The day the music died

As if he hasn’t shouldered enough bad news of late, club owner Sonny Buxton braces himself for more. He wipes down his bar as yet another musician strides in with a bulletin, details of another jazz casualty.

It was pianist Al Plank today.

Two days ago, it was drummer Babatunde Olatunji who passed away. “Did you hear?” asks bassist Michael Zisman, as he unloads his gear for tonight’s gig.

And on Sunday it will be the end for Jazz at Pearl’s itself, the city’s last full-time jazz club. The room -- which Buxton runs on a hectic stretch of Columbus Avenue with the club’s founder and namesake, the indefatigable Pearl Wong -- is losing its lease after 13 years. After a heated back-and-forth with the landlord over renegotiating a lease that, they hoped, would give them five years with an option, Buxton and Wong folded.

That means Pearl’s is going the way of jazzmen of a certain era. The old-fashioned jazz club. Its “whisper if you must talk” rules, its “two-drink minimum” rituals.

All this coincides with a countrywide drift in jazz: Restaurants are booking discreet jazz trios; concert halls are increasingly dedicating calendar space to jazz nights. But clubs dedicated to undiluted, straight-ahead jazz, seven days a week, are rare jewels. “Pearl’s was the stalwart,” says Randall Kline, the executive director of SFJAZZ, a nonprofit jazz programming and education organization. “They showcased the local club scene. It’s a place where top-drawer local musicians could play regularly. “

But despite the news, you won’t hear blues or dirges filtering out of this pink-lighted, low-slung North Beach room, which has played host to big names -- Cedar Walton and Herb Geller -- and woodshedding locals. Buxton is booking just straight-up, straight-ahead jazz. As he always has. “Consistency,” he explains, even in the face of pressing adversity. “That’s why people come.”

It’s also why, from the outside, all looks well. There are no fliers announcing “Last 10 days” or banners screaming, “Thank you San Francisco!” That’s the thing with institutions; you think they will always be there until they are not.

Hotel concierges still send patrons in their cable car sweatshirts and sneaks; pedestrians stop mid-stride to linger before the big picture window during a tenor solo; taxi drivers drop their fares before the fading black awning with a wink and a nod.

But despite the club’s stiff upper lip, word’s gotten out. And people have come to pay homage.

A night of questions

One night last week, Zisman’s trio -- rounded out by Akira Tana on drums and Matt Clark on piano -- provides the sturdy foundation for a string of musicians (guitarist Gene Bertoncini, in from New York, strolling through ballads and samba; Australian-born Andrew Speight, thundering through standards, in solos as bright and shiny as his alto horn itself) who have come down to sit in, pay their respects.

So have patrons. For the first set, the 110-seat room is a sad scatter of men alone in tweed jackets. Seated at two-tops, they rest their briefcases or jackets in the empty chairs and order fancy coffee drinks, or bourbon with a beer chaser. Maybe some potstickers or ribs -- Wong and Buxton’s recipes respectively, dishes named after famous jazz tunes.

By the second set, the room begins to fill. “Is it true, Pearl?” they ask Wong in hushed tones as she flits around the club, a mere blur, with her cocktail tray in one hand, menus in the other. “What are you going to do? Are you going to reopen somewhere?”

She serves drinks, not breaking stride, her cocktail skirt flying behind her. “I don’t mind the work,” she says flatly, with just the hint of a smile. “I don’t want the responsibility.”

Michael Smith, newly relocated to the city from Houston, is crestfallen. “When I used to come into San Francisco for business, I discovered the Monday night big-band gig. I’d come to San Francisco six times a year; four of those times I’d come to Pearl’s. This space is special. It’s like when you pour wine into the glass and it opens up. That’s what the sound does here. I can’t believe that it won’t be here.”

Buxton himself hasn’t quite fully confronted the notion that the day is fast approaching. “I got emotional the other night,” he says in his burnished, radio voice (he hosts a jazz show on KCSM-FM), before taking a sip of grapefruit juice from a highball glass. “We had the Contemporary Jazz Orchestra, 16 instruments, and the audience was just rocking with them. Everything was just flowing. And I took one step toward the stage and all of that emotion just hit me. I had to go downstairs for a moment and collect myself.”

Surviving ups and downs

Along this mixed bag of a stretch of antique burlesque houses, palm readers and Beat Generation landmarks such as City Lights Books, Pearl’s had somehow struggled through the post-earthquake bleakness, the dot-com gold rush (“Those people had bad attitudes”) and eventually bust. “I would say we’ve done our best business in the last two years,” says Wong.

They’ve made a name serving up jazz to a town priding itself on taste and tradition, laying down the rules in boldface and strictly enforcing them -- to the joy of some, the chagrin of others.

Buxton, a jazz drummer and ex-football player with the Oakland Raiders, has one of those no-nonsense faces. All furrowed brow and unreadable stare. When he does break into a smile and give a big, basso laugh, it is heady and disarming.

“My passion is for the music. Pearl’s is for the bottom line,” Buxton says, explaining their working relationship.

“She monitors everything when it comes to the business. I monitor everything when it comes to the music. I’ve heard of bottom line before,” he says and chuckles, making way for the big laugh. “But she is extreme.”

Wong indeed runs a tight ship. There are evenings when she can whip through 101 patrons a set -- alone. Though she carries a pad, the orders are engraved in her brain. “Second drink now,” she announces, not asks. She races about the room nonstop, seating patrons, snapping menus up, delivering the tab just as the last tenor solo winds down and the quintet sails into its coda.

She has been in the restaurant-hospitality business since she was 10. She’s now 72. She grew up roller-skating across the marble floors of her father’s restaurant in Chinatown. But it was in 1984 that Pearl first got the notion to augment her family-style Chinese fare at the old Great Eastern. Since they already served late into the night, playing host to North Beach nighthawks -- bartenders, musicians, cooks and burlesque barkers -- one of her jazz-musician patrons, guitarist Eddie Duran, sweet-talked her into trying some after-hours sets.

The late nights caught on, until the music took over not just the basement room but both floors, where she hosted trios and quartets on one level, piano players and singers on another.

By ‘87, Wong let go of her lease but was determined to find a room -- to do simply jazz.

The timing was right

She and Buxton had met a while back, when he helped organize a San Francisco Jazz Society event at the Great Eastern. Buxton, who at the time ran his own club, Milestones, had been warned about the “Dragon Lady,” but their styles clicked. “We packed the place,” he says. “It was a hit.”

When it looked as if the North Beach place was within reach, she approached Buxton to book and help run things. “Milestones had gone in the earthquake. I was diagnosed with cancer -- a brain tumor,” says Buxton. “I just thought, ‘OK. Let’s try it.’ It was a lifeline for me. I was very, very sick. It took my mind off it.”

It was tough in the beginning. At the time, North Beach was a sketchy ghost town in yet another transition. The freeway access had been shut off. Businesses struggled, turned over, shuttered for good.

“But in the last couple years, business has been really good. That’s what’s so sad. We’ve really built it up,” says Wong, sitting at one of the window tables another night last week, watching pianist Jeff Pittson set up his keyboard for tonight’s organ trio set. All the while, she keeps her eye on the room, the candles being lighted, the chairs arranged just so.

On this night, the room fills up early. A range of folk -- young and older, musicians and “girl singers,” tourists and regulars. Young men in watch caps and rectangle-framed glasses, old hippies with long hair, long beards gone gray. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Now I’m going to have to pay a gym for a workout,” she says. “I guess what I will miss most is getting my exercise.”

That, says Wong, “and the people.”

As the crowd winds in, Buxton and Wong, like a bride and groom on a receiving line, hear endless sentimental stories -- first gig, first date, first kiss. Wong flies around the room, delivering glasses of white Zin and plates of spicy shrimp, pausing only to snap photos of her favorite patrons and the musicians on the stand. Buxton works the room. When he’s not adjusting cables and sound levels, he stops to settle in at a club table with patrons like Laura and David Leff, who on a lark wandered into Pearl’s on a first date many moons ago looking for in-the-mood music.

“If we could have invented a perfect jazz club, this would have been it!” mourns David. Local musicians stop by, asking, “So what can we do?” Buxton shakes his head. It’s done.

There’ll be gigs, says Buxton, but not like this one. The space on Columbus Avenue might end up being a club, but it won’t be Pearl’s.

Tears amid change

Pearl’s closing leaves the Bay Area with one old stalwart, Yoshi’s in Oakland, which has long attracted big names. There are rooms that cater to a mix of music. And there is a rumor in the air about plans to open a club at the Cannery near Fisherman’s Wharf, says SFJAZZ’s Kline. While the experience of live jazz is changing, the audiences, says Buxton, have changed as well. So many people, he’s observed, have just fallen into ruts.

“I hear it all the time ... ‘All the people I like are dead.’ People aren’t interested in hearing new people. Local people. Sometimes some of my old associates from Oakland come down and say, with surprise in their voices, ‘Hey this is great.’ I say, ‘I know, I know. Come back.’ But they don’t. But the other night it felt so good. Watching that band up there. The guys took it up a couple of notches.”

All that emotion, reflects Buxton.

“Those tears,” he says, pausing, looking away, this time his impenetrable face just slightly more readable. “Tears of joy likely.”

Perhaps. But not likely.