Excerpts from Jazz on the Barbary Coast

Author's Preface
by Tom Stoddard

Published in the Frisco Cricket Spring 1998

This volume attempts to survey the black music of the San Francisco Bay area and Northern California from 1850 to 1940. For the period before 1900, I relied entirely on information I culled from various historical sources. For 1900 to 1920, I provide first-hand reports; this is the area of greatest concentration.

The book opens with an autobiographical sketch of Louis Sidney "Sid" LeProtti , who was born in 1886 and played on the Barbary Coast from 1906 until 1921. I call this an autobiographical sketch because it is written in the first person but it derives from a number of sources. I try to use the phrases, expressions, and syntax that Sid used in the autobiographical material he left. His story comes first because it is the most complete-he played the Barbary Coast and Northern California all his life-and it gives us the most basic information. There is a brief remembrance of Sid by his widow that sheds some light on him as an individual but not as a musician.

Sid's life story is followed by a piece on Benjamin M. "Reb" Spikes. Born in 1888, Reb visited the Barbary Coast in 1907 and 1908, but was not a musician at the time, and then returned in 1914 as a musician in Sid LeProtti's So Different Jazz Band. Reb lived in Los Angeles and traveled the Southwest and Midwest during his absence from the Barbary Coast from 1908 to 1914. After his Barbary Coast period, he returned to Los Angeles in 1921 to carve out another historically important career. Thus Reb gives us an important view of the Barbary Coast, a good summary of jazz in the Southwest and Los Angeles during several periods, and, finally, is blessed with an unusually accurate memory.

. . . Alfred Levy . . . , covering the post Barbary Coast era, offer[s] a marked contrast to . . . LeProtti and Spikes. . . . There are distinct generations of musicians in the Bay area. Levy . . . represent[s] the generation after the closing of the Barbary Coast. Levy offers a view of a full-time musician, a profession he entered while with the Peacock Melody Strutters. Most of the musicians Levy played with were full-time professionals and they give similar accounts of their lives.

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