Veteran jazzman Jackson still singing from the heart at 90

Veteran jazzman Jackson still singing from the heart at 90

In his seven decades as a fixture of the Bay Area jazz scene, pianist and singer Frank Jackson has committed countless songs to memory.

Largely self-taught, he learned to read music well enough to use sheet music to fill a customer’s request for one of those rare tunes he doesn’t know.

“I’ve tried to make a list of how many I know, but there’s always something else that comes up that’s not on the list,” he says while sitting at the kitchen table of his Gilroy home, where he has lived for four years after residing in San Francisco for 69.

“I’ve always been a hound dog for music, and not just one style,” adds Jackson, whose fascination with songs was sparked by listening to the popular NBC radio program “Your Hit Parade” while he was growing up in tiny Cleburne, Texas, near Fort Worth.

Jazz and blues singer Kim Nalley has long been a Jackson booster and frequently booked and sat in with his trio during her six years as proprietor of Jazz at Pearl’s in North Beach.

“We first bonded over obscure Nat ‘King’ Cole tunes that he would know,” Nalley says.

Other guest performers that evening will include vocalist Kenny Washington and saxophonist Noel Jewkes.

Bassist Al Obidniski and drummer Vince Lateano, both of whom have worked with Jackson since the ’60s, will play both days.

Jackson initially wanted to be a guitarist like his father, but he says his dad didn’t have the patience to teach him.

Jackson, his four older siblings, his parents and two nephews moved from Texas to San Francisco in 1942 and rented a house in the Fillmore district that had previously been occupied by a Japanese family that was interned during World War II.

“You get tired of being called ‘boy’ and your father being called ‘uncle,’” he says of how he and other African American males were treated in Texas.

With his own groups and as a sideman, sometimes backing such touring artists as T-Bone Walker, Ruth Brown and Jimmy Witherspoon, he played all the joints.

“They started buying up all the homes and taking them away from people, paying them for it,” he says.