cineSOURCE magazine

Cheryl Fabio Makes Masterful Oakland Blues Movie
by Jerry McDaniel

'Evolutionary Blues' Director Cheryl Fabio with executive producer, KTOP's Michael Munson, after a screening at West Oakland's California Hotel. photo D. Blair

I MOVED FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO
West Oakland’s Lower Bottoms in 1989, just after the earthquake. Although it was known as a ghetto, it was the first place I felt at home since I don't know when.

People were sitting on their porches, talking to one another, playing in their yards. It reminded me of Oak Cliff, the Dallas quarter where I was born.

I learned about the sad event called "Cyprus Sandwich," when the freeway fell down and killed over forty people, but which also opened up the neighborhood and brought a breath of fresh air.

I would go now and then to Esther's Orbit Room, the famous club, which was around the corner. People there alluded to a vibrant musical history; friends in the music business also spoke of a shining past.

But that history remained a mystery until I saw "Evolutionary Blues: West Oakland's Music Legacy" (see trailer) at this year’s Oakland International Film Festival, which ran April 4-8th.

Although I was excited to see historical photos of places I had been riding my bike around, I was shocked to finally perceive the breadth, depth and achievement of Oakland’s music scene.

Opportunity had brought thousands of African-Americans from Louisiana, Texas and across the South to Oakland, starting in the early-1900s but booming during World War II, to build those killer ships.

Kept out of Oakland’s downtown clubs by the racist musicians union, black musicians settled around 7th Street in West Oakland turning the already-thriving commercial district into an entertainment capital. Soon there were over a dozen clubs, most famously Slim Jenkins’s Supper Club, where well-dressed black couples and others would dine and dance the night away to swing and bebop but also the blues.

Indeed, West Oakland pioneered a slower, more mournful urban blues, while retaining the horn sections popularized in Chicago. In 1942, Saunders Samuel King became the first to chart a number one hit record out of Oakland, “S.K. Blues, Part I" (check it out here).

The dynamic Miss Faye Carol belts it out. photo: C. Fabio

Unfortunately, after the war, the economy tanked, devastating the club scene. Fifteen years later, construction on the enormous central post office and then the BART station destroyed over a dozen square blocks, with thousands of people pushed out by imminent domain.

Nevertheless, a lot of the music, musicians and culture struggled and shined on, as Fabio so nicely documents in "Evolutionary Blues”.

Using extensive archival footage and stunning interviews with dozens of major players, Fabio and her team have composed a vibrant community history. It tells us where we came from and inspires where we can go to, in a professional, PBS-ready manner.

“My researcher, Tenisha Jones, and I scoured the library archives and catalogs together,” I was informed by Fabio, an attractive older woman sporting hip jewelry and dreadlocks, when we met over a light lunch at a little Thai place just inside Berkeley.

“We looked and looked, even when we didn't know quite what we were looking for.” Executive producer Mike Munson, from Oakland’s government television station, KTOP, where you can see the city council argue incessantly, “gave me the freedom to research and make the story I wanted to make,”

“The editor, Meadow Holmes, helped form and shape the vision,” Fabio continued. “After the two of us got the concept just right, she went back and beautified the look. Our camera guy, Godofredo ‘G’ Dizon, was unrelenting in making this tiny project look BIG. He let me drag him across the country, on a 24-hour trip, to Rhode Island’s Brown University, because one of our historians couldn't come to California!”

Perhaps most importantly, “The musicians shared themselves, they introduced me to their community, and they opened up," Fabio said.

"They opened up" is also a good tag line for this poignant snapshot not only of a hoppin' music scene but its politics, economics and problems—all backed up by an awesome soundtrack, history that needs to be archived and revered but also continued.

Come learn about and celebrate the long running river of music flowing out of our own Oakland, as Cheryl so aptly elucidates in her film and our conversation, below.

And if you can’t find a way to see “Evolutionary Blues”, please petition your city supervisor to let KTOP release and earn money from their productions. Then we could see them all right on Netflix.

On set doing an interview (lf-rt): cinematographer Godofredo ‘G’ Dizon, producer Michael Munsun, director Cheryl Fabio, crew Shomari Smith. photo: Biko Bradford

Cheryl Fabio: I’m from East Oakland—I grew up in East Oakland and I paid attention to my life, to some degree. My mother was very active in Oakland politics.

cineSOURCE: She was a poet?

She was a poet, a writer and she actually recorded some albums for Folkways, putting music to some of her poetry. All of that, in hindsight, informs how excited I was to do this project.

I’m a hyper-focused individual so where I put my gaze, that’s what I know about in the moment. I’ve always loved music but I’ve never GAZED on the local music. So this was an opportunity to do that.

So what sort of focus did you have before?

I spent a lot of time in schools. I went to undergraduate school at Fisk University in Nashville Tennessee; I studied sociology and learned photography there. I’ve always been focused on photography—then I went to film school at Stanford, their documentary program.

When I did it in the 70's, well, black girls weren’t making films. It was really hard to do. I was a single parent, so it was even harder. Juggling that took a lot of energy.

How old were your kids when you were going to Stanford?

Actually I had my first kid coming out of Stanford and that child is now 42 years old. Then I had a kid who’s 30 now.

This was a chance to pay attention to Oakland, to dig into the music. One of the first things that came up was that some of the guys who played behind my mother, when she made those four Folkways albums, were connected to the scene.

So there were pieces of information that I had had and I was going ‘Oh! That’s who they were talking about!’

It was also a chance for me to express what I had observed as a kid with my family and their friends going through the politics of Oakland, which had always made me shudder. A lot of my friends come from somewhere else and they can’t believe Oakland isn’t this panacea.

I’ve had very interesting conversations about what the ghettos in California looked like and what politics in the Bay Area has been like.

Important for me is Isabella Wilkerson's book, ‘The Warmth of Other Suns’ (2010), which explains the migration [from the South]. I thought, ‘Now I understand how we got here, how my family fits into this puzzle.’

Singer and piano player Lady Bianca in a scene from 'Evolutionary Blues'. photo C. Fabio

I’m a diaspora kind of person. My dad is from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, my mother is from Tennessee. I’ve spent time in Africa. I’m interested in all of it. But the film was a chance to dig deep into Oakland’s black community. I was always curious.

Although I came here when I was five, when I’d say, ‘I’m from Oakland,’ my contemporaries would say, ‘You’re not native.’ So there’s these slices of African-American life in Oakland that I got to experience [by making the film].

So first you were making photos, right? Were you doing series with showings or what was your focus?

Actually I had a hard time framing how to make a living with the kind of photography I was interested in doing. I was a street photographer. I studied Ansel Adams but I’m not really interested in that. I was more interested in recording the communities I was living in, but who is going to pay me?

I ended up going to Africa. My school, Fisk University, sent me when I graduated and I came back with a really nice portfolio of pictures. That’s what got me into Stanford. Then I shifted into kind of 'OK, how do I make all this work?’ I’ve just bounced around ever since then. Sometimes I’m working film, sometimes I’m teaching.

So you are teaching?

I taught public school for about four years and then I taught in Bay Area colleges and universities as an adjunct. That is a difficult life because it never amounts to much, just bouncing from one school to the next.

So are you focused on film right now?

I mean I have to bounce around ‘cause I don’t have a silver lining. Rent is due next month and there’s no film paying me this month. But I kept my household afloat. I’ve managed government channels like KTOP. I’ve produced for 30 years.

When cable came to town, each municipality, the streets of which they dug up, they gave a certain amount of bandwidth for education, for government. Public Access was optional, not all cities did it. Oakland had the guts.

In 2000 KTOP got a windfall—I’ve forgotten why. They built out a studio—a state of the art studio—and they hired a lot of staff. I was part of that.

I worked with them for about 3 1/2 years producing, directing and managing the studio. I was the operations manager. Ashley James, do you know him?

No.

He’s a well-known documentary filmmaker in the area; he was the station manager. Then the economy tanked and the City of Oakland layed me off and about 1600 other people.

Singer Lenny Williams, formerly lead singer in Tower of Power. photo: Biko Bradford

I had a relationship with KTOP. When they decided to do this documentary, they needed someone they could trust to deliver a completed project.

The crew is all union—I mean KTOP union, not what a union would look like in Hollywood. Their stage is for hire. It’s a great deal. They used to have this great woman, the stage manager, who did the lighting. They’re good at getting a lot out of a little and they work well together.

It worked out really nicely. The editor and I’d email the project back and forth so someone was always working on it. We got it done in a year and a half.

When was that completed?

We had the audio mix around September 15th [2017]. We showed it for the first time on the 27th, at the Grand Lake Theater—packed the house.

When I saw it at the Oakland International Film Festival, I turned to the woman sitting next to me and said, ‘This place should be packed.’ She said, ‘Well at least we're here.’

I used to run a festival in Oakland for the black filmmakers hall of fame. I know what it takes. Getting an audience out in the Bay Area is [hard] because people have so many choices. So you really have to invest in serious PR, planning and execution. When that happens we get a nice audience, when it doesn’t happen...

I often feel that Oakland is the seat of culture in the Bay Area. San Francisco has it’s own thing but it’s been pretty transient for a long time now.

In the old days [Oakland] had a formidable culture.

The thing I’ve always known, but this film concretized, is that our black communities are always under assault. The people in the community try and push back on harmful forces, but the apathy about what happens in black communities prevents corrective action.

I remember when Maxine Waters, the Los Angeles congressperson, was screaming about this infusion of drugs and guns into Compton. It was videotaped; we could see it. I could see that influx coming to my neighborhood in East Oakland. It was palatable; we're getting drugs and guns together.

But it was denied, nothing was done, and today we are in the situation we are in. The culture around just let that happen—it’s kind of interesting. You know the kids in that school that was just shot up?

Parkland, Florida?

The poster for 'Evolutionary Blues' includes ALL the musicians in the show (click to expand). image: Shomari Smith

Yeah. You know when those kids took to the street and started complaining, the attention they got and deserved? The black kids said, ‘Hey now, wait a minute. We’ve been screaming about the killings perpetrated on us for years and no one pays attention.’ That points to a very complicated relationship between race and our society.

I used to hear that Oakland is in the shadow of San Francisco but I just felt like it’s a different culture.

My family would drive across the country, either to New York or to Tennessee, every summer. I’m accustomed to the fact that America is not ONE culture—it’s a lot of tiny, little cultures. So it’s not foreign to me that Oakland has a different culture from San Francisco, it grooves differently and it drives differently. I think it’s a class difference, largely.

When I started meeting these musicians, they were like pissed with everybody. I thought maybe that’s a constant state. I had to get past them being pissed.

One guy kept saying, ‘If you’re not gonna tell the whole story then I don’t wanna participate.’ So I’d say, ‘What’s the whole story?’

No one was very specific about what the whole story was until I got to Geoffrey Pete, the well-known owner of Geoffrey’s Inner Circle in downtown Oakland. Then the light went on.

I remember when all those little clubs were being shut down and thinking, ‘What the 'f’ is going on?’ Geoffrey just said it very clearly. He’s coming from the position of a business owner and THIS is what’s happening.

By the time I’m making this film, I understood that this harassment was the nail in the coffin of that generation. If there’s any hope, it’s that some other generation has been born and has the guts to pick it up from there.

Do you see any of that going on?

I do. I showed the film at the West Oakland library. This young woman was tearful. You know this film attracts older people—usually it’s a sea of grey hair. This is a woman of about twenty years old, she tearfully said, ‘You guys don’t see us but we're here, and we're doing stuff. But y'all don’t see us.’

I’m not understanding what’s happened to the blues. When I see magazines, the blues belongs to somebody else now. They’re freezing a moment in time. For African-Americans, this music is a continuum. Those [mostly white] musicians know it, but as a consumer. It shows up in different ways in their music.

So it’s a continuum. And that young girl crying, she’s part of that continuum. It might show up literally as rap or hip-hop. Whatever it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be, [but] it comes from the same place.

Well, I have teenagers. One thing I notice is that they’re hung up on what’s going on for them—the internet, pop music—which I’m not sure is all that different from generations over the years. But I do sense a disconnect with history.

An incredible disconnect. It’s incredible and I think it’s our fault. As a kid, in the fifties, there was a disconnect again because there was a culture shift happening [then]. ‘That sinful music!’ and a lot of adult disparaged it. I was lucky to have progressive, really cool parents.

I understand the kids being disconnected from us, from history. If you’re disconnected from your parents and your grandparents, history’s not going to mean anything to you, you know. They’re the bridges; they kind of lay the seeds.

City of Oakland councilperson Lynette McElhaney contributed additional history during a Q&A after a showing of 'Evolutionary Blues'. photo: D. Blair

To me we've abandoned kids for the past thirty years. Things like the drugs, the guns... all of that stuff has caused, at least in my community, a disruption. It happens differently in different communities.

When I drive around North Oakland, where we are now, I don’t see the same kind of disruption that I see in the black or brown blue-collar neighborhoods like East Oakland. That’s where everybody who left North and West Oakland fled to in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. There was a terrible disruption.

When I grew up, I went to Castlemont High School. That’s the most depressing scene in Oakland now, if you ask me. There used to be stores along MacArthur Boulevard, a fountain, where you’d go get ice cream, a hamburger. There’s none of it; it’s the cruelest area; it’s a terrible place. And it’s my neighborhood. I’m part of the fabric of that—how did it happen?

When a city is unresponsive, when part of a municipality is under siege, that city government is complicit, at best.

Fay Carroll, in my interview with her, the very first thing I think I asked her was, why she sang the Billy Holiday song ‘Strange Fruit’ the way she does. I don’t know if you know it—other than in the film—but she sings it very hauntingly.

The way she talked about it, I thought, ‘Oh that’s a great answer but I don’t know how I’m gonna use it.’ I didn’t [film] the beginning sentences but it fit it in perfectly.

She said that she sings it that way because she wanted to make her audience feel how she feels when the song talks about fruit. It’s not plums or nectarines but black bodies hanging from trees. That unlocked for me her style of singing.

You juxtapose that with what that twenty year-old girl was saying to you—it’s chilling.

We don’t want them to be so far gone that it’s too late. Some of the tears in that young woman's eyes was that. But she’s a survivor; she’s in the library with all these grey haired people watching the film; she’s connecting enough to get emotional and say, ‘Hey, I’m still here!’

She’s got a lot of peers that have no place to be found. I’ve been going around to schools with this film. I went to a continuation school the other day and the teachers let me know that the students were gonna be reactive.

But they don’t know that I know they’re auditory learners, this group in particular. So they’re all over the place. But I got a text from the guy this morning saying, ‘You know, they’re still talking about that film.’ AND we only got about a third into it [before] I shut it down.

Slim Jenkins, owner of the supper club shown here, was considered the mayor of West Oakland until the building was torn down for a gas station. photo courtesy: Oakland Public Library

It was a combination of, you know, what they’d gotten [from history], what they could get from me and the film on that day. The administrator thought that maybe [the students] ran away from me but I’ve taught in public schools for so long.

In fact, I told the teacher to tell the kids that 'The next time you see me, you won’t be critiquing my work. I’m gonna be critiquing your work!’

We went to Oakland Technical High School with 500 kids in the auditorium, 9th graders—way too young—but it was still interesting. One class, the music class, they were fascinated.

I brought Larry Vann’s Groove Merchants, a band in the film, with me. So one of the musicians was sitting next to this group of music class kids. When they realized that the bassist Michael, who was in the film, was sitting next to them, they were all over the place. They’d seen him perform live, and now he was sitting next to them!

But all these other kids, they were all over the place, really acting out, the teacher was horrified. I said, ‘It is what it is.’

Clearly, part of ‘what it is,’ is that we weren’t any better when we were kids. But 500 kids could sit in an auditorium [back then] because that’s what you did. It was a treat to get out of your class and sit in an auditorium.

I think that the 9th graders are just entering into that period of ‘looking into the mirror.'

There’s so much information being just thrown in our faces. You know I go for weeks and don’t turn my TV on. I don’t need to. Sometimes I turn it on and some horrific shit’s happening. I mean, ‘Really? How’d I miss that?’

It’s just too much information and I can’t imagine being a young person, who’s getting all of this stuff, trying to filter through it. I can’t do it myself. When they get a little bit older, I think they will start to think about their place in history—a least we would hope so.

I’ve always had a strange relationship with history because I never saw myself reflected in it, I really never did. Its places and people that I don’t know and, frankly, don’t care about.

Maybe when your older generations start passing, you start understanding that we’re not here forever. You miss some information cause you didn’t ask some questions, you might have thought to ask, and they’re gone now.

Then I think it becomes more real to somebody who’s been as aloof to history as I’ve been. I’ve looked more at the past as a sociologist would than a historian. I kind of look at how people move and things. It’s all going to come together in the next doc. [laughs]

Do you think that doing this flick has kind of changed your perspective?

Yeah, it really has. The thing I know about myself is that I’m a multi-modal learner. One reason that I like film—I’ve spent two years on the project, so I had a lot of time to think about it—is it’s visual. It’s auditory. It’s digging deep. It’s staying light. There’s all of that stuff I like.

And it brought context to history—it did kind of turn me on. I have a different way of reading now. I have a bed full of books that maybe I’ll get to read and maybe not. There’s something that has worked for me, using all these different ways of accepting the information, but also connecting the dots of it.

Going back to this history that you didn’t know much about—

First of all, you KNOW the history! My mother’s family migrated from Tennessee, so I'm in it. I didn’t understand it emotionally. It really is about context.

I grew up in the ‘60s and social movements have been the bedrock of everything that I’ve experienced. I worked in Mississippi, in the voter registration drives in the late ‘60s at the end of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC.)

I’ve done all kinds of stuff. So activism is there and I do mean to lift it up. But I don’t see politics quite as some folks might.

I understand. I think, in general, that art can’t help but be political.

Well, yeah, because you’ve got a certain luxury, if you’re making [art], right? The luxury is that you get to sit back and reflect and think about it. I don’t know that most people get to do that.

People in this film, these musicians, they’re different from any other creative people that I’ve worked with. For them, it’s a business in a way that most artists I know don’t see themselves engaged in a business.

The difference is, well, you know, all creative people are under attack in times like these. But the [blues musicians] aren't hearing it. They’re not having it because they’re not rooted in this community of artists, so to speak, the ones getting arts grants and sponsorships, etc.

They’re small business people and made their guitar their business. That’s interesting to me ‘cause when their business starts getting shut down, there is no one advocating for them, right?

It seems like you showed that by showing the arc of what was happening by showing what happened to Geoffery’s getting shut down. He shined the light on the fact that [clubs] are just not politically cool in this town anymore right?

Yeah. Part of what I'm talking about is that in West Oakland there’s two communities that are getting displaced. There’s a creative community being displaced and then the blue-collar workers, the people who came because of that migration, the opportunities.

They stood up in their own feet and made a way for themselves and their families. But then, bit by bit, stuff starts, racism starts, tearing at the fabric, and there’s a discriminatory reaction to African-Americans being here after the war ends. The jobs are gone and black people are in competition with white people.

People get ugly about the fact that there’s this huge population of African-Americans. Bit by bit, it starts getting torn down. When we wipe out this one group it doesn’t get to go someplace else and morph and regenerate. Whereas the creative group that got displaced, they can go someplace else and create more community and regenerate.

Jerry McDaniel is an actor, musician and filmmaker, who starred in the breakout Oakland film ‘Everything Strange and New’ (2009) and can be reached . Posted on Apr 25, 2018 - 08:48 AM