By Lee Hildebrand

ART HICKMAN WAS San Francisco's first superstar recording artist. A half century before Jefferson Airplane and Santana brought San Francisco music to prominence, Hickman and his nine musicians from the St. Francis Hotel's Rose Room were scoring hit after national hit – 14 in all, with two, "Hold Me" and "The Love Nest," reaching number one in 1920. The Oakland-born bandleader was in the vanguard of American popular music, his innovations influencing dance bands from New York City to Los Angeles. And he was a hero at home. The San Francisco Call Bulletin dubbed him the "king of jazz"; the San Francisco Chronicle, the "father of syncopation"; the San Francisco Examiner, the "founder of jazz"; and the Oakland Tribune, the "originator of the jazz tempo."

Today Hickman is an all-but-forgotten figure, a footnote, if that, in jazz history books. His music, a precursor to the jazz-imbued big-band dance music popularized by Paul Whiteman a few years later, hasn't been easy to judge due to the recording quality. The couple dozen 78s Hickman made for Columbia Records between 1919 and 1921 were recorded nonelectronically and thus sound as if they were cut inside a tin can. The asphalt-like substance Columbia mixed into its shellac further detracts from the listening experience, though the discs apparently sound cleaner when played with steel needles on the hand-cranked machines for which they were intended.

Archeophone Records, a St. Joseph, Ill., company that specializes in reissuing recordings from the late 19th and early 20th century, makes Art Hickman's Orchestra more aurally accessible on a new 25-track CD titled The San Francisco Sound, Volume 1. Richard Martin, a record collector and self-taught sound engineer who runs Archeophone with his wife, estimates he spent between two and three hours cleaning up each of the songs on the disc. "We brighten 'em up a bit," he says. A second volume of The San Francisco Sound is due out next year.

Ears of corn

Martin may have made Hickman's music easier on the ears, but it remains corny as hell. A precariously pitched violin frequently wavers over syrupy saxophones, and flutter-tongued trumpet and trombone carry melodies along against the chunk-a-chunk of two banjos and the clippity-clop of Hickman's tom-toms and woodblocks. And when Hickman plays slide whistle, a handheld contraption also known as a "Frisco whistle," the sonority is nearly as grating as fingernails on a chalkboard. He comes off better on piano, however, playing spirited ragtime duets with pianist Frank Ellis.

In his extensively researched liner notes for The San Francisco Sound, Volume 1, Bruce Vermazen – a retired UC Berkeley philosophy professor now living in San Diego – presents a picture of Hickman that's in some ways more fascinating than the music. Born in 1886, Hickman was apparently a self-taught musician and natural-born hustler. Before forming his band in 1914, he managed several cinemas and vaudeville houses in San Francisco and Sacramento and also worked as an entertainment journalist, briefly serving as San Francisco correspondent for Variety. And he made a killing in real estate before 1920, the year his band became a national sensation. He died in 1930.

Vermazen finds much to recommend in Hickman's music. "From listening to other things that were going on at the time, the most interesting thing about him was the idea of playing part of the record as straight dance music and the rest of it as kind of a jam, with each instrument going its own way," Vermazen says. "One instrument will be playing the lead, and two, three, or four instruments will just be going their own way at the same time. That's the jazzy part."

Homesick

Art Hickman's Orchestra might have become even more popular than it was – and lasted longer – if its members hadn't been so attached to San Francisco. In September 1919 the band traveled to NYC in a private Pullman car – "furnished with a piano, so they could rehearse en route," Vermazen writes, to record 28 songs in eight or nine days for Columbia. While in the Big Apple the band played a week at the prestigious Biltmore Hotel but rejected a lucrative offer for an extended engagement because the musicians "were crazy about San Francisco." Two years later the band broke up for good, the players abandoning Hickman during a stay in Los Angeles due to homesickness.

Vermazen would like to bring Hickman's music back to life – much as he did locally with early-20th-century theater orchestra music when he played cornet in the now-defunct Chrysanthemum Ragtime Band – but thus far has been frustrated in getting his hands on original Hickman scores. "A guy in New York says he has some," Vermazen says, "but he won't let me touch them."