Jerry Karp, a San Francisco based Jazz Critic, who has written stories and reviews for Downbeat, The San Francisco Chronicle, and other major publications, was commissioned by GarageGallery to attend GarageGallery Salon #2 on August 17, and write a story based on his evening's experience; To learn more about Jerry, visit his Rocket Words web site.

Cars and Art and Music and Wine: One Good Way to Spend an Evening

By Jerry Karp

I’m in a large, high ceilinged, brick-walled room on Bryant Street in San Francisco’s South of Market District. The room is buzzing with people moving singly and in groups all around me, wine and sandwiches in hand.  Displayed on the spacious walls are large, powerful original paintings, each in its own way alive with bold, bursts of movement and color. From the far end of the room a woman is singing snappy jazz standards, backed by a sprightly and swinging quintet. The day's last rays of light filter in through the sort of beveled glass ceiling that suggests an industrial past for the building and the neighborhood both. I’m taking this all in while lounging from the front seat of a sporty convertible plunked down squarely in the middle of the chamber.

In fact, it’s not strange at all that there’s a car in the middle of the room. The oddity is more the art, the people, the wine and the jazz, for my bucket seat perch is in a lovely if aging Saab, planted where it belongs, in the showroom of Embarcadero Automotive, one of the Bay Area’s San Francisco’s premier Saab dealerships. The event, dubbed the GarageGallery Salon #2 and Exhibition, is, as the moniker suggests, the second art event of its kind hosted by the business’s co-owner Peter MacLaird and curated by busy San Francisco photographer Bram Goodwin, in his first foray into art presentation, with input from artist/curator Susan Tuttle.

While there’s a lot going on, it’s the art that’s brought the assemblage together, and by all indications the work is going over well.  Suzun Hughes’ large colorful abstract works, are computer generated patterns and images overlaid and manipulated, printed onto canvas and then painted over with acrylics into graceful statements of movement and form. Flicka McGurrin’s large paintings portray outdoor urban scenes in bold, sometimes startling, strokes. A darkened, night-time café and a freight tanker at dawn provide particularly affecting images.  And Warren Travis’ lively, dancing, bursts of surrealist color seem to place the viewer among hillside stands of riotous, luminous life.

Hughes explains that she’s especially impressed with the large, high walls of the showroom as an art viewing space. “My pieces are pretty big,” she says, “and sometimes I have trouble placing them.  I just love the fact that there’s space here to hang larger works.”

The first GarageGallery Salon was, by all accounts, successful, but for this second outing, Goodwin and his co-conspirators have gotten even more ambitious, adding the live music and the poetry reading that’s about to kick-off when the band takes a break. And Goodwin has had a village-worth of help in getting this event off the ground. Eric Whittington, owner of the excellent Bird & Beckett Bookstore in the cozy Glen Park neighborhood has done his part by arranging for the music, an ensemble of local jazz veterans and part of the regular roster of players who regularly perform at his store on Friday evenings.

The band is comprised of flutist and bass clarinetist Chuck Peterson, saxophonist Barbara Hunter, keyboardist Henry Irvin, bassist Don Prell and drummer Art Lewis, with the lovely Dorothy Lefkovits providing elegant vocals on favorites like Duke Ellington’s “Do Nothing ‘Til You Hear from Me.”

The swinging combo strikes exactly the right note in turning the art event into a full-scale party. In the meantime, just over the threshold between the showroom and the mechanics area, bartenders Jim Moore and Mel Knox are pouring wines from the L Uvaggio di Giacomo winery in Napa. And “GarageGallery Girls” Jill Kingensmith and Emma Scripps are working the crowd, hawking Vietnamese sandwiches for five bucks a throw. 

During the evening, I ask MacLaird, a tall, friendly, easygoing fellow with a quick laugh, about his history in event hosting.

“We’ve been in business for about 25 years,” he explains. “This is our fourth location. We just bought this building just a year and a half ago, and it’s the kind of place that just begs to have events.  In our former location at Broadway and Sansome, we had some events that weren’t quite so ambitious.  We had a couple of plays and weddings. We even had a David Letterman show. When Letterman did his show at the Palace of Fine Arts, they held the overflow at our dealership. In order to stay amused, I have to do something besides work on cars, and I’ve always liked these sort of affairs. You know, as long as nothing bad happens, and the city doesn’t shut me down, why not?  Maybe even sell a car or two, and have a good time, for sure.”

With a flourish, the band swings to a halt. The hubbub of voices rises, but now we find ourselves called to silence. The poetry reading is about to begin. And as writer Walker Brents begins reciting a prose poem about time spent in the mountains, the idea of the reading seems perhaps to be a mistake, an intrusion into the vibe of the moment. But soon an attentive semi-circle of listeners forms. By the time Brents has concluded and Victoria Sanchez has begun her series of engagingly textured poems, it seems that the poets have, in fact, carried the moment. Listeners come and go, moving easily into the next room and back during the half-hour or so of readings, as Sanchez is followed by Jerry Ferraz’s somewhat self-conscious but ultimately winning recital, Katharine Harer’s hip, scatting poems, read to the accompaniment of keyboards, base and drums, and Marv Heimstra’s quirky compositions.

Still, the evening seems to pick up a bit of steam once the band takes the stage for its second set. One of the unique aspects of the evening is the easy mix of attendees. Some folks here are friends of the artists or otherwise regular participants in the art exhibition circuit. Some are Saab owners who are on the dealership’s mailing list. Hughes, in fact, first heard about the GarageGallery because she owns a Saab. Others are pals of one or more of the poets. More than a few are simply pals of Goodwin’s from the Cole Valley coffee shop he hangs out in (this writer is in that number).  At any rate, it’s a fun and easy mix of people.

As I recline in my convertible (which is one of three in the room and which the sticker tells me is a 1999 Saab 9-3 SE Convertible 2D 4-Cyl 2.0L HO Turbo), a smiling, bright-eyed woman named Patricia wanders by and tells me with a smile how good I look sitting in it. She turns out to be a friend of Whittington’s, a steady customer of Bird & Beckett’s, and a huge fan of the band’s Friday night performance in the bookstore, a performance she urges me to attend sooner rather than later.

Soon thereafter, a dapper fellow in a cap and sports jacket strolls over. He, too, wants me to know how good I look in the Saab, but this gent, whose name turns out to be Bruce Martin, wants something else, as well. He is Embarcadero Automotive’s sales manager, and he wants me to buy the car. His approach is endearingly whimsical, however; he seems to consider the prospect of selling a Saab, cool car that it is, at an art exhibition rather a long shot. We’re on the same wavelength there, and when he drifts away, we part as friends.

Adding to the charm of the evening is the building itself, possessing as it does that singular comfortable industrial feel that seems unique in San Francisco to the old South of Market edifices. Going back through the structure’s history, you feel yourself peeling back archeological layers of the city’s history. MacLaird tells me that the building began as part of a lumber yard, and that it was then in turn a carriage shop and a perforated steel company.

“Sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s,” he says, “it was turned into a design studio, and after that a Japanese pokemon consortium. We’re just reclaiming it, bringing it back to its roots.”

Whether a combined auto dealership/art exhibition hall really represents this building’s “roots” may remain an open question, but no matter. I understood what MacLaird meant, and in any case, in South of Market San Francisco, the formula seems just about right.

In the end, the GarageGallery Salon #2 turned out to feature good art, good music, good wine, fun people and some cool cars in an excellent space. You have to like that.