He stops and points, exclaiming, “Hey!” and wanting to talk. He speaks with a slight accent, in long sentences that refuse to stay in one place. He knows what’s wrong with this city, and he’ll tell you. When asked for his name, he said to call him “Funky J.”
“People know Funky J.”
So, there: Funky J, 73, was born in Nicaragua. His family brought him here when he was just a kid, 13 or 14, around the same age he first started making music. He came up playing bass and percussion for Latin ensembles, eventually moving to fusion and jazz.
Back in the seventies, he says, nightclubs were all over, with live music everywhere you went. Sometimes he and his friends would post up on a street corner and play there, just for the hell of it.
He’s lived all over the city, including the Mission. He’s only left once, in the early aughts, after a year he swears was so foggy, he never once saw the sun. It wasn’t long after 9-11, and the whole country was solemn.
“I was depressed,” Funky J said. So he fled to sunny, fogless Florida to elope with a woman he met on AOL.
It didn’t work out. A year later, he was back in the city. But he could sense that change had already taken hold. In place of the lively nightclubs were buttoned-up “jazz cafes.”
“There were goddamned jazz cafes everywhere,” he said.
They weren’t all bad — he remembered one fondly, the Revolution Cafe on 22nd Street, between Mission and Valencia, which had live music almost every night. He said most of the musicians on weeknights played for free, grateful for the tips and space to practice outside of neighbors’ and landlords’ earshot.
Best of Times, Worst of Times
Over the years, he’s seen the city move on from the music scene of his youth. The pandemic didn’t help.
“And then, somehow, everything was gone,” he says.
Nowadays, he doesn’t play much — he says he’s done with jazz, and only does funk now. It’s too bad none of his friends know how to play it. And in the past few weeks, he’s picked up a new hobby.
“The bass, the drums, the conga, those were my toys. Those were what I played with,” he said. But now, an electric scooter he bought for $199.99, after weeks of deliberations, takes up his time.
“If I saw people on scooters, I would stop them on the street and ask them questions. I was reading about scooters; how much does it cost, this one versus that one.”
He likes to practice around Civic Center, near his apartment. He only rides a few days a week, though. Funky J points to his legs: “This scooter needs to charge too.”