Autumn Jazz Weathers Well in San Francisco

Autumn is a special season for jazz in San Francisco. The weather at other times of the year variously drives one indoors for warmth, a good enough reason to seek shelter in jazz. But in the autumn, mostly gone is the bone-chilling summer fog that pours into the city from the cold Pacific Ocean. Not yet are the winter rains that soak damp alleys. The days and nights are crisp and clear, good for being out and listening.

It's a time of harvest. The glass temple of the San Francisco Jazz Center, SFJazz, planted on the corner of Fell and Franklin Streets, begins a season that runs onward through winter into spring. Just two blocks away on a dark stretch of Fell is Mr. Tipple's Recording Studio, hidden below the bright Civic Center streets otherwise holding the San Francisco Symphony, Opera and Ballet and the domed grandeur of City Hall. There is no actual Mr. Tipple, and there is no recording studio; both are fanciful inventions that create mystery and start conversation. But there are craft cocktails, Asian-based food bites, and jazz.

One enters a small reception foyer, then a heavy drape parts to reveal the club inside. It's small and remarkably stylish: a small corner bandstand, a dozen or so tables and seating at a bar lit from underneath. Comfortable yet secretive, not quite a speakeasy. An upholstered room off to one side is called the Opium Den Lounge. It is a club in that it conveys a sense of membership in the esoteric and covert. Veteran and emergent performers anchor the dates, supplemented by such prominent visitors as trumpeter Nicholas Payton and vibraphonist Chien Chien Lu as they route through San Francisco, and classicists from the nearby Conservatory of Music flexing jazz chops. A lowered admission charge for bar seating eases entry for those who want a drink and some music after work or before another assignation.

Across town, on Broadway, Keys Jazz Bistro is in the space historically occupied in the '50s into the '60s by El Matador, where Vince Guaraldi and Cal Tjader initiated cool jazz adventures with samba and bossa nova, bongo drums, marimba, piano. Couples then loved the cha-cha-cha. Women wore tight skirts or capri pants, later, black stockings as times changed from sophisticated to more bohemian. Keys' listening room extends into what once was a grand Italian restaurant, Vanessi's. Keys keeps alive what had existed in the many clubs that lined Broadway post-World War Two. Even a Playboy Club was once nearby.

Keys finds its roots in performance and academia. Its creator is pianist Simon Rowe, former executive director of University of the Pacific's Brubeck Institute and the founding director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Roots, Jazz, and American Music program. Its schedule draws from a roster of abundant Bay Area talent, also supplemented by touring national performers, some with local roots, like saxophonist Craig Handy of New York's Mingus Big Band. Vocalist Mary Stallings had played El Matador six decades ago, and was back among Keys' early bookings. Rowe chairs a series of late-night B-3 organ sessions to close out many evenings and keep that genre alive as well.

The Streets Speak

Around the corner, on Columbus and Upper Grant Avenues, the North Beach neighborhood was home to jazz coffeehouses in the beat era where the music may still be heard amid some blues bars. The street sign at the intersection of Grant and Green Streets became a jazz landmark when pictured on the cover of Grant Green's Blue Note album Street of Dreams. Recorded in New Jersey by Rudy Van Gelder in 1964 and released in 1967, with organist Larry Young, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson and Elvin Jones on drums, the album's cover makes a statement about San Francisco as a landmark on a jazz map. Across Columbus Avenue a few years later, and lasting for just more than a decade, was Keystone Korner, where Dexter Gordon made a resurgence that paralleled his return to New York's Village Vanguard, and players from Art Blakey to Rahsaan Roland Kirk maintained the spirit of hard bop and created what became mainstream even as tastes turned toward fusion and pop. Greats from Bill Evans to Mary Lou Williams and Pharoah Sanders played there.

Sonny Simmons had come out of a bop tradition inspired by Dexter Gordon, Illinois Jacquet, and Charlie Parker. He was heard as a successor to Ornette Coleman, and was among those who pioneered free jazz and avant-garde saxophone in the 1960s. He had played with Sonny Rollins, Don Cherry, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, and Elvin Jones. But for almost two decades beginning in the 1970s, his life and career fell apart around personal difficulties and he became homeless, busking for spare change if playing at all. He was later re-discovered, in part by SFJazz founder Randall Kline who had heard him playing on the streets and put him back onstage to start a career renewal.

In that lost period, on one night an observer was passing through the empty Financial District well after close of business. There was no one around, but a solitary saxophone was blowing, somewhere. Following the sound to its source in the grey granite canyons of Montgomery Street, a man on a horn was playing way free from convention, outside, not simply out of doors. When the player paused to reassemble himself, the listener went over and asked "Is that 'My One and Only Love?'" "Man, you got that?," was the reply. "Either you got some ears, or I need to get further out." That horn player was Sonny Simmons. Even in playing free, he was heard to have solid standard technique. Simmons lived until 2021, dying at age 87. The streets speak in San Francisco.

In the Paths of History

Downtown now has Local Edition, 601 Market at Third Streets, a primarily artisanal cocktail bar which occupies what had been the basement printing plant for the flagship San Francisco Examiner newspaper of William Randolph Hearst ("Citizen Kane"). Jazz nightly locks inside a period elegance, ranging from traditional, to Django-esque, big band and contemporary. On the Embarcadero boulevard along the bay waterfront between downtown and Fisherman's Wharf, the white clapboard restaurant Pier 23 hosts mostly traditional and mainstream jazz in its nautical pub and outside deck, as it has for decades.

More experimental is the Black Cat on the corner of Eddy and Leavenworth, just two blocks from the site of the former Black Hawk on Hyde and Turk, where Miles Davis made his first live club recording, a pair of live albums in 1961, In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, Volume 1 and 2, later reissued in a four-disc set called The Complete Blackhawk, all on Columbia. The Black Cat's main bar and performance chamber is under street level, beneath a lounge in which music flows upward from an open staircase connecting the two rooms. The Black Cat, as was the Black Hawk, is well within San Francisco's Tenderloin, always one of the city's more challenged neighborhoods. For other than the careful pedestrian, Uber would be recommended.

There are other places. Sheba Piano Lounge in the Fillmore District maintains a historic link to when the "Harlem of the West" across Geary Street held sway centered at Jimbo's Bop City, where jazz royalty was at home. It was a place then for fedoras and cufflinks, satin and pearls; for Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Davis, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Dinah Washington, and more. Sheba today is open with no cover charge, requiring a drink minimum. Far across the city is: Bird and Beckett, a bookstore and record shop tucked into the Glen Park neighborhood almost at the city's southeast border, which fits small combos into a book-lined alcove on Friday evenings, live and livestreaming.

Other places pop up and have varying lifespans, moments of evanescent sound. Each space, from the most prominent to the smallest, seeks a niche in the jazz spectrum, showcase and marketplace. Jay Bordeleau who created Mr. Tipples explained in October 2022 to music writer Andrew Gilbert that a balanced ecosystem provides spaces for musicians to start out, develop a following and grow into wider recognition. Similarly, artists expand their repertoires as they coordinate appearances in environments across the range of clubs, from presenting ballads to groove to further out. Bigger auditoriums present the stars, but stars slip into the intimacy of smaller rooms as well. "Different venues all doing slightly different things," Bordeleau summarized.

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