For the 27th time, Fillmore Street will celebrate the Fourth of July by hosting the Fillmore Jazz Festival, this year on July 2 and 3. It’s by far the largest street party in the city, stretching from Jackson Street in Pacific Heights south through the Fillmore Jazz District to Eddy Street. Ruth Dewson, the long-reigning Mayor of Fillmore Street, remembers how the festival got its start.
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Globetrotting jazz vocalist Kitty Margolis returns to Fillmore — source of some of her earliest musical inspiration — for her debut performance at Yoshi’s on June 24.
“When I was a kid, barely 12 years old,” says the fourth generation San Franciscan, “I would go to the Fillmore and Winterland and see all sorts of bands on the same bill — Miles, the Dead, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix.”
Margolis left the city to study at Harvard, but music had her in its grip. She dropped out and returned to San Francisco just in time to record her first album, “Live at the Jazz Workshop,” in 1988 shortly before the revered club closed.
“My first apartment was on a tree-lined one-block alley in North Beach, down the street from Stan Getz and his Dalmatian, James,” Margolis remembers. “Nearby was another one of the last great clubs, Keystone Korner.”
Margolis has gone on to international acclaim, traveling and performing at clubs and festivals around the world. Although she continues to live in San Francisco, she rarely performs here, making the Yoshi’s date a special treat for a local treasure.
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By Barbara Kate Repa
Yoga.
Trance dancing.
Nurturing food from the earth.
Music by the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart.
A crowd of true believers at the Fillmore.
It sounds like the ’60s all over again. But this time, in a wholly wholesome good way, it’s a unique happening called Wanderlust coming to the historic Fillmore Auditorium on May 21.
The idea for the event came from a New York couple with California roots whose lives took some serendipitous turns. Jeff Krasno was already managing, producing and recording musicians when his wife Schuyler Grant decided to open a yoga studio.
“At the same time my music business was taking off, I also saw the growth of the yoga industry and became very close to its value and cultures,” Krasno says. “I thought perhaps we could marry the music with that progressive, social, environmental community to create a large-scale event.”
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Charles Unger plays on Sunday nights at Rasselas.
MUSIC | Anthony Torres
I first heard Charles Unger play when I stepped into the Sheba Piano Lounge on the way home from Yoshi’s one night. As I walked in, I was immediately struck by the intonation of the tenor sax and the ease with which Unger and his band, The Experience, moved through Carlos Santana’s “Europa.” Since then I have seen them at both Sheba and Rasselas. Every time, it’s been a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
With jazz, they say it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. These guys swing, and they do it in a way that incorporates a range of influences. The music moves and is inflected with a Latin groove and a Middle East undercurrent that creates a melancholy feel so sensuous a person can’t help but be moved.
Unger is a great player. He’s also a great guy who loves what he’s doing and does it with all the seriousness in the world. Music for him is a spiritual mission and a quest for a kind of secular redemption that he has pursued since he was a child — one that sustains him and has brought him a wealth of knowledge and experience.
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Photograph of Allen Smith by Scott Chernis
San Francisco trumpeter Allen Smith, who died February 3 after a long illness, will be remembered and celebrated by many of the top jazz musicians in the Bay Area at a “Musician’s Tribute to Allen Smith.” It will be held at Yoshi’s at 1330 Fillmore on Sunday, April 10, from 2 to 4 p.m. There is no admission fee, but contributions will benefit the Fillmore Jazz Heritage Center, which is directed by his son Peter Fitzsimmons.
Vocalist Kim Nalley: My last gig with jazz legend Allen Smith
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Many in the music world are still scratching their heads about the Grammy Award for Best New Artist that went to bass player Esperanza Spalding Sunday night. But not jazz fans in the Fillmore, who know her from her performances at Yoshi’s.
EARLIER: At Yoshi’s, beauty and the bass
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Fats Waller by Mark Ulriksen
Fats Waller is coming to Fillmore Street.
The rollicking rhythms and exuberant lyrics of the Harlem stride piano master will be celebrated in the musical revue Ain’t Misbehavin’, which makes its San Francisco debut from January 7 to 9 at Yoshi’s on Fillmore. The show — named after one of Waller’s most popular songs — is a tribute to the Harlem Renaissance told through his music by five singers from the Irving Street Repertory in lower Manhattan, plus a rhythm section with piano, bass and drums.
It’s a new kind of show for Yoshi’s.
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The third annual San Francisco Filipino American Jazz Festival comes to Yoshi’s on Sunday, October 10, from 6 to 9 p.m. Among the headliners are composer-pianist-vocalist Primo Kim, appearing with guest vocalist Jo Canion; Tokyo’s premier jazz diva Charito; and, from Manila, the powerful singer Sandra Lim Viray.
The roots of Filipino jazz in San Francisco can be traced to early Filipino immigrants who settled in and around the Fillmore District. Jazz pioneers such as Flip Nunez, Jo Canion and Rudy Tenio created a legacy that many artists have since followed. Today, Filipino jazz is gaining wider recognition as artists — including Primo Kim, Charito and Sandra Viray — are recording and performing worldwide.
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Photograph of Arthur Bloomfield by Susie Biehler
By Mark J. Mitchell
You may have read recently that New York author Pete Hamill’s new book is going straight to digital format, skipping print altogether. But the Fillmore’s own Arthur Bloomfield has beaten him to it.
Bloomfield latest book, “More Than the Notes,” made its debut online a few weeks ago and is available at no charge. In addition to his lyrical prose, it includes more than four and a half hours of music clips, enabling readers to hear the precise performances he’s writing about.
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Q & A | ARTHUR BLOOMFIELD
What motivated you to write “More Than the Notes,” your new e-book on legendary conductors of the 19th century?
When I was 11, my mother started taking me downtown once a month to the White House department store. It was where Banana Republic is now. Up on the fourth floor they had a record department. She’d buy me old Victor and Columbia albums. And she also gave me a book of record reviews. I said: “What’s the point? Isn’t Beethoven’s Fifth always the same?” She emphatically said no. In a way, that was the genesis of this book.
Even then you lived in the neighborhood?
I grew up in Presidio Heights at Clay and Locust and went to the old Town School on Alta Plaza Park. My father was a professor at Stanford Medical School, which is now California Pacific Medical Center. We would take the No. 4 streetcar along Sacramento Street, down Fillmore to Sutter, make a left and go downtown.
And those trips downtown led you to become a music critic.
In the ’60s and ’70s I was a music critic for the Call-Bulletin, which became the News-Call-Bulletin, and later for the old Examiner. I left the Examiner to become a freelance writer, mostly on music and food. I spent a lot of the 1980s researching the conductors book.
You say the book aims to clear up some of the “received wisdom” about conductors. In what way?
I had long felt there was not a book that made a sufficient distinction between conductors — nor a book that told enough about what conductors really do: What are the decisions they make about tempo, balance, etc., all of which can affect the emotion of the performance as it goes from mood to mood. What this book does, first, is tell the kind of decisions a particular conductor made. You get some sense of how his mind works. And second — and quite important — you get a good idea of the many ways in which the secrets of a score can be discovered. There’s a great quote from the English writer and pianist Susan Tomes: “The score is the map, but not the journey.”
Your book itself is something of a tome.
It’s about 100,000 words. I’ve been working on it a lot for about four years — but I’ve been thinking about it for 30 years.
And yet it’s not a book, but a website with sound clips.
The advent of the technology — to have sound clips — came at a perfect time. It’s on the cutting edge. I wasn’t accustomed to listening to music on my computer, but when I heard the sound coming out, I was ecstatic. And I had Dick Wahlberg a block up Webster Street to help. He also grew up in Presidio Heights. He uses my basement to store part of his record collection and is a great sound engineer. So I had technical help nearby I’d known forever. We had a number of sessions making the clips and decided together when the clips should begin and end. It was uncanny how often we agreed. Sometimes we worked from 78s, sometimes 33s, sometimes open-reel tapes. I had almost all of the clips in my own record library. Maybe I got a couple from Dick, but between us we had them all. Then I delivered my text and the master CD with the sound clips to the site designer and engineer. By some mysterious means, they turned them into a website. What we’ve done may be unique. Just click on the megaphone and you can play the exact passage in the exact Beethoven recording I’m writing about. It’s like a time machine.
This is your third book in recent years — and your second online book.
“The Gastronical Tourist” was published in 2002 and had a life of its own as a book. Then in 2007 we put it online. The numbers went up from practically zero to 60,000. And “Gables and Fables” — the book of Pacific Heights architectural history based on my wife Anne’s columns from the New Fillmore — was published in 2007. It’s still available at Browser Books on Fillmore.
Has it been an adjustment to see this new book online rather than on the bookshelf?
It’s been a revelation. Last night I googled the book. There’s something about turning on the screen and seeing all those cross-references. It’s satisfying — and you certainly get much better numbers. I’m a great devotee of Browser Books. I practically live in there sometimes. So it was a little wrenching at first that this new book won’t be there, or in the symphony shop. But I’ve gotten over that. And it’s free. It’s there for the tasting.
Go to “More Than the Notes“
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