KEYNOTE: Transplanted New Orleans singer Henri Smith joins Nat Simpkins for the Jazz Week show at Berklee. |
In jazz, it’s always the iron age. As long as I’ve been listening to jazz in Boston — since the mid ’70s — the complaints have been the same: not enough places to play, or hear, jazz. Yet the tendency is always to see the not-to-distant past as a great flowering. Even if you missed the pre-Beatles Hi-Hat and Storyville of the ’50s, there was the Jazz Workshop and Paul’s Mall in the ’60s and ’70s. At various times you could catch the first set of Bill Evans at Lulu White’s in the South End and the second set of Anthony Braxton or Air at Jonathan Swift’s in Harvard Square, the Fringe or Jaki Byard at Michael’s Pub, Sonny Rollins at the Paradise (!), Steve Lacy playing duets with Roscoe Mitchell at the 1369, David Murray at Charlie’s Tap; or you could trek out to Sandy’s in Beverly to see Dizzy Gillespie or Phil Woods. The tricks of memory would have you believe that all these venues were operating simultaneously.
So how is it these days for the Boston jazz musician? Saxophonist and bandleader Charlie Kohlhase recalls setting up a gig with his friend Allan Chase recently and Chase saying, “Well, we won’t lose too much money.” Kohlhase’s response: “Twenty years ago we would have said, ‘We won’t make too much money.’ Now we’re happy not to lose too much money.”
But he adds, “It’s a great time as far as the quality of the musicians and the bands.” And there’s still a wealth of jazz to be heard in Boston, by home-grown players as well as imports, at the Regattabar, Scullers, Ryles, the Lily Pad, Bob’s Southern Bistro, the indefatigable Wally’s, and on and on.
Boston’s jazz past and jazz present will meet this coming week, April 21-29, as the non-profit coalition of musicians, journalists, presenters, and fans known as JazzBoston kicks off Jazz Week, an umbrella rubric for almost 150 events at more than 50 venues. There will be panel discussions on Boston jazz history, “Family Initiative” concerts for kids, and scores of live performances. The keynote event is a concert headlined by E Street Band drummer and Conan O’Brien bandleader Max Weinberg at Berklee Saturday night (April 21) titled “An All-Star Jazz Blowout: Benefit for New Orleans Habitat for Humanity Musicians’ Village,” with Weinberg performing in Berklee prof Phil Wilson’s Rainbow Band of students and faculty from Berklee and other area colleges. Also on the bill are New Orleans vocalist Henri Smith with local saxophonist Nat Simpkins, and a reunion of the ’80s Boston band Your Neighborhood Saxophone Quartet. (See sidebar for other Jazz Week highlights.)
Until now, JazzBoston has been most visible through its Web site, with its comprehensive Boston jazz calendar, message board for local musicians, media links, and listings of information and services for anyone involved in jazz at any level. (For the record: I’m a member of the non-profit’s all-volunteer advisory council.) JazzBoston originated with Herald freelancer Bob Young, who’d been attending the public forums hosted by the local chapter of the Jazz Journalists Association. He recalls, “It was fun, but it became clear after the first meeting that it was going to be a lot of the same grumbling, sort of this woe-is-me attitude, and people not really thinking that they could take fate into their own hands a little bit more.” But Young did see all the elements of the fragmented jazz scene coming together at those meetings, and that sparked an idea that had been germinating. “The scene has always been fragmented, and unless you were paying close attention to it you might not realize that there’s an awful lot of stuff that happens here on a nightly basis. So this was a chance to pull the people together who don’t normally talk to each other, the various presenters who are realizing that, well, it can’t hurt to promote the entire scene as a whole.”
Young got together with a handful of people who’d been attending the JJA meetings — publicist and JJA member Dawn Singh, pianist/composer Donal Fox, musician and teacher Toni Ballard, writer Bob Blumenthal. The Web site became an immediate priority, one that Young was well suited to initiate given his journalism background and his day job working in the communications department of a large financial-services company overseeing its intranet. Soon Fox had pulled in recently transplanted New Yorker Pauline Bilsky and her husband, Don Carlson, jazz lovers who have extensive corporate communications and fund-raising experience. Bilsky has since become JazzBoston’s executive director.
The idea for Jazz Week came from JazzBoston’s predecessor, the Jazz Coalition, which was founded in 1970 by the jazz trumpeter, composer, and Methodist minister Mark Harvey. The Coalition grew out of Harvey’s work at the Old West Church, where he had started the Jazz Celebrations concert series, “providing a place to play, but also providing a welcoming community for musicians to gather.” From that came the Coalition. “The initial idea was to gather information and pull people together, but we quickly found that that only had so much value and impact and that what we really needed to do was start producing stuff.” Out of that came the original Jazz Week. “We had 100 concerts our first year, and we thought that was pretty good. The JazzBoston Jazz Week has 139 at last count.”
