Take the Georgia Viaduct east from downtown, and just as you slide over Main Street and onto Prior, look left. There’s a field there, a flat, muddy expanse that’s typically home to a few bedraggled seagulls and, on occasion, a knot of elderly Strathcona denizens practising tai chi. But 40 years ago, before the botched urban-renewal project that funnels commuter traffic onto the East Side’s residential streets, that field and the area around it were home to a long-established African-Canadian community—and the late-night revels of a city that was otherwise known for uptight Anglican rectitude.

The area was colloquially known as Hogan’s Alley, after one of its less salubrious thoroughfares, and Chic Gibson’s parents ran one of its premiere nightspots and eateries, the Country Club. The restaurant became known throughout the Pacific Northwest as a place where travelling jazz musicians and railway porters could get a home-cooked meal. Were it standing today, people would be lining up to sit where Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington once ordered fried chicken and collard greens—and it’s not too late to get a taste of that era, thanks to East End Blues and All That Jazz, a new production from Vancouver Moving Theatre.

“People would come there for special occasions,” Gibson recalls, on the line from his home in New Westminster. “And during and after the war, the American soldiers and sailors would come up from Washington state. They’d never been to Canada before, some of them, and they wanted to get some soul food, and mom did the stuff very much like the old South, so they really felt at home there. And we’d have a live band or a piano player playing, so all the people came there and just had a great time.”

Yes, times were hard, Gibson admits. “People in the area—not only blacks, but people who had that address—had a difficult time getting a job,” he explains. “They got all the bad gossip about how bad it was in the East End—although everybody went there to have fun. You know the story!”

Even if you don’t, East End Blues and All That Jazz promises to be an especially entertaining way to celebrate Black History Month. The show incorporates an array of neighbourhood reminiscences, compiled by the late theatre artist and singer Denis Simpson and cowritten by Savannah Walling with Leonard Gibson. But at its heart are the songs of the era, sung by Candus Churchill, Tom Pickett, and Gibson’s sister, Thelma, with Chic himself acting as host and MC.

“It really does a good job of telling the neighbourhood’s history through music,” the veteran actor says. “That’s one of the things that carried my parents and most of the people there through, you know: their love of music, and how it played such an important part in their lives and culture.”

Jazz, blues, and gospel are the show’s primary focus, but Gibson notes that the neighbourhood’s most famous musical export, rock innovator Jimi Hendrix, will also be honoured with a song.

“When he was small, he lived across the street from us,” he recalls with a chuckle. “And then he was here a number of times playing with Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers. They played the Smilin’ Buddha and stuff like that. In fact, I worked at the Smilin’ Buddha and I was there the day he got fired for playing too loud and strange. He was working out his dream, and of course nobody was ready for that. They were a bunch of middle-aged people thinking, ”˜What on earth is going on?’”

Like the urban planners who arranged the destruction of Hogan’s Alley, those listeners had a limited view of the future. Whether things have improved remains a matter for debate—but at least we now know enough to treasure the past.

East End Blues and All That Jazz runs at the Firehall Arts Centre from Friday to Sunday (February 18 to 20).