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Music Extra: End of Jazz

Discussion & Talk

coleman Hawkins and Dizzy Gillespie

03/02/2018 GMT

End of Jazz

BBC World Service - Music Extra, End of Jazz

How gentrification deleted San Francisco's jazz music scene

How gentrification deleted San Francisco's jazz music scene.

During the musical heyday of San Francisco's Fillmore District in the '40s and '50s, the area was known as the "Harlem of the West". It was a swinging place where you could leave your house on Friday night and jump from club to party to bar until the small hours of Monday morning. The black owned businesses boomed and the jazz was jumping. 

Great musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, John Handy and Ella Fitzgerald found a sense of belonging in the area. But then the neighbourhood was targeted by city planners for urban renewal - where bulldozers reduced its soul to rubble, where a music scene came crashing down. 

Jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown Jr takes a look beneath the new apartment buildings and hip gentrified restaurants of today to see the soul of a community that once had music at its core.

(Photo: Jazz saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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