[JPL] 'Harlem of the West' jazz photos on Fillmore

[Dr. Jazz]

'Harlem of the West' jazz photos on Fillmore
Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, December 19, 2008

While other 4-year-olds were off in slumber land, Peter Fitzsimmons was 
soaking up the music at Jimbo's Bop City, the fabled Fillmore District 
nightspot where John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald or Charlie Parker might 
stroll in and join the after-hours jam session.

"My folks wanted to expose me at an early age to the sounds and the 
scene," says Fitzsimmons, executive director of San Francisco's Jazz 
Heritage Center and the son of the esteemed trumpeter Allen Smith. "My 
dad would take me to those famous 2 a.m. cutting sessions. I'd hear him 
play with Pony Poindexter, Vernon Alley and all the greats who came 
through there, like Count Basie and Duke Ellington."

Many of those musicians - and the interracial crowds who mingled at Bop 
City and scores of other stylish clubs, bars and ballrooms that made the 
Fillmore a mecca for music and pleasure in the 1940s and '50s - appear 
in the photographs and artworks at the Jazz Heritage Center in its first 
major show, "Harlem of the West ... Revisited." It offers a rich 
portrait of the once-thriving African American neighborhood where many 
of the businesses were owned by black people, and patrons of all stripes 
came to party in places with names that evoke the midnight glamour of 
the era: the Champagne Supper Club, the Bal Masque Ballroom, the Bird 
Cage, Blackshear's Cafe Society, the Blue Mirror. Most of them, along 
with a way of life, were demolished in the late 1950s and '60s by the 
wrecking ball of redevelopment.

The exhibition includes many of the images curators Elizabeth Pepin and 
Lewis Watts assembled for a show the Museum of Performance & Design put 
on two years ago, based on the Pepin-Watts book "Harlem of the West: The 
San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era." But in addition to those pictures - by 
the late photographers Jerry Stoll and Steve Jackson Jr. and the 
still-active David Johnson, Ansel Adams' first black student - the new 
show features never-seen photographs of kids in the Fillmore by Gerald 
Ratto, who also studied with Adams and Minor White at what's now the San 
Francisco Art Institute.

There are also pictures by Mars Breslow of stalwart musicians like Smith 
and Mary Stallings, memorabilia from Bop City and Minnie's Can-Do, and 
gold-and-silver-leaf bas relief paintings of Illinois Jacquet and Lionel 
Hampton that once hung in the Texas Playhouse. They were pulled from a 
trash bin by two brothers in the neighborhood, Orlando and Willie Orley, 
after the building was torn down in 1975.


Harlem of the West ... Revisited: Through March 7 at the Jazz Heritage 
Center, 1320 Fillmore St., San Francisco. Many of the photographs are in 
the Koret Heritage Lobby, 1330 Fillmore St., noon-11 p.m. daily. Other 
works are in the center's Lush Life Gallery, open 3-10 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 
1-11 p.m. Sat. and 1-9 p.m. Sun. (Closed Christmas and New Year's Day.) 
Free. (415) 377-4565, www.jazzheritagecenter.org.


E-mail Jesse Hamlin at jhamlin at sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/19/DD3S14PV7F.DTL


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