Jazz in San Francisco, 1916-66, Pt. 1: From Terrific Street to Nob Hill

We first met, Jazz and I, at a dance hall dive on the Barbary Coast. It screeched and bellowed at me from a trick platform in the middle of a smoke-hazed, beer-fumed room.” -- Paul Whiteman, 1915 I’ve lately been teaching livestream extension courses about early Jazz and Swing for local universities. I recently surveyed San Francisco Jazz from 1916 to ’66 reflecting its boomtown origins and distinctive culture. Here’s what I learned about a time spanning from the wild Barbary Coast era to when most of the Dixieland bars closed on the eve of The Summer of Love. The Barbary Coast World-famous Vice District Dating back to the California Goldrush of 1849, the Northeastern quarter of San Francisco near the waterfront was a well-established vice district. Prostitution was the main attraction followed by gambling, drinking, drugs and rough trade of all kinds. Kidnapping of sailors was so commonplace that the term “Shanghaiing” probably originated there. The dance halls were a major attraction and point of origin for several dance crazes: The Turkey Trot,
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Dave Radlauer is a six-time award-winning radio broadcaster presenting early Jazz since 1982. His vast JAZZ RHYTHM website is a compendium of early jazz history and photos with some 500 hours of exclusive music, broadcasts, interviews and audio rarities.

Radlauer is focused on telling the story of San Francisco Bay Area Revival Jazz. Preserving the memory of local legends, he is compiling, digitizing, interpreting and publishing their personal libraries of music, images, papers and ephemera to be conserved in the Dave Radlauer Jazz Collection at the Stanford University Library archives.

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