🎶 2022-03-17 10:01:35 – Paris/France.
Surfacing
The jazz club, with its dim lighting and tight tables, occupies an important place in our collective imagination. But today, music thrives in a multitude of different spaces.
A disco ball cast beads of light onto a crowded dance floor on a recent Monday night in Lower Manhattan as old movie footage rolled down a wall near the stage. Half a dozen musicians were up there, churning out waves of rhythm that reshaped over time: a transition might start with a double tap of chords, reggae-style, from keyboardist Ray Angry, or a new vocal line, improvised and looped. by singer Kamilah.
A classically trained pianist who spent time with D'Angelo and the Roots, Angry doesn't call the tunes, in jazz parlance. As usual, his band was cooking up grooves from scratch, treating the audience as a participant. Together they filled the cramped two-story club with rhythm and body heat until well after midnight.
Since before the coronavirus pandemic, Angry has conducted his weekly Producer Mondays jam sessions (Covid restrictions permitting) at Nublu, an Alphabet City venue that feels more like a small European nightclub than a jazz club. New Yorker. With a diverse clientele and a varied roster of shows, Nublu's management keeps a foothold in the jazz world while reserving electronic and rock music as well. On Monday, everything is linked.
As New York nightlife has picked up again in recent months, it's been a major comfort to return to legacy jazz venues, like the Village Vanguard or the Blue Note, most of which have survived the pandemic. But the real blood-pumping moments — the shows where you can sense other musicians are in the room listening to new stuff, and it feels like the script is still being written on stage – occurred most often in venues that don't look like typical jazz clubs. These are spaces where jazz bleeds out and dialogues with a less regimented audience.
"The scene started to fracture," drummer and producer Kassa Overall, 39, said in a recent interview, admitting he wasn't sure which venue would become ground zero for the next generation of innovators. “I don't think he has found a home yet. And that's fine, actually.
This is an exceptionally exciting time for live jazz. Young conductors again have a large following – Makaya McCraven, Esperanza Spalding, Robert Glasper and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah each rack up millions of plays on the services of Streaming — and a generation of musicians and listeners are lined up to follow their lead or break away. This year, for the first time, the artist with the most Grammy nominations is a jazzman who has taken the plunge: Jon Batiste.
The music of these players never quite felt right at home in jazz clubs, nor did the more avant-garde and witty work of artists like James Brandon Lewis, Shabaka Hutchings, Angel Bat Dawid, Kamasi Washington, Nicole Mitchell or the Sun Ra Arkestra, all of which are in high demand these days.
It may be a case of coincidence. A confluence of forces – the pandemic, the volatility of New York real estate, an increasingly digital culture – has upended the landscape, and with music rapidly changing, it also seems to be finding new homes.
Jazz is live embodiment music. Part of its power has always been to change the way we come together (jazz clubs were among the first truly integrated social spaces in northern cities), and artists have always reacted to the environment in which they were being heard. So updating our sense of where this music is happening could be fundamental to restoring jazz's place in culture, especially at a time when culture seems primed for a new wave of jazz.
FIFTY-NINE YEARS A few years ago, poet and critic Amiri Baraka (then writing as LeRoi Jones) reported in DownBeat magazine that New York's big clubs had lost interest in the "newness" of jazz. The freer, more confrontational and Afrocentric styles of improvisation that had taken hold – the revolution of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, for short – were no longer welcome in commercial clubs. So artists started booking themselves into downtown cafes and their own lofts instead.
The music never stopped bubbling and evolving, but since the 1960s, jazz clubs – a holdover from the Prohibition era, with their windowless intimacy and tightly packed tables – have rarely felt like a perfect home for the future development of music. At the same time, it has been impossible to shake off our attachment to the idea that clubs are the “authentic” home of jazz, a jealously guarded idyll in every American imagination.
But Joel Ross, 26, a famous vibraphonist living in Brooklyn, said that especially in the two years since the coronavirus shutdowns began, many young musicians have gotten out of the habit of touring jazz venues. typical. “Cats just play in restaurants and random places,” he said, citing a few musician-led sessions that kicked off in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but not in traditional clubs.
Sometimes it's not a public thing at all. “People are getting together more at home and putting music together,” Ross said.
Singer, flautist and producer Melanie Charles, 34, has turned her Bushwick home into a rehearsal space, recording studio and gathering place. And when she does, it's usually not in straight jazz clubs. His music uses electronics and calls for something heavier than a double bass, so these venues might not have what it takes. "Musicians like me and my peers, we need a bump on the bottom," she said. “Our hardware won't work in those spaces the way we want it to. »
Café Erzulie, a Haitian restaurant and bar nestled along the border between the Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods of Brooklyn, is among Charles' favorite places to gamble. With blue-green walls painted with palm leaf designs and bistro tables set around the room and patio, the club hosts a wide range of music, including R&B jams; album release shows and birthday parties for genre artists like KeiyaA and Pink Siifu; and a weekly jazz night on Thursdays.
Jazz Night returned this month after a late-night pandemic-induced hiatus, and demand hadn't waned: The venue was close to capacity, with crowds of brightly dressed young patrons seated at tables and rolled up around the bar.
Jonathan Michel, bass player and musical confidant of Charles, was joined by keyboardist Axel Tosca and percussionist Bendji Allonce, playing rumba-focused rearrangements of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy", jazz standards and traditional Caribbean songs. The crowd was listening, which didn't always mean quiet. But when Allonce and Tosca gave up and Michel took a thoughtful, not too insistent bass solo, the room fell silent.
Charles sat down with the trio halfway through their set, singing a heartbreaking original, “Symphony,” and an old Haitian song, “Lot Bo.” Almost immediately, she had 90% of the place quiet and 100% attentive. As the group galloped on “Lot Bo,” she took a break from improvisation in flowing, plunging, melismatic runs to explain what the song's lyrics mean: “I have to cross this river; when I get to the other side, I will rest,” she said. "It's been tough out here on these streets," she told the crowd, receiving a buzz of recognition. “The rest is radical, discreet. »
The Erzulie Cafe is just one of a handful of relatively new places in Brooklyn that have established their own identity, independent of jazz, but provide an environment for music to flourish. Public Records opened in Gowanus in 2019 with the primary mission of presenting electronic music in a hi-fi setting. He had originally planned to perform improv combos in his cafe space, separate from the main sound room, but his curators have recently welcomed the music more fully.
Wild Birds, a restaurant and venue in Crown Heights, has incorporated jazz into its regular lineup alongside cumbia, afrobeat and other live music. It will often start a given evening with a live band and audience seating, then transition to a dance floor scenario with a DJ In Greenpoint, IRL Gallery regularly hosts experimental jazz alongside visual art exhibits and live music. electronic music reservations. Facing south, in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, the Owl Music Parlor hosts jazz as well as chamber music and singer-songwriter fare; Zanmi, a few blocks away, is another Haitian restaurant where jazz performances often sound like a roux of related musical cultures.
And jazz turns out to be more than just a feather in a place's cultural hat. The rooms are actually filling up. “On the one hand, we are targeting a very specific type of population: young people of color, who I think really understand and appreciate jazz music,” said Mark Luxama, the owner of Cafe Erzulie, explaining the success of Jazz Night. “We managed to fill the seats.
Plus, he added, “it's really not about the money for Jazz Night. I think it's more about creating a community and being able to create a space for musicians to do their thing and have a really good time.
FROM THE START, the history of New York jazz clubs has been a history of white performers receiving preferential treatment. The first time history remembers jazz being played in a New York establishment was in the winter of 1917, when the Dixieland Original Jass Band – all white and dishonestly named (so little that their sound was original ) – flew in from New Orleans to perform at Reisenweber's Café in Columbus Circle. The performances led to a recording contract, and the Dixieland band had soon recorded the world's first commercially distributed jazz sides, for the Victor label.
During Prohibition, jazz became the favorite entertainment of speakeasies and mob joints. Stage business remained mostly in white hands, even in Harlem. But many clubs served a mixed clientele, and jazz halls were among the first public establishments to serve blacks and whites together in the 1920s and 1930s. (Of course, there were notable exceptions.) In interviews for archivist Jeff Gold's recent book, "Sittin' In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s," Quincy Jones and Sonny Rollins each remembered the city's postwar jazz clubs as a sort of oasis. “It was a place of community and pure love of art,” Jones said. “You couldn't find this anywhere else. »
But when jazz became too radical for commerce, the avant-garde was driven out of the clubs and a loft scene arose. Artists found themselves both empowered and impoverished. They were booking their own shows and marketing themselves. But Baraka, writing about one of the first cafes to feature Cecil Taylor's trio, noted a fatal flaw. “No matter what this cafe pays Taylor,” he wrote, “it certainly isn't enough. »
The silver coin never really rocked the forefront, and by the 1980s lofts had mostly closed amid rising rents and less friendly civic attitudes toward semi-legal assembly . Yet this tradition of form breaking and non-prisoners – whether you call it avant-garde, free jazz or fire music – continues.
Over the past few decades, it's had a pair of fierce defenders in bassist William Parker and dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker, a husband-and-wife organizing duo. The Parkers run the Arts Association…
SOURCE: Reviews News
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