San Francisco Bay Blues

It wasn’t the sonorous saxophone melding into a lively piano solo that opens Miguel Zenón’s Golden City that began my most recent trip to San Francisco.  Instead, it was the mechanical female voice of a recording on the BART train telling riders what the train’s next stop was.  Although soothing, the voice on the train has nothing on that disc’s opening track, titled “Sacred Land.”  Indeed, to combine the two in the same sentence is more of a device than a comparison.  In fact, a better comparison might be the noise of the city that I was enveloped in when I exited the train up the stairs at the 16^th and Mission station.

I used to live in the San Francisco Bay area.  I wandered its many streets, camped illegally in some of its parks, rode its buses and subways, and enjoyed its culture.  I also got harassed by its police, beaten and thrown in jail.  I campaigned for its leftist politicians and opposed those who had sold their souls to the bankers and big business.  I watched tall buildings go up and older ones get torn down.  Its soundtrack was as varied as its people, and its people were as diverse as the flora in Golden Gate Park.  We fought against homogenization and sameness and lived out our struggle daily.  The joy of its music—from the psychedelia most popularly represented by bands like the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service to the funk of Sly and the Family Stone and the horns of Tower of Power—was celebrated in the streets, bars, parks and dance halls around the city.  Despite the efforts of capital’s caretakers, the people’s history was everywhere: painted on the walls of schools and community centers, written up in local newspapers not beholden to the corporate state and even in the common conversation.  Public life in the San Francisco Bay Area was a constant contest between the forces of liberation and control, people and profit.  I left in 1985.  Every time I visit, I can’t help but take note of that contest and who seems to be winning it.

The aforementioned recording Golden City is a rich, resonant and vibrant characterization of that contest and its history.  Indeed, it is more than a representation; it is a poem and a prayer, a memorial and a prediction.  A heartfelt desire for a future where a history of colonialism, exploitation and oppression is overcome.  One hears the struggle of those who toiled in the sweatshops of US capitalism, making others wealthy while they struggled to maintain what can barely be considered an existence.  The racism of the men who employed the immigrants—Asian, Latin American, and those from the US South—is an essential echo throughout the album.  Some of the individual song titles reveal as much: “Acts of Exclusion” mourns laws forbidding Chinese from entering the United States, while “9066” reflects on the racist removal of those with Japanese heritage from their homes and into concentration camps during World War Two.  “Displacement and Erasure” and “SRO” are reminders of a more recent history that saw neighborhoods transformed from communities of working-class families and individuals making a living and maintaining a life into ridiculously priced investments for the banking and tech industries whose main markers are profit and more profit.  One wonders if their humanity is also measured in market gains or if they actually have none at all.  Either response does not bode well.

Miguel Zenón is the band leader.  His alto sax weaves in and out of his compositions, trading licks and harmonies with pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist Chris Tordini, drummer Dan Weiss, guitarist Miles Okazaki, and percussionist Daniel Diaz.  The brass section, which is the backbone of this combo, features Diego Urcola on trumpet and valve trombone, Alan Ferber on trombone and Jacob Garchik on tuba and trombone.  It’s rare that one band features so much trombone, but it’s what makes the sound here as sonorous and rich as it is.  When listened to in the sequence laid down on the disc, the music reveals itself as a modern symphony, a musical homage to a city always in transition and in conversation with itself as to its identity and its future.

The purpose of my recent visit was to see friends and enjoy the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in the city’s Golden Gate Park.  As I wandered between the various stages of the festival, I was reminded of the city’s conversation with itself.  While Patti Smith and her band closed their Sunday afternoon set with her anthem, “People Have the Power,” I watched the crowd dance, keep an eye on their children, and look at their phones.  Some were obviously financially well off, while others were barely getting by.  Later on, I was buying beers for my friend and I from a fellow who had brought a couple cases over from the Haight specifically to make a few bucks, I watched as he and his friends greeted other street-savvy residents while Emmylou Harris and her band sang the Gram Parsons’ classic “Return of the Grievous Angel,” a song she recorded with him on their 1973 record of the same name.  That weekend, I heard two versions of Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 hit song “White Rabbit”—a psychedelic version by the newgrass/bluegrass sensation Molly Tuttle and the Golden Highway and another equally psychedelic take by the rock band Moonalice.  Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was joined by Steve Earle in a short set that included a couple tunes (Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” being one of them) and a few stories.  Joan Baez joined Emmylou on the Steve Earle tune “God is God,” Bobby Rush sweated on stage while he tore it up with his style of the blues, challenging the crowd to keep up. These are just random flashes, not the weekend’s entirety.

When I got back to the airport a few days later, the television showed a hurricane named Milton hitting the coast of Florida.  Meanwhile, the grit of the city was far away, hidden in the architecture of contemporary techno-totalitarianism that modern airports tend to be.

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