JAZZ
Yoshi's came under fire after releasing a CD meant to celebrate the club's 10 years in Oakland. The disc featured 10 tracks recorded live at the club, but none were by African-American artists. "We wanted to use music that had been recorded here," said Peter Williams, the club's artistic director, "but we didn't have the rights to record shows ourselves."
Facing a deadline, the club turned to the Concord Music Group in hopes of finding a large stash of material, but the label came back with only four names. "We used what we had in order to get the CD out on time," Williams explained. "But there were a lot of hurt people in the community. When the situation was pointed out, we pulled the CD, issued a statement and decided to create another CD that is more a reflection of what Yoshi's is."
It became an unwelcome roadblock at a time when the club was gearing up for the November opening of its new venue in San Francisco, but their rapid response fostered a general sense of goodwill.
Meanwhile, Internet whispers grew into allegations that August's Downtown Berkeley Jazz Festival was overlooking black artists. This led to scrutiny of the Jazzschool itself and concerns that blacks were underrepresented in the school's faculty and student body. When the story suddenly became public on radio talk show "Ear Thyme" on KPFA-FM, Jazzschool director and festival booker Susan Muscarella got caught off-guard. "This is a community music school," she said. "The Jazzschool is for everyone: all ages, all levels and all races."
Muscarella acknowledged that there are "not enough" African-Americans at the school, but she said those issues were already being quietly addressed before the controversy erupted. A committee on diversity and outreach was formed at the beginning of the year, and the school launched seven other initiatives, including scholarship programs and grants.
Muscarella said that charges against the festival were premature and unfounded. "We were just beginning to book it," she said. "[The controversy] made it difficult to call African-American artists and ask them to participate." In the end, the festival featured a wide variety of artists representing many ethnicities and styles.
Although the specifics of each case were quickly addressed, an underlying set of questions remains. The intense emotions that played out in local media-and the ease with which the story snowballed-indicate that simmering tensions must have existed in the Bay Area for some time. But where did they come from, why did they boil over and why didn't the community see it coining?
No consensus exists on the source of the problem, but part of it may come down to demographics. The Bay Area takes pride in its spirit of inclusion, although it's undergoing dramatic shifts in its population. As Rhonda Benin, a local jazz and blues singer, noted: "We're always talking about diversity. We brag about it. But when you look into things, you start to wonder how diverse we really are."
U.S. Census Bureau numbers bear her out. As the cost of living has skyrocketed, the African-American population of San Francisco has dropped precipitously. Black residents now make up less than 8 percent of San Francisco and the Bay Area overall, eclipsed by growing Latino and Asian communities. Even Oakland, often thought of as a "black city," has seen a drop: The Census Bureau estimates that Oakland's black population has dipped from 35 percent to 31 percent in the past six years.
While plenty of blade musicians still live in the area, the pool is gradually shrinking. Singer Kim Nalley, who owns the San Francisco nightclub Jazz at Pearl's, considers this important. "To pretend that there's not a declining pool of black jazz musicians is ridiculous," she said. "If you look at bands around here, you'll see the same players over and over."
As poor communities get less exposure to and training in jazz, the race gap widens. Nalley used a wealthy suburb as a case in point. "Down in Palo Alto, a lot of kids go to jazz camp in the summer. But across the freeway in Fast Palo Alto they don't have the resources for that. They're too busy trying to survive."
Some black artists feel that they just aren't getting enough work no matter how demographics are changing. "We're seeing young white guys whose careers are just taking off, and they're good musicians, but there BR black people who are just as good, sometimes even better, whose careers are stalled," Benin said.
Williams said that race is not a factor in Yoshi's booking. "I don't think you can present jazz in the Bay Area and not have a mix of artists," Williams said. "If you're booking the best possible jazz, you tire automatically going to have a diverse mix."
Williams added that after the controversies began, he went back to his calendar to make sure the club w as booking a diverse mix of acts.
Opportunities for local musicians to play are limited, with only a handful of venues dedicated to jazz. Yoshi's focuses primarily on touring bands, leaving only two days a week for local artists. Many of the other rooms book the same artists repeatedly, making it hard for any local jazz artist without a standing gig to get much work. Nalley and Muscarella agree that filling a room is vital to staying afloat financially. Others contend that the focus on draw becomes so great that the jazz scene suffers.
"There's something at work in the jazz world that I call 'gigantism,'" Nalley said. "The industry and the press are only interested in those stars, and it's not necessarily a matter of white or black."
In the face of shrinking budgets, coverage of the jazz scene is also quietly disappearing from Bay Area newspapers. The San Francisco Chronicle has come in for especially harsh criticism: Its front-page article headlined "Blacks in Jazz Decry Exclusion" (since retitled online) was the biggest play the music has had in recent memory, and beat reporter Leslie Fulbright, not a music journalist, wrote the article.
Now that the initial furor has receded. Bay Area residents are looking for ways to move forward.
Benin has a simple answer: keep talking. "People have to be brave enough to stand up and say what they think," she said. "It's OK to have an argument about this."
Nalley and Benin believe much of the change must come from within the black community: showing more support for jazz, coming out to concerts and taking the initiative. Nalley has endowed a scholarship fund at the Jazz-school, and encourages others with the means to follow her example.
Yoshi's plans to lead through setting its own example. "All we can do is to continue doing what we're doing, and not be part of the problem," Williams said. "Our bandstand is like a United Nations of music. We have artists of all races and backgrounds playing together on stage, and maybe if enough people come see this, then we will help to bring people together through music."
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© Copyright 2007, Down Beat
