Within days of an announcement that the Fillmore Jazz Festival, the largest free jazz event on the West Coast, would be canceled this year due to lack of funding, word now comes that the event will be revived with help from local crypto investor Chris Larsen, The Voice has learned.
The Fillmore Merchants Association has also launched a preservation fund to solicit further donations.
When Larsen, the former chief of crypto company Ripple, saw multiple headlines on April 3 that the festival would be canceled due to a $440,000 funding shortfall, he started inquiring about how he could help.
“Yeah, we are helping with that,” Larsen told The Voice in a phone call. “I was kind of surprised when I saw that story that it wasn’t gonna happen, and it’s such a super important festival.” He referred to the festival as one of several well-established events that are “really critical,” along with clean streets and public safety, to drawing visitor revenue into the city.
Larsen gained a high profile as a benefactor of causes, both political and civic, in the years after San Francisco took several economic hits in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, he made a $1 million donation to several food banks in the city. He also set up a $1 million charity to fund wellness and community outreach projects for the San Francisco Police Department in 2022. In 2021, he used $1.7 million of his funds to set up Avenue Greenlight, a program that bolsters neighborhood business associations.
Larsen has also made significant political donations, including $350,000 to campaigns for ballot measures to strengthen law enforcement, which were supported by former Mayor London Breed in 2023. The previous year, he donated $100,000 to the campaign opposing the recall of then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
‘We started getting discussions going on Friday, so we pivoted quickly and applied in time. … It’s amazing news. It helps to cry wolf, I guess.’
The assistance for the festival will be provided through Avenue Greenlight, which has also assisted other projects for the Fillmore Merchants Association for several years, according to Patti Mangan, executive director of the Fillmore Merchants Association. Additional assistance will be forthcoming from the offices of Supervisors Stephen Sherrill and Bilal Mahmood, whose districts include the Fillmore neighborhood.
The Fillmore Merchants Association, which sponsors the Fillmore Jazz Festival, now back on for early July, announced at an April 2 neighborhood meeting that they would cancel the event this year due to the inability to raise sufficient funds before the April 4 deadline to apply for the permit.
“Producing a free two–day festival in San Francisco incurs hundreds of thousands of investments in production, security, recycling, staffing, staging, city fees, musicians, marketing, porta-potties, and much more. The nonprofit association is in debt due to production costs,” read a statement from the association, noting that the festival had been running at a loss for the past two years.
“We weren’t seeing any funding coming, and we weren’t seeing any interest that was really formulating. We had also been waiting for grant announcements that never materialized,” added Mangan.
Meanwhile, some neighborhood merchants had been bemoaning the earlier bad news.
“It would be a real loss to the neighborhood,” Gregory Wood, proprietor of Forest Books in Japantown, told The Voice in a phone call. “It’s a cultural thing, it’s history. People need to be educated about the importance of jazz, the relationship between jazz and the African American community, and the Japanese American community as a beacon for cooperation. Whatever the decision-making behind it was, it was short-sighted.”
Other events adjacent to the Fillmore and District 5 have proved more resilient. This year’s Cherry Blossom Festival in Japantown happens later this month, and the new Eid street fair held this weekend in the Tenderloin has been hailed as a success.
Mangan and Tim Omi, owner of cannabis retailers Blackstreet Holdings, took over leadership of the association in 2023. “We are new, so maybe we’re not that sophisticated at fundraising,” Mangan added. “But we’re learning and are crawling as fast as we can.”
Once Mangan and Omi got word of the extra help from Larsen, they worked quickly to secure the permit. “We started getting discussions going on Friday, so we pivoted very quickly and submitted an application in time,” said Mangan, who described the new help as “amazing news. It helps to cry wolf, I guess.”
