This article was recently published in Elmore The
Harlem Scene
by Gordon Polatnick
Harlem is Cinderella waiting
to get asked to the ball. She’s beautiful, has a big heart and despite
her glorious beginnings has been languishing in an abused state for far too
long. The fairy godmother in the story – the thing with the magic
touch—is the music.
Since the 20’s and 30’s
when the Cotton Club introduced us to Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway and Lena
Horne till today, Harlem’s music scene has always been one jump ahead of the
world and always showing the way. Most of the old clubs, theaters,
speakeasies and ballrooms are long gone with a few notable exceptions.
What you’ll find today is not a throwback-nostalgia but an eager and energetic
resurgence of a culture built on a solid and traditional foundation of
funkiness.
Required reading on the
subject is Mezz Mezzrow’s landmark 1946 memoir, Really the Blues.
The mighty Mezz hips the reader to the Harlem
that he found in the 1920’s and 30’s as he chased after Louie Armstrong to the
epicenter of the cultural explosion known as the Jazz Age. It was
during this prohibition era heyday of Harlem when cannabis was legal and booze
illegal that the Harlem nightclub and
speakeasy scene really captured the world’s attention. Times
Square was square compared to its uptown counter-culture
counterpart five miles north on 7th
Ave.
The Stroll, 7th
Ave. between 131st and 132nd Streets, was where you could
enjoy the beat of the Harlem Renaissance –perhaps at a musical revue of Eubie
Blake and Nobel Sissle at the Lafayette Theatre, or next door at Connie’s Inn
where Satchmo was imported to play and sing Fats Waller and Andy Razaf’s Ain’t Misbehavin’ in Connie’s Hot
Chocolates. Nowadays, this same broad avenue which hosts the ghosts of Harlem’s storied past, has three obscure artistic markers
and a newly planted Tree of Hope to point locals and visitors back to where it
all started. There are several nearby venues tucked away on brownstone-lined
streets where one is encouraged to stray off-the-beaten-path to find the contemporary
soul of Harlem’s music scene.
For the past ten years,
Hammond B3 organist, Seleno Clarke, has been leading a humble yet essential jam
session at the local American Legion Post (248 West 132nd Street) every
Sunday evening. In Harlem, where every lounge in the 1960’s is said to
have had a Hammond B3 churning out soul jazz late into the night, these days
there are only two to be heard. For a taste of what was, check out Jimmy
Smith’s 1957 live recording: Groovin’ at Smalls Paradise (that
club with its 60 year history is now a popular International House of Pancakes (IHOP)
at 135th and 7th Avenue). Clarke, who closed the
original Minton’s Playhouse and came up in the scene with the likes of George
Benson (known to visit the Post jam session from time to time), has
consistently put together an international band. It currently features French drummer, Renaud
Penant and Aussie guitarist, Jason Campbell. Visitors pay nothing to get
in and are more than happy to dash 5 or 10 bucks into the Love Bucket to
support the band -- particularly after paying the best prices around for drinks
and soul victuals.
The American Legion Post
sits on a quiet block that has been slowly gentrifying over the course of the
jam session’s 10 year run. New
families, white and African American alike, are buying and renovating many of
the condemned and rundown brownstones restoring the street to its original
gentility. The new and old patrons of
the Post mix genially, each finding something of value in the other group. This
is a very good thing as space is limited and the dozen table tops are often
shared to accommodate as big a percentage of the crowd as possible. Dress codes run the course from Starving
Artist to Mack Daddy – it’s strictly come as you are. And while you’re there
getting down to Seleno’s organ grooves you’ve got to try the fried
chicken.
Not all venues have a
kitchen, but most keep with a Southern born tradition of making sure food is
available either as a free snack such as the munchies provided by Bill Saxton
at Bill’s Place (148 West 133rd), or as a free plate of food served at
Showman’s (375 West 125th Street), or even the inexpensive nouveau
soul that Chef James caters at St. Nick’s Pub (773 St. Nicholas Avenue). Each
of these heroic jazz spots are living legacies of a distant Harlem past that
carries an undiluted tradition forward and owes its abundant aesthetic charms
to nothing happening anywhere else in New York City.
Bill’s Place is the
bridge connecting modern day Harlem bop with
the speakeasy past of its Swing
Street (AKA Jungle Alley) location. Along
the same strip of brownstone dives where bootleg liquor, sex, drugs, stride
piano and blues all contributed to the emergence of such stars as Billie
Holiday, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Slim Gaillard / Slam Stewart , Moms Mabley
and Gladys Bentley, Bill Saxton (in a somewhat more sober setting) now provides
first glimpses of tomorrow’s great Harlem rhythm section players. Saxton,
true to his name, plays a ton of saxophone every Friday night at his BYOB
updated speakeasy.
As with the American
Legion Post two blocks away, Bill’s is challenged for space – it’s actually
half the size of a typical brownstone.
Luckily, what it lacks in elbow room it makes up in old school
charm. You are always greeted graciously
at the door by someone who is more likely than not going to send you off
several hours later smiling with a pat on the back or even a hug. There are only a handful of seats directly in
front of the bandstand which was built along one wall of the gutted
kitchen. You would have to be told there
was once a kitchen there as the décor hints only at the fact that you are
seated in a shrine of Harlem’s jazz
history. All the walls are adorned with
rare, unearthed photos, plaques, paintings and incidental lighting; and sideline
sightlines are innovatively achieved through arches and decorative doorways.
For $15 cash, you are
treated to the most intimate and powerful 4-hours of jazz to be found
uptown. The young talent that Bill’s been cultivating deliver the goods
with reckless abandon – the true spirit of improvisation deeply entrenched in
their playing. Recent special guests
have included jazz iconoclasts such as pianist, Randy Weston, and saxman, Bobby
Watson. As in all the best uptown clubs,
the real joy and excitement comes when unannounced guests are coerced into
sitting in with the already smoking band.
A mellower but equally
loved and lively scene is savored at Showman’s ten blocks away -- proving to be
the best link to Harlem’s Hammond B3 lounge
vibe of the 1960’s. This long, narrow and elegantly appointed room (now
in its third location since 1942) is the unsung stalwart of the Harlem jazz and tap scene. Upon entering, the perceived purity of the lounge
scene (all the well-dressed folks lining the bar seemed to have been hired for
ambiance) almost makes you feel obliged to acknowledge and identify the musical
giants portrayed in painted glass portraits above the bar. There’s Sarah
Vaughan, Pearl Bailey, Duke Ellington, Eartha Kitt, Lionel Hampton, and the
late great king of Hammond B3 in Harlem, Jimmy
“Preacher” Robins -- all of whom played Showman’s during its rich history.
The tap dance tradition
is kept up by the Copasetics Connection, a hoofers club that was started three
generations ago as a tribute to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the multi-talented
showman and honorary mayor of Harlem.
The tradition lives on in weekly tap sessions that accompany local trumpet
legend, Joey Morant’s band every Thursday night.
The tradition of jam
sessions made famous in Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s
Uptown House in 1940’s Harlem, is what separates St. Nick’s Pub up on Sugar
Hill with every other jazz club in New
York. Even
though the scheduled session on Monday night competes with a dozen other jams
across the city, there is rarely a show performed at the Pub any night of the
week that doesn’t bring up surprise guests -- everyone from the aging
neighborhood bluesman, King David, to the legendary Stevie Wonder. Late into the night, there is a steady stream
of players, instruments in hand, ready to be called up to the small stage. Heavy musicians with international stature
such as Olu Dara, Dennis Davis, and Frank Ku-umba Lacy are regulars who may or
may not take the stage, but clearly enjoy hanging out and their omnipresence
speaks volumes of credibility for the pub over the years.
What’s so remarkable
about this is the absolute unshakeable local watering hole vibe of St. Nick’s. It’s this unselfconscious authenticity that fuels
the international word-of-mouth campaign, and keeps the musicians intrigued
regardless of low pay, technical difficulties, and unforgivable lack of an
acoustic piano. There’s something to be
said for a club that keeps it up year after year on the strength of what might
happen tonight. St. Nick’s Pub benefits
from the impression that no one is in charge - more like a clubhouse than a
club – so almost anything can happen; and in jazz, spontaneity is everything.
The club with the most
potential to blast the lid off the Harlem scene
and bring back the old promise of improvised magic is the one that has been the
most disappointing to hard core fans.
Minton’s Playhouse (210
West 118th Street) is the legendary birthplace of
bebop. When it reopened on May 19, 2006
after lying dormant for three decades, the Harlem
jazz community turned out to support the landmark club and testify to its past
glories in a long line of first-hand testimonials. The stage was set for a bright future as
article after article appeared in all the major jazz magazines and
international newspapers to trumpet the return of Harlem’s
true jazz shrine. The infamous mural was
still in place behind the bandstand featuring Billie Holiday asleep with a bedside
coterie of musicians jamming and smoking the night away. The buzz of enthusiasm and anticipation was spreading
throughout the jazz community as fans and musicians alike waited for the
Playhouse to become a sort of Village Vanguard North -- a club that would live
up to its historical status with consistently high quality bookings of old
masters and contemporary burners ready to take their place among giants. Sadly,
it was not to be.
The management most
likely had too limited a budget after getting the club open to do much
investing in marquis names. Instead, visitors
soon came to realize that a proper piano was not installed; and even though the
local musicians were longtime favorites of the Harlem
scene, Minton’s (now called The Uptown Lounge) was not going to go the extra
mile to restore the historical luster to the shrine. This may change in time as new approaches to
the booking policy are tried. The piano issue was eventually remedied, and a
baby grand is now permanently in place where Monk had played as the house
pianist at the original 1940’s jam sessions. Visitors these Friday nights are most likely
going to find an Old School R&B deejayed party, but the rest of the week is
dedicated to live jazz with band leaders such as Jack Jeffers, Patience Higgins
and Gerald Hayes holding down weekly spots in the roomy-- almost cavernous club. To the chagrin of all who hoped to relive Minton’s
most notable contribution to the evolution of jazz, management gave up on resurrecting
the weekly all-night open jam sessions and cutting contests.
An historic connection
to the Apollo Theater is maintained on Tuesday nights though--it belongs to a talented
and creative young hoofer, Omar Edwards. Edwards was most recently seen nationally in
the role of executioner on the (now
cancelled) TV version of the Apollo amateur contest: Showtime at the
Apollo. The executioner’s duty, made
famous by Sandman Sims, is to respond to the overwhelming disapproval of the
Apollo audience toward an unprepared contestant by entertainingly and
unceremoniously ushering him off the stage – like clearing the room of a bad
odor. Weekly at Minton’s, Edwards
performs his fabulous footwork before an invariably cheering crowd.
It’s the Lenox Lounge (288 Lenox Avenue)
that holds the most prestige these days and attracts a well-heeled crowd of
locals and visitors to its gorgeous Art Deco environs. Swinging since 1939, the Lounge has always
been a neighborhood hang proud to boast of its ties to Billie Holiday. Lady Day reportedly held court back in the
aptly named Zebra Room at the same booth often enough to have it enshrined in
her honor. These days it’s the
headlining jazz musicians such as Houston Person, Cecil Bridgewater, Alex
Blake, and Danny Mixon who play the Zebra Room’s weekend sets that give the
Lenox Lounge a well-deserved international reputation. But the regulars who fill the club’s front
bar during the week realize that Wednesday nights are the funkiest when Nathan
Lucas’ band hits. Nat on organ and his
nonagenarian father Max on tenor sax make the rounds to all of New York’s clubs, but
seem most at home among friends at the Lenox Lounge.
The hope of Harlem is in its solid sense of community. Other Manhattan
neighborhoods to its south have been on a steady trajectory of gentrifying
themselves away from their community identity resulting in a city of wary
strangers. Visitors to Harlem
universally note a harmony that exists in defiance of its reputation as a hard
and dangerous place. Clubgoers in Harlem share a relaxed welcoming attitude that is
contagious and refreshing to newcomers. It
took Cinderella’s incomparable perseverance and many innate charms to get her chance
to dance at the ball and regain her stature; Harlem’s
relaxed welcoming attitude is part of the fabric woven into the dress she will
wear when her invitation comes. And with
Barack Obama in the White House it promises to be coming that much sooner. And when it does you can be sure that there
won’t be any curfew at midnight.
Gordon
Polatnick is New York City’s
only full time jazz tour guide and creator of the Big Apple Jazz Club Bible. His writing has appeared in All About Jazz-New York, The San
Francisco Weekly, The Haight-Ashbury Free Press, and The Greenwich Village
Gazette. His jazz cafe in Harlem, EZ’s
Woodshed, closed in July 2008.
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These are my
observations from Obama's first presidential election night in 2008
I have a
small tour business that focuses on hipping
visitors to New York City's
hidden jazz scene and jazz history called Big Apple Jazz Tours. My clients for election night were to be a
Bavarian family getting together in NY to support their patriarch as he ran the
NYC Marathon that Sunday before. In
planning the jazz tour with the patriarch, Wolfgang, I enthusiastically
suggested that he would see something special if he held the tour off till
Tuesday so his family could experience jazz in Harlem
as the first African American is elected president. Our first stop was Showman's on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. When we got there, the band was not playing
because the clientele were all watching the electoral college projections come in on a large
screen behind the bandstand. The
bandleader didn't think he'd be welcomed onstage till after the results were
confirmed three hours later. It didn't
seem to bode well for my jazz tour, but the German family (of mostly civil
engineers employed by a 100 year old family business) was as interested in the
milieu as the music and decided to stay and watch history be made from this
vantage point - jazz or no jazz. They
admitted that they were Obama supporters as was, in their estimation, "Most
of Europe." As it turned out, the
band did start playing at about 9PM with the screen projected behind them. Lately, I've been reading a lot about the
lightshows that accompanied the psychedelic bands of San Francisco in the late 60's, but I don't
think any of those folks on acid tripping back then had prescient visions of
what we were beholding that night. It
was pretty trippy watching the saxist, Jerry Weldon, turning around to the TV
screen and soloing to Wolf Blitzer and electoral maps as people cheered for
every new state projected for Obama/Biden, and then cheering again for the
amazing socio-politically inspired solos.
The peak moment came around 11PM when the silent TV screen changed the
caption under Barack Obama's name from Senator to President-elect. The shouts, cheers, tears, and
universal-international-interracial embracing and infectious smiling erupted in
the bar and everywhere else we traveled throughout Harlem, and all over New York
City, and lasted throughout the night.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2009
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