.Riffing on Henry Schiro and San Jose’s Jazz History

From the mud of jazz history, a lotus blooms and I can hear the jazz riffs already.

This Sunday, June 22, San Jose Jazz will host a sold-out fundraiser for its Jazz Aid Fund, a heroic endeavor conceived in response to the coronavirus pandemic, providing direct support for Bay Area musicians, including and especially for the creation of new works. The event also specifically honors the musical legacy of Henry Schiro, San Jose Jazz’s executive director from 1988 to 2004. A product of the old Willow Glen, Schiro passed away many years ago, but San Jose Jazz never gave him an official send-off, so now felt like a perfect moment.

In the late ’80s, Schiro also ran the jazz series at Garden City on Saratoga Avenue. Every time I walk by the abandoned chateau-style building, his ghost is one of the first to emerge.

In its heyday, Garden City was a raging destination, initially and before my time, as a downtown hofbrau and card club. I first went to the Saratoga Avenue structure as a 20-year-old with my mom because I was taking Carmen Hermosillo’s jazz history class at West Valley College, a class that required us to attend gigs and write reviews. Jazz history was one of the few classes in junior college, along with music theory, that even interested me.

I was not even a jazz fanatic, but that class was my first intro to bebop, swing, Miles, Duke and everything else. None of my friends at the time cared about jazz, so I went to Garden City with my mom a few times. Smith Dobson was the house piano player, and since I was a keyboardist, I could tell he was the real deal. Garden City was also the first place I ever had a real steak. I could hang with the adults in the room, whatever that meant.

I did not know of Schiro until a few years later, when, as music students, many of us at SJSU were often on the periphery of the local jazz scene, since San Jose still felt like a small town and every musician seemed to know everyone else. At the time, Schiro’s name was ubiquitous.

The history is up to interpretation, but my version goes like this: After musicians like Eddie Gale and educators like Dwight Cannon helped put San Jose on the jazz map in the ’70s, Schiro, a philanthropist and fundraiser extraordinaire, then helped establish the annual festival, in part thanks to conversations with Metro columnist Sammy Cohen, who wrote regular dispatches about the scene. Schiro eventually brought in corporate sponsors like Southwest and Comcast and developed the festival into the largest free jazz weekend in the country. Schiro was also inseparable from Children’s Musical Theatre San Jose, the Steinway Society and the San Jose Civic Light Opera. He was everywhere.

The Merc was there too, adding to Cohen’s reports about various clubs that always seemed to come and go with the wind.

“On any night in the South Bay, jazz lovers can find somewhere to get lost in a tickling riff, an improvisational set of antiphony or a full-blown jam session where cover charges are the exception, rather than the rule,” wrote the Merc’s Broderick Perkins in 1989, before rattling off a few pages of venues: 

There was Cafe Jazz in Cupertino, the Crazy Horse in Saratoga and Club Jazz in downtown San Jose. Restaurants like the Plumed Horse and the Monterey Whaling Company also appeared in the jazz listings, as did hotel bars like J. Patrick’s at Hyatt Rickeys, Beamer’s in Le Baron Hotel, The Toll House Hotel’s Fireside Lounge and Hemingway’s in the Santa Clara Airport Hotel. And back when San Pedro Square still welcomed beatnik intellectuals and bohemians rather than bankers and tech bros, the Phoenix Coffeehouse had a raging jazz and poetry scene. In San Pedro Square.

Not much remains from those days. I’m not sure Schiro would approve. Nevertheless, he should be applauded and honored for everything he gave to this town. He improved the lives of thousands. He brought music to the masses.

In the end, we still have the crumbling Garden City building, empty and abandoned for years now. Yet from the wreckage, if one walks by, a lotus of history just might bloom.