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The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era
Chronicle Books
December 2005
192 pages
ISBN: 0811845486
Hardcover
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Historical | Non-Fiction
Billie Holiday singing at the New Orleans Swing Club.
Dexter Gordon hanging out at Bop City. Dizzy Gillespie,
Lionel Hampton, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane all swinging
through town for gigs. Sound like a nostalgic snapshot from
the New York jazz scene, or perhaps New Orleans? Nope. This
particular sentimental journey describes San Francisco's
Fillmore District in its heyday. The Fillmore in the 1940s
and 1950s was an eclectic, integrated, and hopping
neighborhood dotted with restaurants, pool halls, theaters,
and shops�many minority-owned�and boasting two dozen active
nightclubs and music joints within its one square mile.
Although it has been commemorated in songs, poems, and in
Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, few
people today know of the rich history of the Fillmore and
its musical legacy because it vanished abruptly and so
thoroughly due to redevelopment in the 1960s. Through dozens
of archival photographs and oral accounts from the
neighborhood residents and musicians who experienced it at
its height, Harlem of the West celebrates this unique
and rediscovered chapter in jazz history and the
African-American experience on the West Coast.
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