Fillmore Jazz

The Fillmore Street Jazz Festival is a séance to the older neighborhood that disappeared slowly one store at a time. The doughnut shop left a decade ago. Mi Burrito became Zao Noodles. The street became the place to buy luxury soap and curved furniture: the store Design within Reach defines reach at about 800 dollars for a chair. The crime left, but music disappeared as well having been evacuated into white ear buds and cell phones.

What makes the Fillmore festival different is the jazz. I think the same pottery vendors and rhinestone artists travel street by street in the summertime, but few places have keyboard jams drifting through the air in the same way that the smell from the garlic chicken wafts through the fair.

I watched Sira and the Afro Funk band put down a wicked baseline. The bass rift is the most stolen parts of a modern song. Higher Ground can sneak into Under Pressure and then get completely transferred over to Ice Baby Ice. There is a part of the bass that stirs the animal in us. If the summer in the city forty years ago was about love, then the bass that arrived thirty years ago in seventies funk was something far more sweatier. It is the difference between soft kisses and the wordless grind.

The crowd slithered in front of the stage. Women in tank tops gyrated as their boyfriends drank tall Budweiser’s. A homeless woman circled to pick up the empty cans with a coat hanger, and it seemed that we were back to that culture collision that happened long ago: the desperate and the decadent sharing the same place for a couple of sunny afternoons. There was the horror of the clashing lifestyles, that we are not too isolated from anyone. A homeless man came up to me and he carried a flask for something to anesthetize the differences. He called out to me and I recoiled out of the instinct that comes from too many days of just trying to walk down Market Street.

"Did you go to Dartmouth?" he asked, and I realized he could tell by green sweatshirt.

"I just got back from reunion." I replied. "Great place"

"I was the class of 64" he said as we drifted in different directions. It must have been a hard forty years since them for him.

I would like to say that I was compassionate, but I am not much better than most of the newcomers in this town who want their jazz disneyfied. It saddens me that I have lost such a charitable instinct. I felt wrong to have gone into a store and have the sales person pitch for ten minutes a cartridge system for an espresso machine instead of talking to that rather unbathed fellow alum. I realized then that Fillmore Street isn’t the only thing to have changed, and while I might occasionally get to listen to the music of the street I am still along way off from getting its soul.