North Beach Jazz Festival’s 13th Annual “Jazz on Grant” and “Jazz and Heritage in the Park,” July 25 and July 28, 2007

by Steven Mayers
posted October 30, 2007 @ 9:11am PST

Referred to by its founders as “The Soul of San Francisco,” Alistair Monroe and Sunset Productions present the 13th annual North Beach Jazz Festival, with over 100 artists at over thirty locations, including five main events: “Jazz on Grant,” “Latin Jazz Block Party,” “Jazz Forward,” “World in the Park,” and “Jazz and Heritage in the Park.” With Mayor Gavin Newsom’s support, many of the problems with rowdy fans and the police that almost cancelled the festival in ’06 have been solved or at least suspended. The intimate feeling of North Beach’s sinuous alleyways, and the festival’s unique series of events, from “Jazz on Grant,” which features around twenty small combos in local clubs up and down Grant Street, to “World in the Park” and “Jazz and Heritage in the Park,” which put on free music in Washington Square Park, make the relatively young North Beach Jazz Festival a bona fide San Francisco event that I hope will continue.

Ultimately known as San Francisco’s “Little Italy,” the neighborhood still accommodates a large number of check-tablecloth ristorantes, Cafés, and authentic delis. North Beach is perhaps penultimately known as a central hub in the Beat movement, and home to poets Kerouac and Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s fêted City Lights Books on Columbus Avenue. As Ferlinghetti, Poet Laureate of San Francisco from 1998 to 1999, states in his poem, “The Old Italians Dying,”

“You have seen them / every day in Washington Square San Francisco / the slow bell / tolls in the morning / in the Church of Peter and Paul / in the marzipan church on the plaza / toward ten in the morning the slow bell tolls / in the towers of Peter and Paul / and the old men who are still alive / sit sunning themselves in a row / on the wood benches in the park.”

And as on any weekend, the Italians were there, “sunning themselves in a row on the wood benches in the park,” on Saturday to the music of Los Mocosos, Albino, Wisdom, and Salvador Santana, and on Sunday to the music of John Santos, Bucho, Stephane Wrembel, and Grant Green Jr.

Until the late 1800’s, when thousands of Italians arrived and formed the Latin Quarter, many of them fishermen from Genoa and the Ligurian Sea, North Point Dock mostly brought in South Americans, Europeans, and immigrants from the Australian penal colonies. In 1906, as the earthquake rocked the district and the proceeding fire claimed much of the old architecture, legend has it that many Italians soaked blankets in wine from their cellars, draped them over their buildings, thus saving some of the oldest. In vino veritas! To learn more about Italian history in North Beach, check out The Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. The North Beach Festival, San Francisco’s oldest street fair, is held every June on Grant Street, and various festas are held in October in honor of the Italian community and of Columbus’ blessing of San Francisco fishermen.

At the famous Café Trieste, where the owner, Papa Giani, sings passages of operas with friends on Saturday afternoons, you can sip espresso or Chianti and take in some North Beach history. At Vesuvio Café, right across Jack Kerouac Alley from City Lights, you can have a drink in the same barstools as the Beats and imagine life as Kerouac did, as a “a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.” Check out some jazz at Jazz at Pearl’s and then duck into Specs Twelve Alder Museum Café next-door, and sip a drink in its dimly lit confines with “a menagerie of misfits, from strippers and poets to longshoremen and merchant marines.” Or try the city’s best tiramisu and cannoli at Stella’s Bakery on Columbus. Joe DiMaggio, whose father was a fisherman, lived in a flat on Valparaiso and Taylor.

As testament to its Barbary Coast roots, Broadway still houses a disjointed mix of Italian cuisine, nightclubs, and sex industry sleaze. My father has told me stories about seeing Wes Montgomery at a small club in North Beach in the sixties which is now a liquor store, as well as others at the Matador, the Jazz Workshop, and Bimbo’s 365 Club.

“Jazz on Grant,” Wednesday, July 25

Grant Avenue, San Francisco’s purportedly oldest street, is a single lane ally lined with Victorian buildings small storefronts, cafes, restaurants and music venues such as Café Trieste, Savoy Tivoli, Ristorante Ideale, Grant and Green, El Mojito, and The Royal. On Wednesday evening, there is a band in each of these venues as well as a number of venues on side streets such as The Italian Athletic Club, which this year is hosting Adam Theis’s Realistic Orchestra and Amante, which is featuring guitarist Stephane Wrembel. As I wander up Grant Avenue I stop to listen to the Snake Plisskin Quartet at the Steps of Rome from outside, then the Live Worms Ensemble at the Live Worms Gallery, Boca de Rio at El Mojito, and Times Four at Savoy Tivoli. The clubs are packed, with lively fans spilling out onto the street.

BJ Papa Sextet at Café Trieste

I make my way into Café Trieste, where standing shoulder to shoulder with fans, I listen to pianist BJ Papa’s Sextet belt out some standards and originals. BJ Papa, a North Beach jazz legend and poster child of this year’s festival, brings to the festival fifty years of experience on the San Francisco jazz circuit, from Bop City to Jazz at Pearls. His latest album BJ’s World, a collection of original compositions like “BJ’s World,” and “Bishop’s Ambush.” His composition and playing reflect over this half century of music, and is heavily influenced by the be-bop period. Somewhat Monkish, his sense for complex chords, rhythms, and melodies is always searching, pressing for a new sound. And here at Café Trieste tonight, he is hammering away, his altered chords and sense of space engulfing the quiet sea of people, drinking wine, making espresso, laughing, eating.

BJ Papa was one of the first people I met when I moved back to San Francisco, my birthplace, in 1995, after studying in Oregon and Mexico. I lived at 20th and Valencia and would drink coffee in the mornings at Muddy Waters, just up the street, where I met BJ, along with my friend and band mate, trumpeter Davis Kovacs, and got to talking about San Francisco and jazz. It was through B.J. that we met alto saxophonist Bishop Norman Williams and started sitting in with their band at their jam session at the Gathering Café, which is now the Royal on Grant Street. Dave and I would often accompany BJ to Pearl’s after the jam session to sit in with the band or have a drink at Spec’s Alder Twelve Museum Café, where BJ seemed to know everyone from artists to photographers to musicians. As any musician who has had the opportunity to meet and play with BJ says, BJ’s soul, warm, calm, and experienced, invites one in, mentors one, whether in conversation or in music, always inspirational, and in the spirit of change, transformation, and progress.

Born in Mobile, Alabama in the 1930’s, Papa listened to “all kinds of jazz and blues” on the radio at a young age. After he was drafted in 1959, Papa became a medic and worked at the Letterman Hospital in the Presidio, spending a lot of time playing ball on the Army service teams. In 1956, Papa took up the saxophone and began spending his days practicing and his nights soaking in the music at Bop City. More recently, BJ has lead jam sessions at the North Beach’s former Gathering Café, and the Tropical Haight in the Lower Haight. Like his friend, Bishop, he has mentored dozens of young musicians, including singer Kim Nalley, who now owns Pearl’s, and trumpeter Hung. On the All About Jazz website, Hung says of his mentor, “You learn a lot of songs because B.J. knows them all, and he helps you gain experience and exposure. A lot of the young cats got their start with him, and I feel privileged to be part of that lineage.” About the jam session at Pearl’s, BJ noted in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, “I really love scenes like this," Papa says after the jam. "I came up through the jam sessions myself. Some of them were challenging, to say the least. But the older musicians would encourage you instead of putting you down or cutting you. I saw a lot of that, so now I like to give young musicians a shot." Since the sixties, BJ has been a San Francisco, and especially North Beach establishment, and it seems that I see him every time I go to park in North Beach on Sundays or to Café Trieste. BJ Papa has recently won the North Beach Honorary Achievement Award and plays on Mondays with the Bishop Norman Williams Quartet and Les Loulins and at Café Prague on Saturday Nights with his band.

“Jazz and Heritage in the Park,” Sunday, July 28

Beneath the towering Neo-Gothic cathedral and the spotless blue sky, the typically atypical San Francisco crowd peppered the lawn at Washington Square Park on Sunday for a day of sun and music. The morning kicked off kick with Bucho, a local R&B and hiphop band lead by singer and guitarist Gerald Pease, and then simmered down with jazz guitar by Stephane Wrembel. As I arrived, John Santos’s Latin jazz ensemble was beginning their last tune, Nori Morales’ “Maria Cervantes."

“The Godfathers of Groove”: Grant Green Jr., Bernard Purdie, Reuben Wilson

Son of jazz guitar legend Grant Green (1931-1979), Green Jr. grew up infused with music, listening to his father play spontaneous jam sessions with Miles Davis in his living room, in the Palmer Woods section of Detroit, with neighbors like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight and members of the Four Tops and the Temptations. After releasing two albums in Japan, Jungle Strut and Back to the Groove, Green released Introducing GG and Live at the Blue Note and was featured on A Tribute to Grant Green.

Green steps onto the stage in a white sports coat, faded jeans that are spattered with paint, and the left-handed custom guitar that D’Angelico made for him, the NYL-2. While Green Jr. is known for carrying on the acid jazz tradition that his father helped to set in motion in the later part of his career, the set today consisted more of his classic blues and soul side, jamming on classics like “Everyday I Have the Blues,” and originals like a New Orleans style funk. They finish the set up with Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?” leaving the crowd in contemplation about the current political situation.

Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, “the world’s most recorded drummer,” according to his website, has played with Lonnie Youngblood, King Curtis Aretha Franklin, Rolling Stones, James Brown, Steely Dan, Isaac Hayes, Donny Hathaway, B.B. King, "Sweet" Lou Donaldson, Joe Cocker and Hank Crawford Paul Butterfield as well as Larry Coryell, Miles Davis, Hall & Oates, Al Kooper, Herbie Mann, Todd Rundgren and Cat Stevens, to name a few.

Reuben Wilson, who is on Hammond B3 organ, became a seminal member of the acid jazz movement in the ‘60’s – following in the footsteps of Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff and Richard “Groove” Holmes recording on Blue Note Records, after finishing up a career as a professional boxer.

The Jazz Police

A few gripes about the festival can be of course on yelp.com, diatribes that claim that there is no “pure” or “real” jazz bands “in the mix.” To these statements, I might pose the question, what is “pure” or “real” jazz? The earliest recorded use of the word was made by the Portland Beavers’ pitcher, Ben Henderson: "I got a new curve this year, and I'm goin' to pitch one or two of them tomorrow. I call it the Jazz Ball because it wobbles and you simply can't do anything with it." Wobbly. The term was purportedly used in New Orleans where the music form was born in Congo Square and, according to some, holds the connotations of sex and velocity. The festival’s website states, “While many Jazz Festivals deal in the nostalgic presentation of old masters, the North Beach Jazz Fest has consistently demonstrated an eye and an ear for the future of jazz.” Also, quite a claim, that the festival guarantees a visionary selection of futurists, divining the future of where the wobble will occur.