When giants of jazz hit town, they jammed at Jimbo’s Bop City
From 1950 to 1965, one of the greatest jazz clubs in America, Jimbo’s Bop City, could be found in the heart of San Francisco’s jumping African American nightclub scene.
Every jazz heavyweight who came through town — Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Dexter Gordon — dropped by Jimbo’s at 1690 Post St. when their gigs were done, either to sit in with the house band or just hang out. Locals like John Handy and Vernon Alley made the scene, too.
For jazz fans of all colors, Jimbo’s was heaven, and the fact they had to wait until 2 a. m. to get in just made the experience all the more bewitching.
Bop City’s proprietor, Jimbo Edwards, was one of San Francisco’s first African American
car salesmen, employed by a flamboyant celebrity used- car dealer named “Horsetrader Ed” Shapiro, who was the subject of an earlier Portals. As Carol P. Chamberland notes in “The House That Bop Built,” an article that appeared in the fall 1996 issue of California History Magazine, it was at Horsetrader Ed’s Van Ness showroom that Edwards met a prominent black San Francisco businessman named Charles Sullivan.
One of the buildings owned by Sullivan housed a club called Vout City, run by an eccentric performer named Slim Gaillard. Gaillard was a guitarist, pianist, singer and composer who had made up his own hipster language, called Vout, in which sentences often ended with “a- rooty.” In “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac recalls visiting Vout City, “a little Frisco nightclub” where “great eager crowds of young semi- intellectuals sat at his feet. ... He does and says anything that comes into his head.”
When Vout City folded, Sullivan approached Edwards.
“Charles Sullivan gave me this place, said now you got to pay the rent,” Edwards told Chamberland. “The rent on the whole building was $ 145 a month.”
Edwards opened a small cafe called Jimbo’s Waffle Shop. It had a large back room, and local jazz musicians started coming by after their gigs at 2 a. m. At first, there was no piano, drums or bandstand.
“When a musician would walk in the door, he’d just start to blowing his horn. ... We didn’t have nothing,” Edwards recalled. Then someone gave him an old piano, he built a bandstand, and got a drum set and a bass. The place didn’t have a name, but “we figured since Bop City’s closed in New York, we might as well name it Bop City.”
Bop City opened in 1950. Drummer
Earl Watkins, who was playing at another jazz club called the Say When, recalled, “When Jimbo opened it the first week, I played there. It was just almost a musical fairy tale! Because it opened with a bang and all the guys, from the first night, every night there was a different set of musicians there. And then, of course, the celebrities started to come in.”
Edwards charged $ 1 admission; musicians got in free. He promoted it with a big neon “Bop City” sign out front. The room was long, narrow, dimly lit and windowless, but the walls were covered with colorful murals that changed over the years.
Perhaps the club’s most memorable feature was its hand- painted chairs. Whenever jazz heavyweights came in, Jimbo would paint their names on the back of the chairs where they had sat. If they came in again, whoever was sitting in that chair had to give it up. A contemporaneous photograph shows chairs bearing the names of Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis and others.
The jam sessions that unfolded at Bop City between 2 and 6 a. m. were legendarily hot and ferociously competitive. Bay Area drummer Ray Fisher told Chamberland about one particularly memorable battle.
The great tenor player Dexter Gordon, whom Jimbo had recruited to be in the house band, was playing when a then- unknown tenor man, Frank Foster, walked in with his sax, wearing his Army uniform. Jimbo invited Foster to sit in. After making some jokey remarks about the “soldier boy,” Gordon started playing an old standard, “Strike Up the Band,” expecting to blow his rival off the stage.
His smugness vanished when Foster immediately upped the tempo. They played the melody and were about to start trading solos, but Gordon never got a chance. As Fisher recalls, “Going into the solo, Dexter took a deep breath and never got it out because Frank was gone. Frank had played about 5,000 notes by the time Dexter could take his breath.”
With a chuckle, Fisher added, “And I know Dexter was very upset. I don’t think he came back the next night.”
As at all first- class bebop clubs, the musicians at Jimbo’s Bop City enforced high musical standards, and anybody rash enough to get up on the stage who couldn’t play a difficult tune like “Cherokee” at a breakneck tempo was immediately asked to leave — if not escorted to the egress.
“They like, ‘ Get outta here!’ I mean physically take you off the bandstand
and put you out the front door,” recalled drummer Dick Berk.
But many aspiring musicians also remembered the kindness shown to them by veteran players. Sax player Vince Wallace said, “The greatest musicians were the nicest ones. The ones that were on a mediocre level, they would get jealous and real cliquish. But the real great ones, they could see if you had talent and would encourage you. And so I got a lot of encouragement from guys like Eric Dolphy, Sonny Stitt. It really made me feel good. It made me feel as if all my efforts weren’t in vain.”
In a city where black musicians were still not allowed to stay in hotels east of Van Ness, Bop City was an oasis of tolerance. Edwards would not put up with racial hostility of any kind. Jazz fan Patricia Nacey told Chamberland, “Jimbo’s was more than just a place to gather to hear great sounds. It was like a snapshot of your soul or a snapshot of the soul of the community. I think in the early dawn of the civil rights movement, it was 3: 00 a. m. at Jimbo’s.”
Bop City was just one of many jazz clubs that flourished in San Francisco in the 1950s and early ’ 60s — the Blackhawk, the Both/ And, the Jazz Workshop, Basin Street West and Elsie’s Breakfast Club, to name just a few. But by the mid-’ 60s, folk and rock music were taking off and jazz was no longer popular.
“The time had ran out,” Edwards mused. “I was there 15 years from 1950 to 1965 and the time was over.”
Jimbo’s Bop City closed in 1965. The building — which later housed the nation’s first African American bookstore, Marcus Books — was physically moved around the corner in the 1970s. The Victorian still stands at 1712 Fillmore, a memento of a vanished era of musical brilliance and racial harmony.