Reporting: SF Arts Commission Funds Jazz As Liberation

Originally written October 22, 2021

By Megan Robertson

** photo thanks to Kanlaon on Wordpress

Walking through the streets of the Fillmore District, the banners hanging overhead display a world that once was: The Harlem of the West. Their jazz depictions are something which the city of San Francisco is hoping to honor and bring back to this neighborhood, via the Fillmore Jazz Ambassadors.

 On Tuesday, Oct. 12, The Community Investments Committee of the San Francisco Commission on the Arts voted to award a $60,000 grant to the Fillmore Jazz Ambassadors (FJA), to support programming in the Fillmore and Western Addition neighborhoods.

 This grant was approved unanimously by the commission, along with 29 other similar grants awarded to community arts organizations.

 In the 1940s and 50s, the Fillmore neighborhood was once a major stop on jazz circuits. Artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker played to San Franciscan audiences. As Elizabeth Pepin writes in her critically acclaimed book, The Harlem of the West, “the entire neighborhood was a giant multi-cultural party throbbing with excitement and music.”

 This party quickly came to an end, according to research from KQED, when President Truman’s 1949 Housing Act, set in motion in the Fillmore in the late 1950s, led to the complete demolition of neighborhoods thought of as slums, marketed by the government as urban renewal. “They came in with bulldozers and took down 22 blocks of our homes, our businesses, our history,” Darlene Roberts, founder of the Fillmore Jazz Ambassadors said.

 This redevelopment impacted 20,000 people in the Fillmore District. African Americans were kicked out of their homes, jazz clubs were demolished, and wealthy San Franciscans moved in. The jazz era in the Fillmore came to an end.

 The Fillmore Jazz Ambassadors are dedicated to reviving jazz performance and history in the Fillmore, according to the company’s mission statement. “What we want to do is bring people back into San Francisco, to show them what it was once was like and what it can be - Jazz can help do that,” Charles Dixon, Vice President and head of Project Development and Marketing said.

 Roberts founded this organization in October of 2019, at age 70. In her work as a poet, she performed alongside many Black musicians in the Bay Area, inspiring her to act on jazz restoration.  “I sat home for years waiting to die in front of the television set,” she said. “When I saw that all the musicians I played with were playing for pennies on the street, I knew I had to do something.”

This was not a simple career choice for Roberts. “I’m not in this because it’s fun,” she said. “I’m in this so that we can survive. Otherwise, our history is not going to.”

FJA have numerous community investment initiatives, such as: free concerts with upcoming, Black jazz musicians and after-school jazz education in SF public schools, grades 4-6. Education is of major importance to Roberts.

“Our kids don’t know what jazz is,” she said. Jazz is key to learning about Black oppression in Roberts’ eyes. FJA are likewise committed to placing not only jazz performers, but also jazz historians into community spaces. “All of the things that are going on in our community are in our music. It’s our voice, telling what they did to us.”

In the past two years, Roberts’ organization has garnered much attention, with many supporters, including the cast of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. FJA were also recipients of the Dream Keeper’s initiative from the SF Human Rights Commission and are in partnership with the African American Art & Culture Complex.

As vaccination rates increase and Covid-19 precautions begin to loosen, Dixon is excited to get back to live music. “Jazz is a social function, all about improvisation,” he said. “In this situation, it’s difficult to get that mix of music, community, and listener base together. We’re glad that coming out of the pandemic we can go back to more communal work and social gatherings.”

The Fillmore Jazz Ambassadors have many events in the works, from an outdoor Halloween concert to a month of block parties next September, introducing the community to jazz performance and history.

As Roberts said, “Jazz is liberty, our music, our history, our song,” and this grant money is a step towards its revitalization.