Barbary Coast piano player a jazz pioneer

San Francisco’s Barbary Coast is remembered as one of the world’s most depraved vice districts. But in the years after the 1906 earthquake, it was also a hotbed of the swinging, improvised new music that soon came to be known as jazz.

Jazz originated in another rollicking vice district, New Orleans’ Storyville, but San Francisco played a major role in its development as well. Indeed, the word “jazz,” as used in reference to music, first appeared in a San Francisco newspaper in 1913.

One of the leading black musicians who played on the Barbary Coast was a piano player named Sid Le Protti. Le Protti’s life and career provide a window into a mostly forgotten but fascinating chapter of the city’s cultural and racial history.

As Bill Edwards notes in his entry on Le Protti on his website Ragpiano.com, Louis Sidney Le Protti was born in Oakland in November 1886, the illegitimate son of a 17-year-old African American woman named Amelia Dangerfield and an Italian laborer named Louis Le Protti, who played the harp. Sid was raised by his

African American grandmother, who put him through sixth grade and hired a young German woman to give him piano lessons.

Le Protti first heard ragtime, the syncopated music that helped shape jazz, in 1894 or 1895, when a black pianist named Leroy Watkins played at his grandmother’s house for Oakland’s few black families. In Tom Stoddard’s “Jazz on the Barbary Coast,” Le Protti tells a charmingly multicultural story about the first time he played ragtime.

In those days, the Sunday San Francisco Examiner used to include sheet music for popular songs. When he was about 11 years old, Le Protti found a song called “Ambolena Snow: An Afro-American Military Ballad” and began playing it. His uncle went into the kitchen and told his grandmother, “Ma, Sid’s playin’ ragtime.”

His grandmother “kind of pulled me over the coals,” Le Protti said. “She said, ‘I spend the money for your music lessons, and here you’re playing ragtime.’ ” But after conferring with a German friend known as Old Man Lorenzo, she told Le Protti, “Old Man Lorenzo told me he thought it was fine that you were playin’ ragtime.”

While working at the Judson Iron Works in Emeryville, Le Protti met another musician who told him a club at 40th Street and San Pablo Avenue needed a piano player. He got the gig, playing the two ragtime pieces he knew along with waltzes like “The Blue Danube.”

His next job was in Purissima on the San Mateo County coast, which is now a ghost town. The farmers had never heard ragtime and “I made me a hatful of money,” he said. In 1904, he went to the Gold Rush town of Angels Camp, where he played in a brothel. In 1906, soon after the earthquake and fire, he landed in the Barbary Coast, where he quickly became a fixture at one of the city’s legendary bars, Sid Purcell’s So Different Club.

Purcell and his partner, Sam King, were African American former Pullman porters. After the 1906 disaster, they opened Purcell’s at 520 Pacific St., where Le Protti and his So Different Orchestra were the house band for much of the next 15 years.

Le Protti saw several groundbreaking New Orleans musicians and bands in Barbary Coast clubs, including King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. ( Jelly Roll’s brief stint on the Barbary Coast was the subject of an earlier Portals.) But the first New Orleans band he saw, and the one that had the biggest influence on his music, was Will Johnson’s Original Creole Orchestra.

Johnson’s band played four beats to the bar rather than the thenconventional two beats. Le Protti decided he wanted his band to do the same thing, but his drummer, who was called Old Pete, rebelled.

“When I told Old Pete I wanted him to play the four beats, he got kind of imminent and said, ‘Man, you don’t know how much work that is!’ ” Le Protti said. He fired Old Pete and weeded out other players who weren’t cutting it until he got the musicians he wanted. His first-rate six-man band featured piano, drums, string bass, clarinet, flute and piccolo, and baritone euphonium.

Purcell’s was what was known as a “black and tan” club, featuring black dancers and open to both blacks and whites. At the time, such race mixing was taboo in American society, but as a designated zone of misrule, a kind of ur-Las Vegas, the Coast was allowed to stretch the limits of propriety. Plus, the police were paid off. Purcell’s was a 20-centsa-dance joint with upstairs bedrooms, where the dancers would take interested customers to make extra cash.

Le Protti made an excellent living playing at Purcell’s and other Barbary Coast clubs, but he earned his money. He and his band played as many as 30 songs an hour.

“It was nothing for the piano player to have tape on the end of his fingers and wear out a good piano in a year,” he said.

And playing on the Barbary Coast meant facing worse dangers than calloused fingers. At Purcell’s and the other joints where Le Protti played, brawls and shootouts were practically nightly affairs.

“One time we had a bad shootin’ scrape over at Louie Gomez’s,” Le Protti said. “How that drummer didn't get shot, nobody knows! This customer got in a fight and pulled a gun and started shootin’. One of the bullets went right through the bass drum. ... They killed that fella as he went out the door; the bartender reached over and hit him with a bottle full a’ whiskey, and then after he hit him, the fellow staggered, and the bartender jammed the rest of the broken bottle in his neck. That cut his jugular veins and his throat, and he fell over and bled to death.”

Starting in 1916, the authorities began trying to close down the Barbary Coast, passing an ordinance forbidding dancing in the district and busting clubs that violated it. The Coast struggled on for a few years, but its last call came in March 1921, when two policemen walked into Purcell’s at 1 a.m. and closed the place down for good. Le Protti recalled the exact tune he was playing: One of his own compositions called “Four O’Clock.”

Le Protti kept playing here and there, but gigs became harder to come by. In the 1920s, he opened a shoe-shine parlor and cigar store in Berkeley, where he rehearsed with musician friends. In the 1930s, he and his wife, Mayme, moved to Walnut Creek, where he played for service clubs like the Lions and Kiwanis.

“I’m still poundin’ the piano, and just as long as I can keep foolin’ the public, I’ll keep goin,’ ” he said.

Sid Le Protti died in 1958.