Quick Take
On May 2, the Kuumbwa Jazz Center celebrates its 50th anniversary with an exhibit of photos, posters and archival material that chronicle its early years. On May 3, the public will remember the late Ralph Abraham. Both events mark the inevitable passing of the Santa Cruz culture first established in the 1960s and '70s.
Last week, I walked into the Food Bin on Mission Street in Santa Cruz, and I found myself nearly overwhelmed by a warm rush of … well, it wasn’t exactly nostalgia. Rather, it was more a sense of gratitude that the cramped corner healthy-food market looked and felt pretty much like it did when I first visited it some 35 years ago.
For the past decade — which included the pandemic, an ongoing construction boom and the closing of several downtown touchstones such as Logos, Caffe Pergolesi and the Saturn Cafe — many longtime Santa Cruzans have been haunted by a growing sense that the Santa Cruz culture that was established in the 1970s and ’80s is gradually and/or rapidly disappearing.
In the case of the Food Bin, that sense is more than just a feeling. Where the market now stands — and has stood for 50 years — at Mission and Laurel Street is scheduled to become a new five-story housing development. The Food Bin itself is expected to reopen on the ground floor of the new housing complex. But the charming little rabbit warren that exists today will soon be another old-timers’ memory.
Obviously, Santa Cruz is a-changin’, and mostly those changes are fundamental, inexorable and pointed in one direction only. You can lament those changes and bemoan the relentless march of time and redevelopment. Or you can indulge in your memories with a spirit of wonder and gratitude and hunt out the environments that evoke pre-earthquake Santa Cruz. For instance, be honest, who was president the last time you had breakfast at Zachary’s?
In May, Santa Cruz longtimers (as well as those who are just interested in Santa Cruz’s recent cultural history) will have a chance to at least peek into the wayback machine at one foundational Santa Cruz institution. On May 2, the Kuumbwa Jazz Center is hosting a special event that’s part of the yearlong celebration of its 50th anniversary. On that evening, the club itself will become a kind of a walk-in archive looking back at its earliest years with a wide variety of photos, posters, memorabilia and other material, all designed to invite stories and memories from old-timers.
Kuumbwa is exactly the kind of entity that emerged in the years after the arrival of the University of California that fundamentally reshaped the city’s culture. With its recent change in leadership, the nonprofit jazz club is poised to go boldly into the future, like a handful of other local businesses that date back to that era. But at least for one night, nostalgia is the show.
As part of the city’s monthly First Friday art tour, Kuumbwa will open its new archival exhibit in conjunction with an onstage conversation with the club’s co-founder and longtime artistic director, Tim Jackson, and performer and jazz historian Kim Nalley.
“It’s going to be a complete venue-wide exhibit,” said Kuumbwa’s creative director Bennett Jackson, who took the lead in the curation of the event, “and it will remain up through the end of the year.”
Rather than spanning Kuumbwa’s entire history, the exhibit, titled “Celebrating Creativity,” will focus on the club’s first decade in business, first as the free-floating, nonprofit Kuumbwa Jazz Society in 1975, then through the core group’s construction of a home venue in 1977. Some of the photos will cover the building out of the club at the site of a former bakery. (The Bagelry, Kuumbwa’s next door neighbor, is another current business that traces its beginnings to that formative era.)
In the original club, the stage was not where it is now, but rather on the opposite wall from the main entrance. Other than the stage’s reorientation and many technical and sound improvements to the room, Kuumbwa remains much as it did in its earliest years. Since then, however, an astonishing array of big-name jazz musicians have come, performed and moved on. In its history, Kuumbwa has hosted Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner, Wynton Marsalis and countless others.
“There’s a real if-these-walls-could-talk scenario going on,” said Bennett Jackson, Tim Jackson’s son. The Kuumbwa organization was founded more than a decade before Bennett was born by his father and co-founders Rich Wills and Sheba Burney. That means he’s exploring a chapter of the club’s history, not to mention the unique culture vibe of the ’70s, of which he has no personal memories.
“At that time, before I was born, Kuumbwa had the opportunity to present what you might call the last class of legends from the Bebop Era. So it was exciting for me to see these photographs of Dizzy Gillespie or Helen Humes or Ruth Brown. I mean, how cool that a ‘startup’ venue, so to speak, in the late ’70s could bring these legends to town. It was just one part of what I understood to be a very vibrant time in Santa Cruz.”
The original organization’s founding as a nonprofit, something that was rarely done in those days for arts or entertainment venues, allowed Kuumbwa to act as a kind of shepherd and protector of an art form that was largely out of fashion and moving into a fusion direction in an effort to compete with the disco and hard rock of the era. “It was very innovative at the time,” said Tim Jackson. “But we didn’t know that. It just seemed like the right thing to do. It turned out it was a precursor of what was to come. In those days, there wasn’t any [other jazz non-profits like] Jazz at Lincoln Center or SF Jazz. Jazz was always presented in commercial surroundings.”
On May 3, the day after the opening of the archival exhibit at the Kuumbwa, a memorial service will be held for Ralph Abraham, in another more poignant reminder of the passing of an era. Abraham, who died last fall, was not only a chronicler of Santa Cruz’s cultural flowering in the 1960s and ’70s, as editor of a series of oral-history books known as “Hip Santa Cruz,” he was also a central participant. As UC Santa Cruz math professor, he also presided over an enormous Victorian house near Santa Cruz High School that served as a kind of magnet for hippies, freethinkers, artists and other counterculture types.
There is a new downtown Santa Cruz struggling to emerge today, a new city that will look and feel different, with new businesses and new residents. Whether it emulates or even resembles the cultural self-image of the city is yet to be determined. Kuumbwa, with new leadership and a schedule full of vibrant musical offerings, will be part of that new future even if the world of Ralph Abraham will not.
Either way, the Santa Cruz of the hippie era is receding deeper into history. It’s not entirely gone yet, but its passing is happening in real time. Those concerned that Santa Cruz is losing a bit of its soul with this inevitable turning of the clock have a choice: to mourn the cruelties of time, or to embrace the moment when places like the Food Bin, Zachary’s and the Kuumbwa Jazz Center still resonate with that special era.
I suspect Ralph Abraham would say, what’s the point of mourning?
“Celebrating Creativity,” an exhibit looking back at the beginning of the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, opens with a First Friday event May 2 at the Kuumbwa. The event begins at 5 p.m. A conversation with Tim Jackson and Kim Nalley begins at 6 p.m., followed by DJ sets from Redwood Records. The event is free.
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