Great Revival Musicians
Bob Schulz, Lu Watters, Dottie Lawless Annie Street, San Francisco
Meet the Players
San Francisco musicians of the Great Revival ranged from the pioneering players Lu Watters, Turk Murphy, and Bob Helm to younger musicians, including Leon Oakley, who joined the Turk Murphy Jazz Band in the late 1960s.
Only a fraction of the key players involved in the early traditional jazz movement are presented here.
Sometimes they worked together like one large band, moving among groups under different leaders, performing in a variety of settings, in outdoor venues and union halls, in clubs, on the concert stage and for recording sessions.
Whether or not they jammed at the Big Bear Bear Tavern, all of the musicians of the Great Revival were:
- Brilliant, highly trained, multi-instrumentalists, arrangers, composers, equally capable of playing jazz, blues, big band swing, or pop music of the day.
- Passionate about the music, independent and open-minded in an era when black culture was ignored; they embraced the hot jazz sound of first generation jazzmen King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and many others.
- Researchers, scouring junk stores, going door to door, looking for old records and sheet music to document a music that had all but disappeared.