The Jazz Heritage Center has begun holding its first exhibition, “Harlem of the West…Revisited.” Having started December 6th, 2008 and lasting until March 7, 2009, the Jazz Heritage Center will feature art and photography from The Fillmore bustling jazz era of the 1940s and 1950s. This free exhibit celebrates a unique and rediscovered chapter in jazz history and the African-American experience on the West Coast. The Jazz Heritage Center, which operates as a non-profit, is housed within the new Fillmore Heritage Center at the corner of San Francisco’s Fillmore and Eddy Streets. A centerpiece of the Historic Fillmore Jazz preservation District, the building also houses Yoshi’s new San Francisco jazz club.

The exhibition will include two different components: Harlem of the West – featuring nearly sixty rare archival photographs of the Fillmore at its height – and Harlem of the West…Revisited, an exhibit curated by the Jazz Heritage Center to compliment Harlem of the West and consisting of original photographs, paintings and murals. The exhibit also marks the formal opening of the Jazz Heritage Center’s Koret Heritage Center, named to acknowledge the Jazz Heritage Center’s lead donor, the Koret Foundation.

To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, the Jazz Heritage Center hosted a Community Day December 6th at the Lush Life Gallery. Jazz greats from The Fillmore were in attendance in addition to Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts, curators or Harlem of the West; and prominent photographers, David Johnson, Gerald Ratto (both of whom studied with Ansel Adams) and Mars Breslow.

To learn more about the exhibition or The Jazz Heritage Center, please visit their site at
www.jazzheritagecenter.org

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Harlem of the West – The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era
(Paperback, 2005)

This particular sentimental journey describes San Francisco’s Fillmore District in its heyday. The Fillmore in the 1940s and 1950s was an eclectic, integrated, and hopping neighborhood dotted with restaurants, pool halls, theaters, shops, and boasting two dozen active nightclubs and music joints within its one square mile. Although it has been commemorated in songs, poems, and in Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, few people today know of the rich history of the Fillmore and its musical legacy because it vanished so abruptly due to redevelopment in the 1960s.

Through dozens of archival photographs and oral accounts from the neighborhood residents and musicians who experienced it at its height, Harlem of the West celebrates this unique and rediscovered chapter in jazz history and the African-American experience on the West Coast.

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