Delivering songs from the heart
In his seven decades as a fixture of the Bay Area jazz scene, pianist and singer Frank Jackson has committed countless songs to memory. Largely self-taught, he learned to read music well enough to use sheet music to fill a customer’s request for one of those rare tunes he doesn’t know. Most of his repertoire, however, is cataloged in his brain.
“I’ve tried to make a list of how many I know, but there’s always something else that comes up that’s not on the list,” he says while sitting at the kitchen table of his Gilroy home, where he has lived for four years after residing in San Francisco for 69. His face is smooth and wrinkle-free, belying his 89 years.
‘Your Hit Parade’
“I’ve always been a hound dog for music, and not just one style,” adds Jackson, whose fascination with songs was sparked by listening to the popular NBC radio program “Your Hit Parade” while he was growing up in tiny Cleburne, Texas, near Fort Worth.
“If I like a song, I’m going to stick with it. I just run it through my head. I take the lyrics to bed with me. When I put the lyrics and the melody away, I know I have it.”
Jazz and blues singer Kim Nalley has long been a Jackson booster and frequently booked and sat in with his trio during her six years as proprietor of Jazz at Pearl’s in North Beach.
Nat ‘King’ Cole
“We first bonded over obscure Nat ‘King’ Cole tunes that he would know,” Nalley says. “There was a song (“If You Can’t Smile and Say Yes”) — ‘Baby, let bygones be bygones ’cause men are scarcer than nylons’ — and he would do it for me.”
“He sounds like he’s smiling when he sings,” she adds. “He has a smoothness that I’ve always admired.”
Nalley will join Jackson on Saturday for a show at the Sound Room in Oakland celebrating his 90th birthday. Other guest performers that evening will include vocalist Kenny Washington and saxophonist Noel Jewkes. Washington will return for another performance the next afternoon, along with trombonist John Hunt. Bassist Al Obidniski and drummer Vince Lateano, both of whom have worked with Jackson since the ’60s, will play both days.
Jackson initially wanted to be a guitarist like his father, but he says his dad didn’t have the patience to teach him. He instead took piano lessons from, he says, “a little lady at our church who didn’t play very much, but she played good enough for the church thing.” Later in San Francisco, he spent a year studying with a German classical pianist. Neither instructor, however, showed him how to correctly finger the keys. He would eventually teach himself from a book.
“I also learned from books that everybody didn’t finger the same way,” he says. Thelonious “Monk was the weirdest I ever seen.”
Fillmore district
Jackson, his four older siblings, his parents and two nephews moved from Texas to San Francisco in 1942 and rented a house in the Fillmore district that had previously been occupied by a Japanese family that was interned during World War II. He also encountered racism in the city, but he says it was more subtle than what he had experienced back in Texas.
“You get tired of being called ‘boy’ and your father being called ‘uncle,’ ” he says of how he and other African American males were treated in Texas. “You go from ‘boy’ to ‘uncle.’ You never grow up to be a man.”
Jazz thrived in the Fillmore during the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s, and Jackson found himself in the thick of things after he got back in 1946 from two years of Army duty in Saipan. With his own groups and as a sideman, sometimes backing such touring artists as T-Bone Walker, Ruth Brown and Jimmy Witherspoon, he played all the joints. They included Vout City, the Blue Mirror, Club Alabam, Jack’s Tavern and the Booker T. Washington Hotel lounge, as well as Slim Jenkins’ supper club in Oakland.
Most famous of all was Jimbo’s Bop City, an after-hours club on Post Street where such stars
as Cole, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington. Billie Holiday, Max Roach and Art Tatum might hang out between 2 and 6 a.m. after their paying gigs in the area had ended. Some would sit in with the house band, in which Jackson alternated with fellow pianist Stanley “Wild Man” Willis throughout the ’50s.
“He didn’t like for anybody to look over his shoulders,” Jackson says of Willis, whose unique style was something of a cross between those of Monk and Tatum.
‘Big bandanna’
“When that didn’t work, he’d take out this big bandanna, spread it on the piano and put his hands under it so you couldn’t see his hands.”
Charlie Parker and John Coltrane were among the many jazz giants that Jackson backed at Jimbo’s jam sessions. One of his clearest memories is of the night future Count Basie saxophonist Frank Foster, just out of the Army and still wearing his uniform, ripped through the chord changes of “Cherokee” at a breakneck tempo and blew everyone away.
“People surrounded him and wanted to know who he was,” Jackson recalls.
By the late ’60s, all the Fillmore clubs were gone, save for Jimmy’s West Point on the Haight Street block where Jackson lived at the time. He blames the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency for their demise and that of much of the African American community that supported them.
“They started buying up all the homes and taking them away from people, paying them for it,” he says. “If you didn’t go along with that, you didn’t get anything.”
Jackson has remained active as a musician ever since, however. Though he’s slowed down in recent years, he and his wife, Kathy, still travel to San Francisco every few months for gigs, most recently at Pier 23 on the Embarcadero.