The Legend of Bop City

This tribute to a San Francisco after-hours club called Jimbo's Bop City offers a charming piece of nostalgia for jazz buffs, but also places the club's history in a larger social context that will appeal to a broader audience. Under the disciplined eye of black manager Jimbo Edwards, Bop City was open from 2 a.m. until 6 a.m. in the predominantly black Fillmore District of San Francisco, from 1950 until 1965. It provided a lively testing ground for jazz musicians and singers, who vied to out-perform one another. Through period b&w photographs and interviews with Bop City veterans, the documentary introduces the viewer to a late-night-early-morning world visited by such greats as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie "Bird" Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, Art Blakey, Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald. "You had to be good to play there," recalls one elderly musician. "You had to face the music." Players not up to speed were politely escorted to the door and told to go home and practice. For the dollar admission price, anyone could listen to the nightly jam session, offering one of the few contemporary non-judgmental environments for inter-racial couples. In the mid-'60s, with the Vietnam War and civil rights movement, and the rise of folk music, rhythm-and-blues, and rock-n-roll, Jimbo's Bop City closed. In a way, the after-hours club was emblematic of a world we now look back upon as a time of innocence. Contemporaneous with the closing of Bop City, good jazz, a uniquely American art-form, went underground until its current revival. An intriguing slice of Americana. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (M. Pendergrast)