A Fillmore rap

Posted on March 15, 2010 by editors

SF Weekly reviews local rapper DaVinci’s debut album:

The song “What You Finna Do?,” released earlier this month by Fillmore District rapper DaVinci, opens with a vocal sample from the 2001 PBS documentary The Fillmore. It condenses the gentrification process the area underwent from the 1960s into one slogan, lamenting, “Basically, after the urban renewal, it was basically Negro removal.”

As the gloomy beat kicks in, DaVinci starts to rap, eventually coining his update on the situation: “Down the corner of the street used to be the spot/Till they replaced all the liquor stores with coffee shops.”

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Rec center reopens

Posted on March 6, 2010 by editors

A neighborhood party today from 1 to 5 p.m. will celebrate the grand opening of the newly renovated Hamilton Recreation Center. There’s a new and improved playground, tennis courts and basketball courts — plus a new swimming pool with water slides. The celebration will include food, entertainment and arts and crafts. Hamilton Rec Center is located at 1900 Geary between Scott & Steiner.

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Coming: the Fillmore dance project

Posted on March 3, 2010 by editors

KQED reports on a new dance theater production about San Francisco’s Fillmore District being created by choreographer Jacinta Vlach and saxophonist Howard Wiley.

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When films were modern art

Posted on February 22, 2010 by editors

By Jerome Tarshis

By way of calling public attention to its 75th anniversary this year, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is making a major advertising push all over town. The lion’s share of advertising mentions “The Anniversary Show,” a survey of seven and a half decades of painting, sculpture, and photography in the museum’s permanent collection. Almost lost in the hoopla is the museum’s recognition of its on-again, off-again commitment to having a film program, which included an early experimental filmmaker from the neighborhood.
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Her baby, the Mostly British Film Festival

Posted on February 4, 2010 by editors

Q & A | RUTHE STEIN

From February 4 to 11, the Mostly British Film Festival comes to the Vogue Theater on Sacramento Street. It’s the brainchild of longtime Chronicle movie writer and editor Ruthe Stein, who’s just back in town from the Sundance Film Festival.

Tell us about this new film festival coming to the neighborhood.

It’s the Mostly British Film Festival, showing 32 films from the U.K., Ireland, Australia and South Africa. We jokingly call it a “Foreign Film Festival For People Who Don’t Like Subtitles.”

This festival comes at a great time because so many wonderful movies from these countries can no longer secure American distribution. That means the festival may be the only chance to see such terrific movies as “London River,’’ a tearjerker starring Brenda Blethyn as the mother of a missing daughter, which opens the festival, and “Balibo,’’ a political thriller from Australia starring Anthony LaPaglia. We will also present the Northern California premiere of the much-lauded “Red Riding Trilogy,’’ which British film scholar David Thomson recently called “better than ‘The Godfather.'” Thomson, who lives in the neighborhood, will introduce the films.

How did the festival come to the Vogue?

Because it is operated by my friends Alfonso Felder and Jack Bair. They saved the Vogue from extinction two years ago by forming the San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation, which bought the place. Alfie and Jack share my love of cinema and I told them if I ever had time I would do some programming for the Vogue. Now that I’m no longer a full time staff member at the Chronicle, I have the time.
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It’s St. John Coltrane’s Church

Posted on July 2, 2009 by editors

Photograph of St. John Coltrane Church by Susie Biehler

By James DeKoven

Without hestitation, the Rev. Wanika King-Stephens can name her favorite John Coltrane song: “What’s New?” Then, true to form for any music obsessive, she provides additional knowledge: The song was originally on the album Ballads, released by the Impulse! label.

Jazz records and churches are not usually an easy fit. But this church, at 1286 Fillmore Street, is no ordinary house of worship. It’s the Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church, or as it’s known to people around the world, the Church of John Coltrane.

Every Sunday from noon to 3 p.m., Rev. King-Stephens sits in with other members of the house band — the “Ministers of Sound” — and they perform the music of John Coltrane as a vehicle to praise God. They call it “sound praise.”
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A lifetime of loving film

Posted on November 12, 2008 by editors

Global but local: film critic David Thomson on Fillmore. Photograph by Lucy Gray.

“What should I see?”

It’s the question the eminent film critic and historian David Thomson is asked most often — sometimes even as he walks his dog in Alta Plaza Park or runs errands on Fillmore Street.

Now, more than three decades after he published his landmark Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson has responded to the question comprehensively in a new book published in October 2008 titled Have You Seen…? Its subtitle bills it as “A personal introduction to 1,000 films, including masterpieces, oddities, guilty pleasures and classics (with just a few disasters).”
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At Yoshi’s, beauty and the bass

Posted on October 15, 2008 by editors

By Anthony Torres

Esperanza means hope in Spanish. After seeing bassist, vocalist and composer Esperanza Spalding — who comes to Yoshi’s this month on October 14 and 15 — one cannot help but be hopeful for the future of women in jazz. Spalding is blessed with the ability to fuse instrumental licks and a multilingual voice through the vehicle of a gorgeous beauty. It makes this 23-year-old prodigy a joy to behold.
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For vocalist Kim Nalley, it all started on Fillmore

Posted on July 3, 2008 by editors

Photograph of Kim Nalley by Walter Wagner

By THOMAS REYNOLDS

Sultry, soulful, swinging singer Kim Nalley remembers when she got her first big break in San Francisco. It was the early ’90s, and the manager of Harry’s on Fillmore called to see if she might fill a slot for a band that had cancelled.

But Nalley was otherwise engaged. She had a house to clean — a job that was helping to pay her way through UC Berkeley. She called her client and explained she wouldn’t be able to come. “How much are they paying you to sing?” the woman wanted to know. “Well, you make more here cleaning — and this is an ongoing thing.”

She called back Harry’s and told the manager she wouldn’t be able to make the gig, but that she hoped to sing another night. “This is your chance,” he told her.

So she gave up domestic work. And she started her rise to a place of prominence and respect in the jazz world, toured and lived in Europe, then came home triumphantly to take over Pearl’s, the North Beach jazz club.
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Santana’s back on Fillmore

Posted on June 30, 2008 by editors

Photograph of Santana by Mark Brady

FILLMORE HAS ALWAYS had a claim on guitarist Carlos Santana, and not only because of his many appearances at the Fillmore Auditorium. For a number of years his studio was on Fillmore Street next door to the Clay Theater.

Now he’s back as part of the first special exhibition at the Fillmore Heritage Center. “A Tribute to Miles Davis and Carlos Santana” opened May 23 and continues through July 31, 2008, and includes items from Santana’s personal collection.

The man himself stopped by after his appearance May 20 up the street at the Fillmore Auditorium, reports the center’s executive director, Peter Fitzsimmons.

“Carlos came by and fell in love with many Miles images,” Fitzsimmons says, “and seemed delighted to visit with the many memories inherent in the memorabilia and photographs. Stopping in front of Mark Brady’s photograph of a Santana concert at San Quentin, Carlos recounted the concert and how he was able to reach across racial barriers to involve the hardest of the hard-core inmates in musical rapture. He mentioned, in what must have been a surreal moment, that he saw the machine-gun-toting guard up in the tower swaying to rocking rhythms. He was with us for a good 45 minutes, taking photos with his guest and the staff, and he seemed intrigued and open to learning more about the Jazz Heritage Center.”

Photograph of Santana at San Quentin by Mark Brady

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