New York’s Jazz Scene Decimated by Ongoing Shutdown
New York’s jazz performance scene is in shambles in the wake of COVID-19. Can livestreaming, a temporary and problematic response, keep struggling venues alive until the virus is vanquished?
By Ali McPherson
There’s a block on West 133rd Street in Harlem, between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Malcolm X Blvd, that is sacred to jazz lovers and devotees of New York’s Black cultural history. That is partly because in the 1920s and ’30s the block was considered a major mecca for jazz performance in New York City — and also a hotbed of illegal alcohol consumption during prohibition at so-called “speakeasies.”
At that time, Harlem was dotted with music clubs and speakeasies like Edith’s Clam House and Mexico’s, and this block in particular was among the densest concentrations of bistros. It was also a safe haven for Black musicians and vocalists seeking a place to eat and relax after a performance. Black musicians who played at such nearby venues as the Lenox Lounge and the Cotton Club, for instance, were not permitted to hang with the venues’ exclusively white patrons. And so players made their way to West 133rd Street to enjoy some jazz and break bread with their fellow peers.
But West 133rd is also hallowed ground because of the history behind one particular four-story brownstone. It’s the narrow building at number 148, on the south side of the street. In the 1920s it housed a restaurant and nightclub, called Tillie’s Chicken Shack. In the ’30s it was Monette’s Supper Club, where a 17-year-old Billie Holiday was first discovered by producer John Hammond. In 2004, after the townhouse was bought by the accomplished bebop saxophonist Bill Saxton, he and his wife turned the parlor into a jazz club. They revived it as what their website describes as “Harlem’s only authentic speakeasy,” calling it “Bill’s Place.”
For sixteen years, Bill’s Place served as a beloved outpost. Tiny and cramped, it had been set up to look more like a jazz aficionado’s living room than an actual jazz club — part of its charm. Visitors were welcomed by a picture of Billie Holliday on the building exterior, hanging above a sign reading “Billie Holiday was discovered here in 1933” and another plaque reading, “Bill’s Place Speakeasy, Dr. Theda Palmer & Bill Saxton 2004.” Most nights, club manager Joseph Landon was the person collecting a $20 cover charge from each guest, ushering them in and past black-and-white photos of Bill Saxton holding his saxophone and a color photograph of Miles Davis. On Friday and Saturday nights, tourists and Harlemites would crowd into the tiny space to hear Saxton and his Harlem All Stars band play.
But in mid-March of 2020, Bill’s Place hit a metaphorical wall when the specter of COVID came to West 133rd Street, as it came to every neighborhood in the city. Bill’s Place was forced to shut down abruptly. Suddenly, there was no music coming from the parlor, nor were there people standing outside waiting to get in on weekends. Why would there be, when Bill’s had become a seemingly perfect breeding ground for this malevolent virus, and thus especially vulnerable to superspreader event fears?
“It’s just been awful,” said co-owner Theda Palmer Saxton in October, worn down by months of uncertainty. “We don’t think that in the next six months or nine months things are going to be anything like normal.”
New York’s small Jazz clubs are by definition overcrowded spaces. They have poor ventilation. They jam tables right next to one another. Compared to Broadway theaters and major mainstream concert spaces, they are much more intimate. Most have audience limits of less than 100 people, and patrons are packed into extremely tight quarters. Jazz fans tend to be older, and thus especially vulnerable to COVID. At clubs where food and drinks are served, people would have to take off their masks to eat and drink — an obvious major health hazard. To make matters worse, musicians and guests are in exceptionally close proximity. There’s no intervening orchestra pit or promontory as the artists sing or blow hard into wind instruments.
For all these reasons, jazz clubs now stand as the most potentially unsafe public-health environments among all of New York’s performance spaces. And given jazz’s cornerstone position in New York’s overall Black musical culture, the disproportionate toll that the virus is taking on Black citizens in general has compounded a sense of terminal crisis.
Of course it’s not just Bill’s Place that’s facing this meltdown, but every independent jazz venue in the city. Even if they wanted to devise social-distancing protocols and could convince city authorities to allow them, these clubs can’t stay financially viable with only a few patrons at a given performance. Village Vanguard, a small but prestigious jazz club in Greenwich Village, Smalls, a gritty basement underground jazz club in the East Village, and The Jazz Gallery, a distinguished non-profit in Chelsea, are all struggling to keep business going.
It’s more than just audience access to jazz performances that’s suffering in this shutdown. It’s an entire jazz culture that’s at stake. According to David Hajdu, a professor at Columbia University, jazz clubs are especially crucial spaces because they are institutions not just of audience consumption, but of artist training and tutelage.
“That’s where musicians learn their craft,” says Hajdu. “It’s where they learn their art. So it’s like an educational institution as well, an institution of presentation.” Hajdu also stresses that jazz clubs are where musicians start out and find their voices. It is where they learn how to play cooperatively with other players, and how to read an audience.
Linda Briceño, a Grammy-winning Latin music producer who came to New York as an aspiring trumpeter eight years ago, echoes Hajdu’s assertion.
“The first thing that the bigger musicians always recommended to me when I moved to New York was, you gotta hang,” she says. “You gotta get out there, get your ass kicked by musicians in jam sessions, and try to get better, learn more repertoire. Mostly those things happen in the clubs. It’s also kind of essential for musicians to go and see live music in order to get some inspiration, and create work that is relevant to the present.”
But now, as COVID has disrupted virtually all in-person musical performances, musicians are left with nowhere to perform and with no definite time frame as to when they will be allowed to enter a club again.
A hundred and twenty years ago, there was no such thing as a jazz scene in New York City. Jazz clubs were found mainly in New Orleans, the southern port known as the genre’s birthplace. And in a startling echo of historical destiny, it was another out-of-control virus — not COVID but the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918 — that nearly wiped out that new musical form before it got fully established.
In the early 1900s, New Orleans was the epicenter of jazz as a uniquely American and Black musical form. The city was home to legendary cats like Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. Then the so-called Spanish Flu hit the U.S.
Between September 8, 1918, and March 15, 1919, according to The Historic New Orleans Collection, nearly one percent of the city’s population died of Influenza-related complications, about twice the national rate. Clubs and music halls were shut down to try to help contain the spread. As it turned out, that helped jazz catch on in other northern cities, as struggling musicians began to make their way to cities like Chicago and New York. They weren’t just fleeing the epidemic. They were also looking to escape the vitriolic racial discrimination that was surging in the south. Unquestionably, the Influenza scourge accelerated that northward migration, and jazz began to flourish outside New Orleans for the first time. Ironically, the very thing that had decimated the Big Easy’s nascent jazz scene helped establish new centers elsewhere — and jazz found exceptionally quick growth in the roaring-20s abandon of New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. It was the beginning of a beautiful ongoing friendship between a freewheeling musical culture and an anything-goes, ambition-driven town.
During the Harlem Renaissance, jazz musicians found their footing at clubs like the World Famous Cotton Club on West 125th street. Swing Street, another name for West 133rd between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, was swarming with cats like Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes. It was also a sweet escape for black musicians during segregation. The Cotton Club, where Black musicians would play for white audiences, featured entertainers like Cab Calloway and Ellington.
By the ’80s and ’90s, Harlem was no longer the only focal point for jazz in Manhattan. Smaller clubs like Blue Note and Smalls began popping up in Greenwich Village as well, where unknown artists searching for a break could perform. In the mid to late 90’s, venues like Jazz Standard and The Jazz Gallery started opening up in Chelsea, with the latter being named by The New York Times as the most imaginatively booked jazz club in New York.” The Gallery, which typically hosts around 400 shows a year, differs from many of the other venues in that it is a non-profit, and was able to push through financially through a combination of fees and government funding.
While newer musical forms like rap and hip-hop had long since eclipsed it in popularity with young Black audiences, jazz maintained a respected niche well into the new century’s first two decades. But it’s proud hundred-year history of growth and institutionalization came to a screeching halt early in 2020–once again because of a virus. After the de facto shutdown of all live performances, jazz club managers suddenly found themselves stumped for a way to keep the music alive.
Much of the world made it through 2020 on the strength of online video conferencing programs like Zoom and Google Hangouts. Educators have used it to conduct “virtual” classes. Politicians have carried out campaigns in good part online. And for the arts, in-person audiences have been replaced with virtual group events via livestreaming.
Starting in late March of 2020, many different art forms, including theatre, dance and music concerts, started to appear on platforms like YouTube, Zoom, and Facebook Live. Theatrical performances took place online like playwright Jordan Cooper’s comedy, “Mama’s Got a A Cough,” enacted over a zoom call. Michael Urie reprised his role in the 2013 play Buyer and Cellar, a one-man show adapted for YouTube.
But can livestreaming also serve as a successful, temporary-band-aid solution for jazz, given the music’s dependence on improvisation and intimacy? And beyond aesthetic questions, what about the considerable infrastructure costs of such alternate methods of content delivery?
In many instances livestreaming has in fact worked as a reasonable substitute for live musical performance. Sometimes these online performances have been mass-audience events. Pop-artist Billie Eilish, Nigerian afro-fusion artist Burna Boy, and rapper 6black each performed virtually for millions of fans. NPR Tiny Desk Concert also made the transition to producing concerts straight from artists’ homes, with no live audience as they had in their usual NPR offices in Washington D.C.
So what’s the success rate for New York Jazz clubs adapting livestreaming? As of the new year, a very mixed scorecard.
Given the limitations and costs of the form, it’s perhaps not surprising that quite a few marginally-viable venues haven’t been able to adapt to them — and have simply gone dark. The Bitter End, for example, has had to temporarily shut down until further notice. On its website, the club has in recent months posted two GoFundMe campaigns. The first $12,000 was earmarked for payments to laid-off staff, according to a Bloomberg News interview with Bitter End owner Paul Rizzo. The second campaign brought in more than $100,000. But according to Rizzo, even this money may not keep him in business; it will go towards reopening costs such as insurance, maintaining a sprinkler system and restocking liquor. Rizzo is also worried that even when and if things do start opening up again, the public won’t be ready to come back fully.
But there are livestreaming successes in the jazz world.
The Village Vanguard, located on Perry Street and 7th avenue South in Greenwich Village, has been able to make the approach work. “Live Streaming at The Vanguard” takes place at the renowned venue and premieres on its website every Friday and Saturday with an occasional special solo concert on Tuesdays. For the series, the Vanguard brought back some of the musicians who frequented the club for years such as Sullivan Fortner, Jason Moran and the Bandwagon, Ravi Coltrane Quartet and Tom Harrell. To watch a virtual performance, you have to pay $10.
Deborah Gordon, the owner of the Vanguard, says it would have been celebrating its 85th anniversary February of 2020. Her dad opened the club in 1935. After he died, her mother took over. In 1989, Gordon began working as co-owner, and now she has sole ownership. She has had to invest in camera equipment and streaming companies to try to weather the pandemic with online performances.
“We’re not doing it because it’s a great financial model,” says Gordon. “Really, it’s just to say, we’re here, we still exist, we’re not gone.”
In June, the club Smalls in the East Village embarked on a comparable path. Performances are released online every evening. Some performers include Jeremy Melts & George Cables and Small’s regulars like Jon Beshay Quartet, and Corey Wallace Dubtet. Anyone who wants to watch the livestreamed shows has to go through a paywall. Club owner Spike Wilner told the New York Times that musicians are alone in the club with the exception of an engineer and manager. Wilmer also told the Times that livestreaming was made possible mainly because of a $25,000 donation from Billy Joel to the SmallsLIVE Foundation, supplemented by many smaller donations (there’s a minimum of $10.)
The Jazz Gallery in Chelsea was fortunate enough to have the resources to quickly transition to livestream in April of last year, starting out with Lockdown Sessions, and unlike other venues like the Vanguard and Smalls, it hosted virtual happy hours for musicians and guests to converse and connect. While members pay a suggested donation of $5, non-members pay $20 for a livestream performance. The Gallery has adapted well and has even broadened viewership outside of New York with an additional 15,000 new viewers since March 2020. Rio Sakairi, the artistic director, says at the beginning stages no one was prepared to do it properly, but after realizing how hungry musicians were to play again she knew something had to be done.
“The sense of isolation is so strong, lockdown sessions bring people together in a way that is substantial and intimate,” Sakairi says.
Latvian jazz artist Arta Jēkabsone has performed frequently at the Gallery, both in person and now virtually. Prior to the shutdown, she was about to graduate from the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music at The New School and was preparing to perform at the Jazz Gallery for a multidisciplinary performance as her capstone project.
“I remember, like, two days after I played at the Jamaica Center,[Rio] just texted me,” Jēkabsone recalls. “She was like, I think we might have to postpone until September. People were thinking, oh, probably it’s gonna work out and it’s gonna be like a short pandemic situation. Turns out it wasn’t.”
In September, The Jazz Gallery was able, for the first time since the initial shutdown, to actually supplement its livestreaming by hosting some live performances, though in greatly diminished form. With the blessing of health authorities, it opened its doors to eight audience members at a time with a total of only 16 people allowed at the venue at any one time, including staff and audience members. (In pre-COVD days, typically the Gallery could hold 75 people.) But even that adaptation to conditions was short-lived. In November, the Gallery had to once again scale back to being completely virtual for reasons Sakairi did not expand on.
Despite the Gallery’s somewhat successful efforts, Sakairi worries that livestream performances ultimately do not fully measure up to in-person performances.
“Livestreaming is a great tool for what we have,” she says. “But I’m a little bit wary. [In a live performance], when everything lines up great, you feel that the room is levitating. We are never able to capture that feeling on livestream. You never get to experience the artist in the way you’re supposed to experience them. There is a little bit of a gap between what happens and the perception of what happens.”
The jazz scene’s agony only kept escalating throughout 2020. The form lost a number of luminaries to the COVID virus, not just folks living in New York but all over the world. Many prominent jazz icons have succumbed to COVID, including cultural critic Stanley Crouch, Ellis Marsalis Jr.,Wallace Roney, French jazz artist Claude Bolling, and Cameroon jazz icon Manu DiBango to name a few. These are icons that cannot be replaced, and jazz will forever be changed because of it.
By the end of 2020, the jazz casualty list was made up not just of people, but of locations. The end had arrived for a number of struggling venues. For instance, in early December, Jazz Standard announced on Twitter that the beloved midtown club would be closing its doors permanently. The iconic Birdland Jazz Club is on the brink of suffering the same fate. The owner, Gianni Valentini, told ABC TV’s Eyewitness News in January 2021 that the club will be shutting down if it doesn’t raise at least $250,000.
For other clubs that are hanging by a thread, every day is a struggle. Take it from Bill Saxton and Theda Palmer Saxton, who have been fighting to keep Bill’s Place alive up in Harlem since March. Reached during a rehearsal day in October of 2020, Saxton said he wasn’t sure what he was going to do.
“Nobody’s ever experienced nothing like this before,” says Saxton. “We’re still trying to adjust even as we speak. We were thinking of opening up the club [again] and then the numbers went up in Brooklyn.” Saxton was referring to a surge of cases in Queens and Brooklyn three months ago. In response, Governor Cuomo designated some Brooklyn neighborhoods as red zones where four Brooklyn zip codes experienced the strictest shutdown measures.
“Brooklyn is right across the river, ” Saxton said. “So it didn’t make sense to open again.”
When, if ever, will it make sense for Bill’s Place to reopen? How many more clubs will succumb before vaccinations become common, which right now might not be until at least mid-2021? That’s the sad question hanging over the city’s longest-lived, most deeply treasured form of Black musical culture. For now, club owners and artists will have to keep doing what jazz artists have always been most gifted at doing: persevering, taking challenges in stride, and improvising.