What Becomes a Yoshi's Most?
BeyondChron has a civil point/counter-point debate going on about Yoshi's SF, which opens its doors today. But let's go back a bit, shall we?
If you didn't know, San Francisco has the most cheery pockmark on its record: the "Negro removal" period. During this time historic buildings were torn down and black Western Addition residents were shooed out of the city. A movement that "never succeeded in driving all blacks from the Fillmore," but instead "destroyed the African-American community’s strongest neighborhood economic base," according to BeyondChron.
To simplify things (and presumably outrage others), Yoshi's San Francisco is now one of several efforts to restore the neighborhood back to what it once was. Whatever that was.
One perspective on the new jazz club's branch -- an "African-American perspective" -- is Harrison Chastang's. He points out that venues like Yoshi's San Francisco, the Sheba Lounge, and Rasselas already bring in a black audience. What's more, said clubs will encourage younger black audiences to drop on by. He says that "[t]he key to attracting African Americans to Yoshi's depends on the effort Yoshi's makes to inform African Americans about events at Yoshi's; and to support education programs to cultivate the next generation of African American Jazz fans." Which sounds good, but we can't imagine any amount of outreach would transform young kids into jazz aficionados. At least not in 2007.
As we pointed out yesterday, jazz is a dead form of music. Period. We didn't mean that in a disco-sucks tone, but more in a Latin-is-a-dead-language way. (Disco, by the way, does not suck.) That's not a critique of a certain sound -- believe us, our iTunes library is littered with music that many would consider unmitigated crap -- but anytime scholarly types start fetishizing or picking apart a music genre, said genre is well on its way to the grave.
But Mr. Shaw points out SF Magazine's Chris Smith's point out (so meta!):
As Chris Smith observes in the current San Francisco Magazine, "if you want to revitalize a black neighborhood, a hip-hop preservation district would make more sense." But the Agency would be afraid to expand hip-hop for the same reasons that it would not have backed jazz in the music’s heyday -- incendiary and often subversive art forms are what Redevelopment Agencies are created to extinguish, not promote.
O! To be in the room when someone suggested opening up a hip hop venue in the Wester Addition! (Also, why not? It's well overdue.) But the point is this: more venues geared toward a younger audience with more, um, modern music need to open in the area to bring the neighborhood back to life. (Although we never really thought of it as dead.) There are enough jazz clubs in the area at this point, and any more of them runs the risk of turning the district into an amusement park of the past. And no one wants that.