Jazz & Blues

Much as the 1960s flower children fueled the San Francisco sound of rock and roll, the tens of thousands of African Americans who came to the Bay Area in the 1940s with the military and to work in the shipyards amplified the audience for mainstream-modern jazz and, particularly, blues in all its forms. Clubs opened on Fillmore Street where Jimbo's famous after-hours Bop City tea room, among other spots, flourished through the 1950s.

Across the Bay, West Oakland jazz, swing and blues clubs have an even older history; in the early 1920s, Kid Ory's and King Oliver's bands and pianist Jelly Roll Morton were playing there. The Bay Area black musicians union was based in Oakland; it was not until 1960 that the white San Francisco Local 6 merged with the Oakland local.

After World War II, many clubs clustered in North Beach in San Francisco: El Matador, Basin Street West, Jazz Workshop, The Cellar, Keystone Korner, Off Broadway and Turk Murphy's Earthquake McGoon's. Scattered around the city were the Black Hawk (Turk and Hyde), where Dave Brubeck played intermission piano on Sunday afternoons, with Johnny Mathis occasionally singing, and Art Tatum, John Coltrane, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Lester Young et al. played two-week gigs; the Both/And, Great American Music Hall, Say When, Club Hangover, Mocombo, Fack's I & 2, The Dawn Club (home of the Lu Watters Yerba Buena Jazz Band), and, down on the Embarcadero, the Tin Angel and Pier 23, where Turk Murphy, Kid Ory, Bob Scobey and other “trad jazz” favorites played.

As has been the case across the country, recent decades have brought a steep decline in the number of Bay Area jazz venues.

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