The Rebirth of Cool

Following a three-song warm-up by The Red Hot Skillet Lickers, Lavay Smith walks casually into the spotlight on the Café du Nord stage. Wearing a black velvet dress and a tiger lily in her cropped, black hair, she launches into an emotional rendition of Billie Holliday's "Stormy Weather." Although she's singing the blues, the pert and pretty Smith exudes a smiling radiance akin to someone who has just won the lottery.

The happiness is infectious and spreads to her enthusiastic audience, a dedicated and loyal following, who have arrived dressed for the occasion in silk gowns, pearls, fedora hats and suspenders. Many come every Saturday night to see Smith perform, willing to wait outside in the cold in a line that stretches down the western side of Market Street. Once inside, they deal with a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.

Lavay Smith and her band are part of the local jazz circuit, a focal point in a burgeoning San Francisco jazz scene that many thought was long dead. Local FM radio station KJAZ, after being on life support supplied by fund raisers and cable stations for nearly two years, had finally met its demise in 1994, signaling what many thought was the end of an era. But just the opposite has happened. Jazz music, particularly the style that is considered "classic" or "cool" jazz from the '50s and '60s, is enjoying a resurgence.

Local bands like The Red Hot Skillet Lickers have packed fans of all ages into San Francisco supper clubs and jazz hangouts from South of Market to Haight Street. All across town, nightclubs like Enrico's, the Elbo Room, Bruno's and Club Deluxe are filled every night with young people and hep cats ready to swing.

Nationwide, rap and hip-hop acts are either sampling the legends (as Digable Planets did effectively with Miles Davis' "Birth of Cool" for their hit "Rebirth of Slick"), or hiring big name studio talent to collaborate on entire albums (as Guru did for his two massively successful Jazzmatazz albums). Even in the critically lauded arena of college radio and alternative rock, bands are abandoning guitars altogether in exchange for saxophones (Morphine) and pianos (Ben Folds Five).

"I think people my age are just burned out on the whole grunge scene," says Fatima Anderson, 24, a recently converted jazz fan attending a Skillet Lickers show. "While there was a certain sense of rebellion attached to wearing frayed jeans and flannel shirts, it is nice to go out and get dressed up. By the time you grow up and move out of the parents' house, it's time to lose the 'I don't care' attitude."

"A band like Green Day is still a good band," reasons Marty Venturi, 21, "but their songs aren't exactly anthems anymore. While there is something to be said about the alienated loser who learns to play three chords on the guitar in the garage, you have to respect guys like this," he says. "These guys are musicians. They read music, they know time signatures, they've studied other composers, and they practice."

"Of course for an old guy like me, jazz never went away," says San Francisco Chronicle jazz writer/critic Jesse Hamlin. "There have always been great people out there playing it, they just weren't getting much money doing it."

Still mourning what he calls the "slow, painful death" of KJAZ, Hamlin is at a loss to explain why popularity in jazz is on the rise again after going largely unnoticed in the '80s and early '90s. Whatever it is, he's happy about it. "Most of these bands-The Skillet Lickers, Indigo Swing, Louie Jordan-they're cashing in on an old sound by going retro, but that is okay. They're all very good at what they do, and I hope they keep doing it."

Despite its growing popularity, the local jazz scene is still very much an underground scene, and at the Cafe du Nord it is literally an underground scene. Unless there is a line outside, du Nord is barely noticeable, except for a small, red neon sign with an arrow pointing downstairs.

With its crimson-painted walls, antique chandeliers, and impeccably dressed and well-groomed patrons, the descent into the Cafe du Nord is akin to walking into a smoky San Francisco jazz club of the late '50s. To the right is a bar, three people deep waiting for cocktails, at the left is a red felt billiard table, and around the corner is the actual lounge, an intimate room lit solely by chandeliers and candlelight.

In between sets, Lavay finally rests. Despite what a lot of people think, Lavay Smith is her real name, and not a stage name inspired by one of her prime influences, the late blues singer Bessie Smith. "No, Smith is a pretty common name," Lavay says. "It was my grandmother's name. I am actually Lavay Smith, Jr."

A native San Franciscan, Smith, 28, grew up in the '70s listening to jazz records and looking through old Life magazines. "When I was younger, I would see all these glamorous pictures of Billie Holliday with flowers in her hair, and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan in their dresses and gowns and was just intrigued by their class," she says. "I knew it was what I wanted to do."

Fortunately, in addition to adapting to her heroines' fashion styles, she could harmonize with their various vocal styles as well, and began singing in talent shows and at friend's parties "just for fun." Shortly after high school, Smith and her piano player Chris Heyward decided to form the Skillet Lickers, enlisting friends and auditioning local talent left from local jazz combos who were impressed by Smith's vocal range.

Certainly not to be overlooked are the Skillet Lickers themselves. Made up of a piano, guitar, upright bass, drums, trombone and two saxophones, their clipped accents and syrupy rhythms serve as a perfect musical complement to Smith's tonal approach. As they play a couple of swinging instrumentals, Smith accepts a dance offer from a male friend in the audience. The scene is like something out of a Roosevelt-era film by George Stevens or Busby Berkeley, as the smiling, light-complected Smith keeps in perfect step with her partner at the front of the stage, much to the audience's delight.

Without even breaking a sweat, Smith gracefully walks back onto the stage and wastes no time leading into a powerfully moving cover of Sarah Vaughan's "Black Coffee:"

"I'm feelin' mighty lonesome
haven't slept a wink
I walk the floor and watch the door
and in between I drink...
black coffeeeee..."

Her voice is deep and heavy, and as her eyes roll back behind her fluttering eyelids, no one in the audience can help but feel the undeniable and incredible concentration of emotion which wells up through the song.

Although she has been criticized for her lack of body rhythm on stage, she sings with a slow, rolling pulse that, like her predecessor Bessie Smith, predates 6/8 time. Unlike her other protegees, she doesn't snap and twitch with accents like Holliday and Vaughan, but instead, gently sways in time with her band.

"Lavay is great," says local jazz aficionado Mister Lucky. "She straddles the line of how someone should sound and act on stage. She is about two inches from being over the top, but always stays under the line, and that is why she is so fabulous."

If anyone knows anything about being over the top, it's Mister Lucky, a sophisticated, cultured and debonair San Francisco lad who claims he spends every hour of every day in pursuit of two things-"the heppest music on the planet, and the best booze he can lay his hands on." Although he may sound like a Harry Denton in waiting, Lucky infuses his knowledge of the two mediums to publish what he calls "a quarterly musical communique [rather than 'zine] celebrating music of a 'jazz-centric' nature."

In between cocktail parties, he also runs a music licensing company, produces a stylish Italian radio show, and maintains a popular web site. Not bad for a self-professed San Francisco State University dropout, who admits himself that the story of Mister Lucky is an unlikely one.

Born and raised in Mill Valley, Mister Lucky (aka Steve Sando) spent what he calls a "mad, impetuous youth" perusing thrift shops for clothes, cocktail shakers, and any vinyl albums with absurd covers that happened to catch his eye. He also shopped at Village Music in Marin, where he got into jazz.

"Here I was, a teenager in the 'stoner suburbs' of '70s Marin County," he recalls, "And all my friends were listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd, Foghat, and Journey. I was going crazy. I knew there had to be some sort of alternative."

Once he began to amass quite a collection of obscure, often out of print records, he began taping compilation tapes, distributing them to his friends. By the time he had produced a number of what he calls "90 minute miracles," he decided to print up descriptions of each tape and the various types of music on them, distributing them as catalogues.

It was around this time, in the late '80s, when he was working at the corporate office of ESPRIT that his boss offered him a round-trip ticket to Italy if he agreed to take Italian lessons. Sando jumped at the chance, took the lessons, learned the language, and took his show abroad. His knowledge of music landed him a job as a deejay at an Italian radio station, and his show, Mr. Lucky Cocktail was born, instantaneously becoming a smash hit. Sando has since moved back to the city, but still produces his popular weekly show from his San Francisco apartment. (Unfortunately, it is only broadcast in Italy.)

It is from this same Potrero Hill pad that he throws all his swank cocktail parties, stores his thousands of records, and produces his quarterly newsletter. "The best part about it," he says, "is that I almost always work in my pajamas....silk, of course!"

When he realized he could entertain and educate at the same time, he stopped producing his unauthorized tapes, and launched his newsletter in December 1993. By simply combining reviews of obscure jazz records with a "responsible love of booze and cocktails," Sando has turned a hobby into a profitable industry.

"I would never take any credit for this resurgent interest in jazz," the always polite and self-effacing Sando says. Like Hamlin, he agrees that it should be noted that jazz never left, although he too, is felicitous about its revival.

"Noel Coward said it best," he says: "'Strange how potent cheap music is.'"

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