Back Beats #4: Black beats, white fans?
Wherein articles from the archive in which music and the literary find common currency earn a fresh airing
Jazz and New York are synonymous; jazz and the Beat Generation once shared a symbiotic connection. In the summer of 2009, I took the temperature of that musical style at a couple of legendary venues in the heart of Manhattan, half a century and more after Kerouac and friends had gone looking for the ultimate horn solo. This piece, originally published as ‘All this jazz: Blue notes and Birdland’, appeared in Words of Warner on August 15th, 2009.
THERE ARE conflicting accounts of the state of jazz in the USA. On the one hand, the style is championed as the great, ground-breaking music of the American twentieth-century – a bold, brash blast from a downtrodden people, a white-hot torrent of black innovation, courageously forged in the face of racial oppression.
On the other, jazz has been pigeon-holed as something else: a marginalised format briefly wheeled on, from time to time, to evoke the nocturnal angst of the city streets in a TV cop show soundtrack but now little more than a historical oddity, a music that the vast majority of Americans know exists but not a form they care that much about.
But whether jazz is art or muzak, an emblem of freedom or, increasingly, a kind of urban guerrilla folk, there is little issue that it struggles to make a commercial mark. In a land where country and R&B dominate and rock and pop follow close behind, jazz remains a style at the very edges. The critics may talk it up but the customers continue to put it down – jazz is either too old-fashioned or too difficult for the average listener.
This is not hard to explain. When a musical genre stretches from the most mainstream of Broadway balladry to the most extreme of free-form cacophony, it is little wonder that those wandering the middle-of-the-road marketplace become confused. Jazz can mean ear-soothing musical theatre; it can also equal mind-bending dissonance.
Yet in the midst of this diversity, few would dispute that New York City remains the capital of this eclectic musical language. If jazz was seeded in places like New Orleans and Kansas City, it blossomed in Manhattan – from Ellington’s Cotton Club to Parker’s Minton’s Playhouse, Coltrane’s Village Vanguard and Miles’ Fillmore East – and, if much of middle America has largely tuned out, the Big Apple still clicks its fingers to this particular beat.
I was in Manhattan in the last fortnight or so, keen to check the pulse of jazz in a couple of its surviving hotspots. The Blue Note in Greenwich Village describes itself as ‘the world’s finest jazz club’. Birdland, which makes its home in Midtown, is arguably the most famous jazz club of all. I paid a visit to both to assess the health of the patient.
At this point we should add a small proviso. The Blue Note has been in the heart of the bohemian Village for almost thirty years; Birdland was once the great venue of the greatest jazz stretch in the city. But 52nd Street’s musical breath ceased long ago, the victim of commercial re-development. Its hippest hall – named after Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker – has since appeared in two new locations, its history still celebrated but somewhat peripatetic.
So, Monday night at the Blue Note. A deep, not-so-wide, club stretching away from the narrow street. A short bar by the door, a wide stage set centrally laid long-on to the room, and rows of tables, some at floor level others set on a raised platform, forming a circle, so to speak, above the stalls.
There’ll be two performances this evening by the same artist – an early set at 8pm, a second at 10.30. This we may characterise as a quieter night in a highly prestigious venue and the talent on offer is not yet widely known but, this being the Blue Note, the standard is still likely to be high. You have to be knocking on the doors of the big league to get a gig here.
And Mavis ‘Swan’ Poole, a singer joined by her ten-piece band Soul Understated, does not disappoint, bringing a raft of influences into play – soul, funk, reggae – but still respecting the jazz code: a three piece horn section – including a rarity, a woman sax player – deliver some firm, authoritative stabs before moving sweetly into extended solos and the guitarist – a white boy in an otherwise all-black combo, though rather hidden away – does step into the limelight from time to time to trade some deliciously angular and unconventional licks.
There’s a good house for the occasion but you sense this is not quite a normal night. The vast majority of the audience – like me – suggest early-in-the-week visitors to the city and few carry an African-American mark except, that is, for the knots of fans closest to the stage who, it transpires, are mostly friends and relatives of the group.
For a $10 entry and a mere $5 dollar cover – the amount you must spend of food or drink – this is a great value evening and a terrific way to experience a legendary club. But the fact that those present – the band and their coterie apart – are predominantly non-black makes you wonder if the music is now a curiosity, a relic for the white folks to vicariously digest but of little moment to indigenous African-Americans.
Early Friday evening, Birdland. At 5.15pm, the venue runs an after-work, end-of-week live session. As you step from the brilliant, clammy July sidewalk into the cool dark of the club you feel like you are traversing a time tunnel. The place may not be the original, but a sizeable space featuring a broad arc of diners grouped around a stage platform evokes a 1940s evening. Monochrome photographs and smartly suited waitresses add to the effect.
This venture is a little more expensive – $20 a head, $10 cover – but the fare on offer raises the stakes somewhat. If Mavis Poole and group are caught on the cusp of neo-soul or soul funk, even if the trappings have a jazz veneer, Tommy Igoe and the Birdland Big Band are standard-bearers for a particular brand of music that wears its heart on in sleeve and has scant chance of crossing over or moving much beyond its committed following.
Yet even the notion of the big band can be misleading. The tradition, which we might date back to Count Basie or even to white frontmen like Tommy Dorsey, is usually linked with a particular brand of war-time swing. However, the last couple of decades have seen major contemporary jazz players – Mike Gibbs, Carla Bley and Jaco Pastorius all come to mind – regarding the expanded ensemble as an opportunity to showcase much more recent jazz repertoire, not a trip through the lanes of memory.
Drummer Igoe’s band is very much in the latterday mould, drawing the core of its playlist from the last quarter of a century – Michael Brecker and Weather Report’s Pastorius, for instance, provide the material they play. And what a band they are: 15 top-of-the-tree instrumentalists led with infectious verve by their percussive general and all capable of staggering rhythmic switches and blistering extemporisation.
Trombones trade solos with the facility of electric guitars; the guest bass player, a member of the house band on Late Night with David Letterman, plucks his amplified strings with a puckish glee; and the battery of saxes and trumpets come back, tune after tune, with scales and runs that leave you breathless. In short, the crème de la crème of jazzmen – correction, there is, again, one woman on reeds – in the premier jazz city in the world are simply doing their thing, the best of their kind hitting the highest notes.
Yet, and yet, and I feel obliged to come back to this point, the black presence in the room – on the platform and at the tables – is virtually nil. One trombonist appears to have African-Asian antecedents; every other player is white. Plus the diners, with a tiny handful of exceptions, are white, too. Jazz is venerated, yes, but by a discreet minority and barely, it seems, by that ethnic segment which devised the form.
It strikes me as odd and sad. But Igoe’s orchestra are so outstanding that you can only take the liberal view that this thrilling music simply crosses concepts of race or culture and has a universal power.
My non-scientific survey proved very little but it was an indicator, I think, of the state of play. Jazz is thriving before packed – yet still modest – crowds in intimate settings. But to go the Blue Note and Birdland is to join the faithful, to take your seat next to he converted. The striking matter is the absence of an African-American support for this aesthetic brand.
Poole and co perform a tasteful jazz version that could conceivably find a foothold in the soul charts and leave the more testing complexities of their core music behind them some day. As a consequence, they may well draw young black supporters in greater numbers. Igoe and his ace team will continue their exhilarating Friday evening jaunts as long as there are a gallery of middle-aged fans willing to join the party. But I doubt many of them will be from the Harlem end of town.
More than thirty years ago, I remember wandering into a jazz bar in New Orleans only to find a quintet of average white musicians bumbling through some Armstrong-like 12-bar blues. I was shocked then not to discover black talent carrying forward this musical legacy. But that earlier experience makes me much less surprised today that the future of these sounds – on stage to an extent and certainly at the box office – probably rests with those who have adopted these traditions rather than those who were born in to them.
Thoughtful and engaging piece Simon. I particularly enjoyed your account of the band at Birdland. I wonder what your experience would have been had you gone to the Vanguard and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Should you find yourself in Boston in the future, and should it reopen once the pandemic has receded, you might well enjoy an evening at Wally's, an historic Jazz Club, one that always drew black and white audiences alike. https://wallyscafe.com