Keystone Korner

Kathy Sloane

Description

Looking back at a West Coast Jazz oasis

Visit photographer Kathy Sloane's website Listen to a Jazz at Lincoln Center podcast with Keystone Korner owner Todd Barkan

During the 1970s, when jazz clubs all over America were folding under the onslaught of rock and roll and disco, San Francisco's Keystone Korner was an oasis for jazz musicians and patrons. Tucked next to a police station in the city's North Beach area, the Keystone became known as one of the most important jazz spots in the United States. It was so beloved by musicians that superstars McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, and Elvin Jones played a benefit concert just so the club could buy a liquor license. In this book, more than 100 black and white photographs and a collage of oral histories from the club chronicle the Keystone experience.

Sujets

• Styles
• Genres
• MUSIC
• Popular music
• Multiple signal classification
• Jazz

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 28 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780253010407
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Bobby Hutcherson, 1976

Cedar Walton, 1977

Charlie Haden, 1978

Elvin Jones, 1976


Mary Lou Williams, 1977

portrait of a jazz club
PHOTOGRAPHS AND INTERVIEWS BY KATHY SLOANE
Edited by Sascha Feinstein and Kathy Sloane
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
2012 by Indiana University Press
All photos Kathy Sloane
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sloane, Kathy, [date]
Keystone Korner : portrait of a jazz club / photographs and interviews by Kathy Sloane ; edited by Sascha Feinstein and Kathy Sloane.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-253-35691-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Jazz - California - San Francisco - 1971-1980 - Pictorial works. 2. Jazz - California - San Francisco - 1981-1990 - Pictorial works. 3. Keystone Korner (Night Club : San Francisco, Calif.) - Pictorial works. 4. Jazz musicians - California - San Francisco - Interviews. 5. San Francisco (Calif.) - Social life and customs - 20th century - Pictorial works. I. Feinstein, Sascha, 1963- II. Title. III. Title: Keystone Corner.
ML 3508.8.S26S56 2012
792.709794 61-dc23
2011030458

1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
In honor of my parents, Perry J. and Neddie Sloane,
and
for my daughter, Ayisha Basha Knight-Shaw
I was there. I had a camera. I had a passion and the joyous chance to dwell in the sounds and sights of jazz at Keystone Korner. I hope these images and interviews suggest both the vitality of those years and my gratitude to the musicians who taught me so much while giving me great pleasure.





Joseph Jarman, 1981
CONTENTS
The Storytellers
Preface Al Young
Introduction: Before There Was You Steve Turre Carl Burnett
The Keystone Legacy Sascha Feinstein

1 Todd s Tune Todd Barkan
2 Begin the Beguine
3 The Space Is the Place
4 The Backroom
5 Ora s Kitchen Ora Harris
6 Taking Care of Business
7 Rahsaan Roland Kirk
8 Teach Me Tonight
9 Bobby and Bags
10 Dexter Gordon
11 Compared to What?
12 East Side, West Side
13 Orrin Orates Orrin Keepnews
14 Bright Moments
15 Rifficals Jack Hirschman
16 Then and Now
17 The End of Keystone

Afterword: My Years at Keystone Kathy Sloane
Acknowledgments
Keystone Korner Discography Stuart Kremsky
CD Notes (from print edition) Sascha Feinstein

Ahmad Jamal, 1977
THE STORYTELLERS
Laurie Antonioli
singer; director, vocal jazz studies, The Jazzschool, Berkeley, California
Todd Barkan
owner, Keystone Korner; record producer; programming director, Dizzy s Club Coca Cola at Jazz at Lincoln Center
Carl Burnett
drummer (Abdul Karim Salih)
George Cables
pianist
Billy Harper
saxophonist
Ora Harris
cook, Keystone Korner; artist manager
Eddie Henderson
trumpeter
Terri Hinte
public relations director, Fantasy Records; freelance writer, editor, publicist
Jack Hirschman
writer; San Francisco Poet Laureate
Orrin Keepnews
record producer; founder, Riverside, Milestone, and Landmark record companies; NEA jazz master
Calvin Keys
guitarist
Maria Rosa Keys
teacher
Stuart Kremsky
Monday night soundman, Keystone Korner; archivist, Fantasy Records
David Liebman
saxophonist; NEA jazz master
devorah major
writer; teacher; San Francisco Poet Laureate
Eddie Marshall
drummer
Ronnie Matthews
pianist
Flicka McGurrin
waitress, Keystone Korner; owner, Pier 23 Restaurant and Club; painter
John Ross
writer; revolutionary
Bob Stewart
tuba player
Steve Turre
trombonist; shells player
David Williams
bassist
Helen Wray
waitress, Keystone Korner; landscape designer
Al Young
writer; teacher; California Poet Laureate

Al Young
PREFACE
Al Young
The spirit of communality and self-expression lives at the heart center of jazz and blues, as well as many vernacular and classical musical traditions. While we tend to view self-expression as purely individual expression, we do so at the risk of forgetting how tightly we re plugged into everyone and everything else going on around us. As Charles Mingus stated more than once: You have to improvise on something. You can t improvise on nothing.
Before and during the Prohibition era of the early twentieth century, San Francisco had its honky-tonks, speakeasies, barrelhouses, and jazz joints. Tom Stoddard s brilliant, painstakingly researched Jazz on the Barbary Coast tracks and tells the story and doesn t leave out Jelly Roll Morton s short-lived Jupiter Club, which bumped and jumped in North Beach at Jackson and Kearney in the 1920s. But in the nested history of San Francisco jazz clubs, taverns, cabarets, and bars that have blazed and flickered since Barbary Coast days, Keystone Korner truly stands out.
All heart and guts, Todd Barkan, Keystone Korner s savvy visionary and uncanny owner, never enjoyed the kind of big-time, official backing the Port of Oakland now provides for Yoshi s - once one of Keystone s exciting underdog East Bay rivals - yet he somehow managed to hold the 200-seat club together for more than a decade, usually on a shoestring budget and sometimes on a no-string budget. In its cash-strapped lifetime, the club was on financial life support and yet remained artistically healthy for years, one night at a time, one set at a time. During the ride, Keystone Korner inspired and provided the setting for a superb library of live jazz albums, as documented in this book s discography. Moreover, Keystone s laid-back ambiance drew players, visitors, and acolytes from all over the world. Stan Getz once called it the number one jazz club in the world today. Singer-lyricist Jon Hendricks described Keystone as the finest jazz club in the Bay Area and fast becoming one of the most important cultural institutions in the world. Premier pianists McCoy Tyner and Cecil Taylor - and so many other important artists - expressed similarly passionate affection.
The energy of Keystone even reached me when I was many miles away, a visiting writer at the University of Washington. National Public Radio used to broadcast a live show from Keystone as part of its New Year s celebration of the nation s jazz clubs. One broadcast I fondly revisit on cassette tape sweeps me back to Seattle, December 31, 1979, where - snug and warm on that cold, rainy night in a big rented house in Windermere, a gated community - my little family and I soaked up the sound of music from home. (I borrow that phrase from the title of a book of poems by Seattle-based Colleen McElroy, the Sarah Vaughan of poets.) At the stroke of midnight, Art Blakey and his tireless Jazz Messengers bopped out a stirring version of Auld Lang Syne, which let me hear again how much of the Scots Irish folk tradition jazz has absorbed and adopted.
Art Blakey is one of the few living schools of this music, Todd Barkan told jazz scholar-producer Herb Wong in 1978. When he comes to town, everyone at Keystone Korner - including the bartenders, waitresses, and managers - feels the promise and purpose of the club [are] fulfilled and we realize why we knock ourselves out week after week. Having dwelled six months in Seattle, I d gotten so homesick for the Bay Area that I grew wistful, even a little tearful, picturing myself back home at Keystone Korner to ring in 1980. In some ways, feeling like this made no sense. After all, my home base then was Palo Alto, one hour south of San Francisco. Home was another rented house, not a jazz club, and by then, of course, jazz had emigrated so globally that it could no longer call any particular place home.
I had gone through a similar sea change in Paris years before, when I and my girlfriend, whom I would soon marry, got to the Blue Note in Paris - and who should we find there but saxophonist Johnny Griffin, playing Thelonious Monk s Rhythm-a-ning on alien soil. The joyful sound of it carried me from France, where they called such joints bo tes and caves , back to New York and the first clubs that allowed me entry: Birdland, the Half Note, the Village Vanguard, the Village Gate, the Five Spot, the Jazz Gallery, Eddie Condon s.
But this 1979 New Year s air shot of Art Blakey and the Messengers - featuring Valery Ponomarev, Bobby Watson, and David Schnitter, a group that had already made In This Korner , the first of three Keystone albums by the Jazz Messengers - made me homesick. How ludicrous and heartfelt! How blue can you get?
Keystone sat at 750 Vallejo; the substation precinct known as the North Beach Police Station stood at 766 Vallejo. Jazz and fuzz. Whazzup with that? I still hear my son Michael