no one could relate to, but with whom everyone would instantly sympathize.
The casual viewer will laugh at the scene, but the extravagance goes past the joke. Keaton picked this spot on Divisadero Street purely because the northerly crest prevented other structures from cluttering the scope of the scene. His minimalist vision makes this scene that much more endearing. It’s as if these two giant mansions and a few others exist all by themselves. That makes the fairy tale of the two young lovers that much sweeter, even when she rejects him.
The ivy-choked mansion on the right, which was meant to belong to Rollo Treadway, is now sadly long gone, demolished in the 1930s. But his girlfriend’s mansion is still in place at 2505 Divisadero. Built in 1899, it was more recently known as Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett’s residence. It sold for $10 million three years ago, a price at which Rollo Treadway might barely blink an eye.
There is something magical and unique about the top of Divisadero Street. Buster Keaton saw it in 1924, and we can see it still.
— Mark Fantino
VIDEO: Buster Keaton goes for a ride in The Navigator
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.
