It’s 10.45pm last Wednesday night and I’m in one of my happy places. Wedged into a hard uncomfortable seat in the Blue Note in Greenwich Village, I’m about to experience my first live jazz in over 20 months, and it feels surprisingly normal. The gruff waitresses showing people to their seats are the same as they ever were. They size you up as you walk across the room to determine whether you’re a gullible tourist who’ll accept banishment to Siberia in the back right corner or whether you’re savvy enough to demand ‘best possible’ seating. Whether it was my grey hair, a knowing look, or just that I was a single, and hence a useful jigsaw piece, I found myself right in front of the azure-lit stage with perfect sightlines and a large speaker about five feet above my head.
Jazz clubs are the battery farming of New York live entertainment, with a seating density that results in constant jousting matches between servers with trays of drinks and customers heading for the bathrooms. Despite the novelty of it, I didn’t have any anxiety about being in a crowded indoor space sitting knee to knee with a bunch of strangers. We’d all shown proof of vaccination at the door and, while the staff were masked up, for everyone else it felt like 2019.
When four strangers are crammed within a few square feet, social proximity typically breeds social interaction, so before long I’d exchanged pleasantries with my table mates. In the seating lottery I’d won a young Argentinian couple studying at New York University and a stocky early 30s Asian American from Queens whose wife hates jazz. Within minutes we were sharing plates of calamari, French fries, and coconut shrimp, exploiting our new friend group to diversify our late-night snacking, while washing it all down with a round of $16 ‘Burnt Maple’ Old Fashioneds.
We needed the food and drink to kill time. The early show had run way over, so my credulous faith in ‘doors open at 10’ had left me standing on West 3rd Street for almost an hour. But it was a beautiful New York autumn evening in a 5G world, so I happily joined the queue, popped my air pods in and immersed myself in a double overtime win for the New York Knicks on my phone until the line started moving. As we polished off the shrimp and ordered another round of drinks, it was clear that the promised 10.30pm start was probably Central rather than Eastern Time.
I’ve written in these pages before about my adventures in the jazz clubs of New York. Some are planned months in advance to see a big name, but there’s also the randomness of nights like last Wednesday; a free midweek evening in the city following a business dinner and the perusing of the listings to see what catches my eye. It’s these unpredictable nights that have occasionally ended up as Scottish Review columns. They’ve included an album launch party at Dizzy’s apparently marshalled by the Dora Milaje from Wakanda and a Jaco Pastorius memorial concert at the Blue Note that had people dancing on the tables to James Brown’s Sex Machine. My last such night before lockdown was the thrill of seeing nonagenarian drummer Jimmy Cobb â the last surviving member of Miles Davis’s ‘Kind of Blue’ sextet â sitting in with a bunch of relative kids at the Jazz Standard just months before he died.
During lockdown there was no shortage of online concerts to listen to, but I’d sorely missed these musical safaris. The chance to take a risk and broaden my horizons by seeing someone who wouldn’t make my ‘plan ahead’ list. So, that’s how I found myself as a very visible middle-aged-white-guy minority waiting for Grammy award-winning pianist Robert Glasper and his band to take the stage.
Glasper has taken over the Blue Note for a 33-night ‘Robtober’ residency and his prodigious musical output is the aural smoothie that you get when you throw jazz, soul, hip-hop, funk, gospel, and R&B into a blender and hit the pulse button. Glasper has undoubted credibility as a straight-ahead jazz pianist, but in the great tradition of Charlie Parker with Bebop and Miles Davis with electric Fusion, he’s also expansive and curious. More than any other great art form, jazz isn’t frozen in canonical aspic, but instead thrives by having artists like Glasper act as catalysts, injecting cocktails of musical DNA from every corner of the culture to force mutation and evolution. Just like biological evolution, there’s many musical dead ends (and I’ve attended my fair share of hard to listen to funerals), but the variants that do survive make jazz more resilient and ensure its ongoing social relevance.
The arrival of the second round of cocktails thankfully coincided with the neon-beanie-wearing DJ Jahi Sundance sauntering on stage to warm up the crowd behind two turntables and a MacBook Pro. Starting with some modern rap that I couldn’t place, he quickly segued into classic soul like Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues, Terence Trent D’Arby’s Wishing Well and the menacing groove of Bill Withers’ Who Is He And What Is He To You? before wrapping his set by floating some ethereal Radiohead on top of some bouncy hip-hop beats.
Turns out Jahi wasn’t just the warm-up act, but also an integral part of the band as he was joined on stage by Glasper, a drummer, bassist, and a second keyboard player. With just a nod to the crowd, they launched into a 15-minute version of Herbie Hancock’s Butterfly, a fusion classic from 1974 complete with vocoder vocals and heavily distorted Fender Rhodes electric piano. The vocals (and later alto sax) were courtesy of the second keyboard player, who turned out to be multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin, famous for producing hip-hop megastars like Kendrick Lamar and Wiz Khalifa.
The titular programme for the evening was to showcase the album Dinner Party, a 2020 lockdown collaboration between Glasper, Martin, sax player Kamasi Washington and producer 9th Wonder. But even though half the group were on stage on Wednesday, we got far less than half the album tracks. Instead, what we got for around 90 minutes, was what you always want to happen at a great jazz gig. Creative musicians playing off each other and spontaneously interacting. Explorers willing to take a groove and build a musical conversation on top of it that is surprising, fleeting, and unique.
During one extended piano improvisation, Glasper started chanting softly into his mic. I saw Terrace Martin glance over at him with a quizzical look that said, ‘so that’s where we’re going now?’ and then he joined in with a now recognisable ‘hello, hello, hello’. Suddenly Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit emerged from the musical undergrowth, first on bass and then on piano, before disappearing back into the groove like a grungy ghost that had just passed through the room.
With the crowd now full warmed up, any lingering pretence that this was just a jazz gig went out the window when Miami rapper Denzel Curry leapt on stage, grabbed a mic, and started freestyling over a seven-string bass line that blended Spanish flamenco flourishes with George Clinton-esque funk. Arms were now in the air and a few naïve people tried to get up and dance, before realising that their allotted battery cage barely allowed them to stand never mind boogie.
As Curry prowled the postage stamp of the stage that wasn’t filled with the band’s kit, he brought an urgency and propulsiveness to the music. The Blue Note may be some of jazz’s most hallowed ground, but it struck me that Curry’s improvisational rapping was in no way heretical, but instead built on Louis Armstrong dropping his lyric sheet during a 1926 recording of the song Heebie Jeebies and filling the void with nonsense scat syllables. Rather than a sacrilege, rapping over a jazz beat is clearly a scat upgrade, as it allows pointed social commentary to replace the typical dippity doppity doo.
Finishing a verse with ‘and that’s all I got’, Curry then goaded Glasper into his own freestyling in which he mocked the tendency of the lights at the top of the Blue Note’s stairs to go out whenever someone brushes the switch with their shoulder on their way to the bathroom. Witty, verbally dexterous, and always on the beat, he brought the house down and had the rest of the band doubled over laughing.
With Curry having exited, the set wrapped up with an extended story from Terrace Martin about his life in LA and how a man who dances every day at the top of a freeway exit ramp from Interstate 10 does it not for money, but simply to make people smile. It inspired him to write Valdez Off Crenshaw, a sun-drenched Californian jam with a Grover Washington vibe that was still making me sway (or maybe that was the Old Fashioneds) as I exited onto a still crowded West 3rd Street just after 1am on Thursday morning.
As Blue Note regular Ray Charles once observed, ‘It’s like Duke Ellington said, there are only two kinds of music â good and bad. And you can tell when something is good’. Robert Glasper may not have been what I would have chosen for my first post-pandemic gig, but maybe it was just what I needed. A genre defying, kind of messy, slightly self-indulgent reminder that, while Mark Zuckerberg may claim that we’ll all be living in the virtual metaverse sometime soon, you can’t replicate the adrenaline jolt and visceral collective experience of great live music.
For all the talk of online communities over the last 18 months, Wednesday also reminded me that live music is really about communion. About the bilateral energy transmission between performers and audience, and the Brownian motion of cultural collisions that can occasionally fashion sublime musical highs. It also highlighted to me that in the still nascent post-pandemic world, we’re all going to need to take some measured medical and musical risks to get back to something that feels truly normal.
Alan McIntyre is a Trustee and Patron of the Institute of Contemporary ScotlandÂ