Jazz Places

How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History

Kimberly Hannon Teal

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520972841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica jazz

The social connotation of jazz in American popular culture has shifted dramatically since its emergence in the early twentieth century. Once considered youthful and even rebellious, jazz music is now a firmly established American artistic tradition. As jazz in American life has shifted, so too has the kind of venue in which it is performed. In Jazz Places, Kimberly Hannon Teal traces the history of jazz performance from private jazz clubs to public, high-art venues often associated with charitable institutions. As live jazz performance has become more closely tied to nonprofit institutions, the music's heritage has become increasingly important, serving as a means of defining jazz as a social good worthy of charitable support. Though different jazz spaces present jazz and its heritage in various and sometimes conflicting terms, ties between the music and the past play an important role in defining the value of present-day music in a diverse range of jazz venues, from the Village Vanguard in New York to SFJazz on the West Coast to Preservation Hall in New Orleans.

CHAPTER 1

Jazz Heritage Live at the Village Vanguard

There’s no other place on the planet where so many greats played for so many years, and that’s one of those statements that seems like hyperbole, but it’s not. . . . It’s really the only quote unquote holy place left in jazz—period.¹

Loren Schoenberg, artistic director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, on the Village Vanguard

The first night I came to New York to go to college, I came to the Village Vanguard. On a Sunday night, I saw Joe Lovano, Tom Harrell, John Abercrombie, Rufus Reid, and Ed Blackwell play. As the first time I’d seen, well, specifically Ed Blackwell, who is really one of my favorite musicians in history, it was so incredible just to be able to walk down and see him be in this place. There were a lot of other musicians here seeing Lovano and Blackwell—I recognized a lot of musicians. And I think that is the jazz tradition in a sense, a place like the Vanguard where all these people have played. I knew that I wanted to try to be a part of that tradition, so I came to the Vanguard.²

Ethan Iverson, regular performer at the Village Vanguard

February 2020 marked the eighty-sixth year since the Village Vanguard first opened its doors, a venue that began on the fringes of the jazz world that now, for many, stands at its sacred center. Having long held the title of New York City’s oldest nightclub, the small, triangular basement on Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village must appear quite unassuming to those unaware of the club’s rich history. It holds just 123 closely packed seats amidst a display of black and white photos and an old tuba. Yet to today’s jazz musicians, the Vanguard is, as pianist Jason Moran put it, “the place where Moses and Mohammed and Jesus walked!”³ Everything—including the red awning out front, the cozy stage at the point of the triangle, and the multitude of recordings whose covers proclaim them recorded “live at the Village Vanguard”—comes together to evoke memories of great past artists whose faces stare down from the pictures on the club’s walls: Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, and many more.

Commentators often note the consistencies the Vanguard has maintained over the course of the many years it has been open. As Matthew Kassel wrote in a piece for The Observer on the venue’s eightieth birthday, “not much has changed about the Vanguard, its distinct red awning jutting out into the sidewalk like a beacon of stability in a neighborhood that often feels like a palimpsest of itself.”⁴ Yet the very stability of the club and its unbroken links with its own past have begun to drastically set it apart from other venues on the current New York City jazz scene and other clubs throughout the country. While the Vanguard itself has remained remarkably consistent, the cultural meanings surrounding it have fundamentally changed over time, and these changes have ultimately altered the functioning of the club itself. During the past eight decades, the Village Vanguard moved from the periphery of the city’s jazz culture to its heart as it came increasingly to represent not so much an artistic vanguard of musical experimentation as a symbol of a historically sanctified jazz mainstream. An examination of the way place and history interact with music makes plain the growing role of heritage in defining today’s Village Vanguard and its characteristic showcasing of a tradition of small group improvisation with ties, both sonic and philosophical, to bebop and its related subgenres.

The place in which a sound originates shapes our experience of it in a number of ways, both acoustically and culturally, and musicians and audiences have spoken highly of the Vanguard in both regards. In her introduction to the volume Music, Sound and Space, Georgina Born identifies three main lineages of thought in the analysis of sound and space, including metaphorical conceptions of musical space drawn from musical notation, the type of physical spatialization of sound associated with, for example, multichannel recording and a broad third entry point for study that conceptualizes space “not in terms of the internal operations of musical form, nor in terms of the perception of evolving musical or sound objects, but as multiple and constellatory.”⁵ To consider the sounds of the Village Vanguard as multiple and constellatory helps to identify the various meanings that the music of this ostensibly consistent place traverses through ever-shifting contexts of space and time. Rather than functioning as a fixed point in a shifting sea of jazz history, the Vanguard itself also “moves” with currents that shift over time. Drawing on work in geography by Nigel Thrift, Born writes that “rather than think of space as static, unitary and unconnected to time, it should be interpreted as inherently mobile and in motion.”⁶ To search for what the Village Vanguard means to jazz is to search for a moving target, as musical, cultural, temporal, and geographic forces are always shifting the way in which the space is experienced. As Born argues, “Taking account of all the elements in these multiplicities—music and sound, space and time, subjectivity and sociality—all are immanent in the experience of music and sound, and all are continually involved in the mediation of the other terms. Abstractly, the six elements can be conceived as composing a dynamic matrix in which each term potentially mediates all the others, together forming a constellation of multidirectional, virtual transformations. But this tidy image pins down what is more aptly portrayed as a decentered, mobile and unruly flux of mediations.”⁷ The various tensions Born describes as shaping the experience of music, sound, and space occur at the Village Vanguard not only for listeners taking in sound but also for musicians creating those sounds through improvisation on stage. The venue is in a dynamic, ever-changing relationship with musicians, listeners, its local geography, and its broader influence that plays out in part through the musical choices of players as they create the Vanguard’s present sound in real time.

The present Vanguard, however, is always in dialog with the past. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s theorization of heritage production offers a useful way of understanding how past and present now interact in the Village Vanguard. She writes that, “Heritage is created through a process of exhibition (as knowledge, as performance, as museum display). Exhibition endows heritage thus conceived with a second life.”⁸ The musicians who now play at the Village Vanguard perform the line between Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s second life and what could be called a first life, relying on heritage for cultural weight, but facing the additional challenge that the heritage in question traditionally values individuality, countercultural cache, and the placement of pressure on established norms. Music that manages this elaborate balancing act both supports and is supported by the venue itself as the Vanguard plays its own set of complex local and global changes to hold onto its literal and cultural real estate. This space made famous by the music performed and recorded there has valorized a heritage that now exerts control over what is played on its stage, and, by extension, what is widely considered to be today’s most respected subgenre of jazz. The network of people involved with this space, including musicians, listeners in person and through records, and the management of the business both past and present, together create a unique local identity for the Vanguard and a construction of what jazz is and has been that resonates outward beyond the physical limits of its famous red doors.

While its status as a small, privately owned jazz club that has held on since an era in which such places were common in many ways makes it stand out in sharp contrast to today’s growing prevalence of large nonprofit jazz institutions; the fact that it now shares a scene with those institutions contributes to the Vanguard’s current value as a historic landmark. Especially as tourism has grown in importance in the area surrounding the venue, its role in presenting not just jazz but also jazz heritage has added weight to what happens on the Vanguard’s stage. The site simultaneously enacts its specific local nature, shown in the rhetoric about its consistency, and turns that local specificity into a commodity with a broader reach in its more recently acquired status as a tourist destination and recording space. A delicate balance between sameness and change, local and distributed, characterizes today’s Village Vanguard, a place that simultaneously operates as the bohemian club it has always been and a sort of shrine to both its own past and the numerous other places from the heyday of jazz nightclubs that it outlived. We embark now on a tour of the Vanguard, beginning with its position in the context of a national scene of small jazz clubs in the United States then continuing to consider the history of the venue, its role as a recording space, transitions in ownership from one member of the Gordon family to the next, and changes in its surrounding scenes, both in terms of its local neighborhood and a more geographically broad community of artists and listeners who have engaged with the space over the years. Finally, the music of two pianists who have been regulars at the Vanguard for the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Fred Hersch and Ethan Iverson, will be explored to show how the specific intersection of place and heritage at this venue is audible in the music performed there.

JAZZ IN SMALL CLUBS

In the months leading up to their stint at the Vanguard in April of 1961, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers combined international touring and festival performances with engagements at various clubs in the United States that often lasted for two weeks at a time. While they spent the month of December, 1960, mostly playing one or two nights each in cities in Sweden, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, they spent a week or more of the same year at several domestic clubs like Birdhouse, the Sutherland Lounge, and the Cloister Inn—all in Chicago—and Showboat in Philadelphia. When in New York, they had multiple extended residencies at Birdland throughout the year. At other points in the early 1960s, the Jazz Messengers had extended club gigs at the Renaissance Club and Shelly’s Manne Hole in Los Angeles, the Black Hawk and the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, Minor Key in Detroit, the Jazz Temple in Cleveland, and the Plugged Nickel in Chicago. In the mid-twentieth century, club spaces around the country booked the same artists as the Vanguard for the same multiday or multiweek engagements.⁹

While there are a number of similarities in the touring practices of jazz musicians who play at the Vanguard half a century later, their relationship to small American clubs has changed considerably. Drummer Antonio Sanchez played three other jazz-specific clubs in major US cities in the months leading up to his 2019 Vanguard appearance, but he performed only one night each at Yoshi’s in Oakland and the 1905 in Portland, Oregon, and two nights at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley in Seattle. Likewise, saxophonist Mark Turner, who performed weeks with two different groups at the Vanguard that year, toured a number of US jazz clubs around the time of the release of his album Lathe of Heaven, including Boston’s Regattabar, Chicago’s Constellation, Kuumbwa Jazz in Santa Cruz, and Dazzle Jazz in Denver, and he played only one show at each venue. Many contemporary performers at the Vanguard can be more predictably found playing internationally than in other US cities around when they appear in New York. Brad Mehldau’s June 2019 Vanguard stint followed tour dates in eight European countries, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan. Others, like Joe Lovano and Renee Rosnes, who both performed elsewhere in the United States around the time of their Vanguard dates, appeared at large concert halls rather than clubs, Lovano at theatres in Seattle, Hollywood, Boulder, and Detroit and Rosnes at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. While these contemporary artists appear for one-off performances at festivals and large theatres, just as Blakey’s band did in the 1960s, they rarely have extended club engagements outside New York. When they do play clubs, they appear more frequently in Europe than in the United States.¹⁰

Although touring jazz musicians can no longer count on working in major cities for weeks or even multiple days at a time, those cities tend to have at least one performance venue operating as or styled as a privately owned jazz club like those that thrived during the mid-twentieth century. Many of the longer standing and more successful and prominent of these venues have developed structures and practices different from those at work in the Vanguard to attain stability within their own local scenes. Some, like Yoshi’s in Oakland, California, have been running for decades and regularly feature nationally and internationally touring acts that might also appear at the Vanguard, but often for only one or two nights at a time. Others, like Snug Harbor in New Orleans, tend to feature mostly performers with strong ties to the local jazz scene—the surname “Marsalis” is reliably peppered throughout the monthly schedule, for example. The Ferring Jazz Bistro in St. Louis demonstrates how the small jazz club format has been incorporated into some jazz spaces operated by nonprofit organizations with explicitly educational and preservational missions. Jazz St. Louis, the nonprofit that owns the Bistro, runs this cabaret-style jazz club alongside programs like WeBop and Essentially Ellington, two youth jazz education initiatives connected to Jazz at Lincoln Center, and it offers ticketing options for the club spaces that parallel concert hall experiences in the form of season subscriptions. For spaces without nonprofit support, the strategy of blending jazz programming with other types of music or events is sometimes used to broaden appeal. As the Yoshi’s website proclaims, “Under the guidance of current Artistic Director Daniel Grujic, the venue has expanded its focus to include broader genres suitable to a variety of musical tastes.”¹¹ In addition to more expansive missions or musical programming in comparison to the Vanguard, many of these spaces are also more physically expansive. Yoshi’s holds more than twice as many listeners with its capacity of 310; the Dakota in Minneapolis can hold an even larger audience of 350; the Ferring Bistro was expanded to seat 220 during a 2014 renovation; and a series of moves and renovations for Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley has added over one hundred seats, bringing its total capacity well over two hundred.¹² The majority of jazz clubs in major US cities also differ from the Vanguard in that they serve a dual function as restaurants. For example, Nighttown in Cleveland has a “tiny stage in a crowded room evoking now-gone Short Vincent in Cleveland or other intimate venues in Manhattan” for jazz performances embedded in what it advertises as “perhaps the largest restaurant in Greater Cleveland, based on seating capacity.”¹³ The Dakota reserves the seats with the clearest sightlines to the stage for people who also order dinner, and those dining in the restaurant adjoining the performance space at Yoshi’s can have the best available seats for a show held for them while enjoying a meal. It has been decades since the tiny kitchen at the Vanguard served food; its more recent usage has been closer to that of a green room and office for musicians and staff. In part, what has allowed the Vanguard to continue to operate as a no-frills jazz club featuring well-known players for a week at a time has been the way in which the local and national scenes in which it is embedded have departed from the model the Vanguard represents. Gradually, it has become one of a kind.

FROM EXPERIMENT TO LANDMARK

In an article celebrating the seventieth anniversary of the Vanguard, jazz writer Ashley Kahn begins by suggesting that the very words “Village Vanguard” sound like jazz, “Try repeating it out loud: VIL-lage VAN-guard, VIL-lage VAN-guard. For seventy years, that alliterative name has swung in 4/4 time, marking the center of the known jazz universe to an international circle of musicians and music fans.”¹⁴ While Kahn could refer to the club as “the center of the known jazz universe” in 2005, when Max Gordon first opened his doors in 1935, the place was anything but. In the 1930s, it was not much of a jazz club at all but rather a space for a wide variety of yet-to-be-established performers. At first, liberal young poets at home in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village, led by master of ceremonies Eli Siegel, provided the bulk of the entertainment at the fledgling establishment. According to Gordon, “In addition to poetry, there was music and dance.”¹⁵ These musical performances were indeed additions, not central acts by major stars but brief and often humorous numbers by members of the audience or service staff. ...