Where Jazz Lives Now: A Continuum, Not a Dichotomy

I recently took the stage at Smalls Jazz Club this past weekend - a hallmark of jazz tradition, rites of musical passage and cutting teeth through jam sessions, a jazz club that emerges down a skinny tunnel of stairs into a tightly packed, dimly lit basement club in the heart of the West Village. Me, mind you - someone who has been vocal in interviews about my music about neglecting a bebop vibraphonist path, not interested in repeating history. Me, tattoos all up and down my arms, Cruella de Vil colored hair, winged eyeliner, black gogo boots, openly pansexual, a woman bandleader, someone who has garnered a lot of work from using electronic manipulations of the vibraphone and speaks of genre melding freely. Anyone who has heard my recorded work or been to my shows can definitively say that I have not occupied a traditional jazz realm. And yet, this Friday night at Smalls, with its supposed traditional jazz leaning audience, I had sold out both sets. The second set wanted an encore despite that Smalls does not allow for encores to make room for the following set.

There is something beautiful about the fact that all walks of jazz appreciation celebrated that performance. It is something I often state of importance in grant applications and artist statements – my goal is to just bring folks out of their sonic comfort zone, period. I want to bring all of the above audience members together. Modern jazz, ragtime, bebop, free jazz, electronic music, alternative rock, punk rock, classical, whatever it may be – my musical upbringing has been rooted in the fact that all of these things have been in constantly dialogue with each other. You can hear it like a panoramic in my music, even if the compositional style can be more highly attributed to jazz in particular. My sound has been influenced by the simultaneous existence of all of them, and each highly influential record I have is as innovative as the last, whether recorded in the 1920's or 2020s. The fact that some folks insist on driving a dichotomy through old jazz vs. new jazz, a theme that has existed since Ornette Coleman explored free jazz and Miles Davis brought on Filles de Kilimanjaro and Bitches Brew in high contrast to his famously renowned Kind of Blue, has never served the music well. Maybe the reason why folks are not so interested in jazz has nothing to do with the music being created or the spaces it exists in but the fact that we are too concerned with how it should exist, sound, or act in today's world. The fact of the matter is that it exists in many forms, places, and ends of the jazz genre spectrum, and one does not need to die in order for the other to exist.

This is the argument at hand in the recent article by Giovanni Russonello in the New York Times, entitled “Where Jazz Lives Now”, which bears the overarching point that old, uninspired, and less inventive jazz exists in dim basement jazz clubs while today's more innovative jazz exists and thrives in modern, multi genre spaces akin to night clubs or rustic loft spaces. The irony is that some of the main artists featured in the article are not quite part of this dichotomous movement like the narrative of the article is painting. One of the artists featured prominently in the article as being at the head of this exploratory and interdisciplinary current jazz movement is Melanie Charles, a singer and dear friend of mine who has a vocal tone and vibrato control akin to Sarah Vaughn or Betty Carter with an instrumental soundscape like J. Dilla or Solange. I have also had the privilege of having her record on one of my songs that almost made it to Onyx, my upcoming sophomore album. And sure enough, after my Smalls gig, I head on over to the neighboring twin club Mezzrow and see Melanie seated at the bar with Lezlie Harrison – singer, WBGO radio host, and co-founder of the Jazz Gallery. Upon returning to Smalls later, the Corey Wallace dubtet was hosting the session with music in the realm of RH Factor, and Melanie's bass player Jonathan Michel was on bass that night. So we have to ask - is jazz really that polarized in reality? And is it totally necessary?

It is worth considering the politicization of the subject at hand. Smalls, for example, is falsely associated with exclusively traditional jazz. Russonnello states of the club that “today it’s hard to argue that Smalls is the right destination for hearing the most cutting-edge sounds”. My presence there would be a direct counter argument to that, and to make a claim like that would generalize the innovative individuals I have seen share their music there – the only difference is that their innovation may not exist in electronic manipulation and production as often as the largely acoustic setting. The two do not go hand in hand. He also alleges that these types of clubs are often engaged in an archaic understanding of who gets to own and run jazz spaces – white men. While Smalls is, in fact, run by a white man (as is, might I note, Nublu, which is revered highly in the article and a venue I do love equally), Spike Wilner has done a fantastic job at featuring band leaders of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and women who fall both in the more familiar jazz tradition and who write cutting edge original music.

Furthermore, there is something extremely powerful about the fact that so many of these musicians are leading their groups or taking up room in a space historically conflated with misogyny, bitter jazz tradition, and homophobia, to name a few, and reclaiming it for the modern day as the leaders of the music. Joel Ross, the vibraphonist and good friend of mine who is mentioned in Russonello's article, got his start on the New York scene playing the late night session at Smalls regularly and was one of the first people to make me feel welcome at a NYC jazz jam session. Nicole Glover, one of the most talented young tenor saxophonists today and a colleague of mine, has one of the most well attended, skillful late night sessions I've seen at Smalls as both a woman and a lesbian. Although she falls more within a traditional jazz realm, the way it is expressed and articulated has as much innovation as a cross genre form of jazz. Marta Sanchez, an outstanding pianist who's music easily falls in to a more contemporary sound, led her group at Smalls with extremely thoughtful and intriguing compositions.

In a similar vein, there is another quote worth addressing from the article about the challenges of rewriting the script in a traditional jazz club setting:

But the real blood-pumping moments — the shows where you can sense that other musicians are in the room listening for new tricks, and it feels like the script is still being written onstage — have been happening most often in venues that don’t look like typical jazz clubs. They’re spaces where jazz bleeds outward, and converses with a less regimented audience. […] since the 1960s, jazz clubs — a vestige of the Prohibition era, with their windowless intimacy and closely clustered tables — have rarely felt like a perfect home for the music’s future development.

This quote makes literal sense in the context of sessions like Ray Angry's Producer Mondays, which the article mentions, where there is no sheet music, all parts are learned and conducted by ear and live on stage, manifesting a different strain of the jazz jam session. It does not make sense when I go to the Village Vanguard, a highly renowned jazz venue that follows the appearance and historical timeline of said typical jazz club – walking down a skinny, steep set of stairs to a basement like, low ceiling space with round tables, intimately seated setting, and certainly no windows – and hear some of the best modern jazz concerts of my life. Melissa Aldana's most progressive album to date, 12 Stars, debuted there just two weeks ago. The boundless and experimental trio of Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, and Tyshawn Sorey held residence there for a week. Folks of every background and walk of jazz idiom perform there in the current day.

Furthermore, I've seen shows at some of the more “unconventional” venues mentioned in the article that were far from innovative, rewriting any scripts, or would make the mainstream music audience get in to jazz more. I will also argue that a lot of this archaic hegemony associated with old jazz clubs happens just as much at other venues as it does at traditional clubs. If anything, I think it's happened more, since folks still have an issue with the idea of today's forefront innovators being canonized as women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, or folks of color. I'll give you an example. I went to see a gig at Oakland's Spirithaus a couple years ago – the space curated by crossover drummer Thomas Pridgen – featuring electronic/acoustic hybrid “jazz” groups led by innovative drummers Justin Brown and Mike Mitchell. I've known Thomas Pridgen since I was 17. I knew everyone in Justin's band. I knew half of Mike's band, and I'll be joining him for a show in LA next month with my MalletStation (basically a MIDI vibraphone). I was talking to a drummer friend of mine when a mutual friend of his said hi with his group of friends, who consequently introduced themselves to my drummer friend while fully ignoring me because it was assumed I was there as someone's musically disinterested girlfriend.

This is not a dig at any of these venues, by the way. The point is that the venues themselves are not responsible for curating that kind of behavior. It is a socialized thing that has existed in every single type of musical space. It's not the venues that make the music what it is. It's the musicians that do, and what they choose to do within their respective spaces. The article's subtitle asserts that jazz happens in a “host of different spaces”, which I agree with, but is not actually the argument made in the article. And I think that while I understand the point and motives of the article completely, and perhaps it will get more mainstream crowds crossing over in to the jazz idiom in some form, the argument made in the article is that the best jazz today does not, in fact, exist in a host of different spaces. It exists in places that cater to many genres, ages, personalities, styles, and disciplines of art exclusively. And we have to be careful when we say these things.

As someone who is as far from an old school jazz tradition as one can get, innovation can both exist at those edgier performance spaces or those jazz clubs dedicated more strictly to jazz acts and the art of improvisation equally. Innovation can exist inside your own home, practicing to the walls, falling upwards to no ears but your own. Innovation can exist inside the subway train station at Chambers Street, only to have pennies thrown in to a bucket by annoyed Wall Street executives. That does not negate its existence nor its validity. Maybe if we saw jazz as an incredibly complex spectrum, full of 100+ years of incredibly diverse discography and evolution, electronically toyed with or not, a discernible beat or a fleeting soundscape, something that even the greats of the music have begged not to categorize or compartmentalize in to a name, a selling point, existence in a particular space or another – we would eradicate this decades old thinking that has largely caused greater division and bitterness in the genre. The truth is, jazz is everywhere, all the time. I hope that our objective as jazz performers, critics, teachers, adjudicators, appreciators, and spectators, can simply be to uphold that simple fact on every account that we see it.