The Jazz that Passed

Blue Swamini in January 2020 (photo by author)

That 2020 was a bad year goes without saying. One of the areas of human endeavor that suffered most was arts and culture. And these are also amongst the most vital areas for us. In a year dominated by a pandemic and a health crisis (which is fundamentally an expression of how our human society has an unhealthy relationship with nature), social and political strife, closures of small businesses and rising unemployment, police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of right-wing violence and white supremacy, and the sad farce of an increasingly mad president in the United States, it’s easy to overlook how important a role music and other arts play in our wellbeing.

As countries and cities locked down in the spring, museums, galleries, concert halls and live music venues boarded up as well. I personally had planned to have an active year of music and cultural events. In fact, it all started off well. In January, I managed to first catch the Beijing Bamboo Orchestra (a Chinese ensemble that features more than 30 instruments all made of bamboo) and then saw the Kassa Overall Blue Swamini, a fabulous and innovative band with the unusual set-up of harp, vibes, bass and drums, also featuring the vocalist Carmen Lundy. In early-February, I was delighted to witness the performance of composer and bassist Linda May Han Oh’s work Aventurine for strings and a jazz quartet. All of these interesting and elevating events at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.

While there is no doubt the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Opera and other major venues around the world will bounce back—they have the resources to bridge over these tough times and their patrons will be eager to come back—I am frankly terribly worried about smaller live music venues and clubs. Many have already closed down and many of them, I fear, permanently. In August, we lost one of the best clubs in Washington, DC, Twins Jazz, which had operated for 33 years on U Street. One of the biggest losses for the jazz scene in New York (and the world) was the closure of Jazz Standard, another well-established club, which featured nightly many of the city’s best talent, often of the more progressive variety creating new and innovative music. 

Then there were those who died of COVID-19. The first one I took note of early in the pandemic was Manu Dibango, who passed on March 24 in his adopted city, Paris. The Cameroonian saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist was highly influential in mixing African music with funk and jazz. His best known piece was probably the 1972 hit Soul Makossa. Dibango was 86.

The last day of March witnessed the passing of Wallace Roney (59), a protégé of Miles Davis and a remarkable trumpeter in his own right. Three decades ago, Roney was one of the “Young Lions” who wanted to bring back the glory of modern jazz from earlier days. There was a lot of Miles in his playing, as can be heard in the recording of Metropolis from 2018, but he was definitely his own man. One of the top trumpeters in his generation and beyond.

On April 1st, world lost the pianist Ellis Marsalis who died of pneumonia triggered by COVID at the age of 85. Apart from being a musician, Ellis Marsalis was an important music educator in New Orleans where his legacy lives on in the Ellis Marsalis Center. His legacy is also evident in his four sons, Winton, Branford, Delfeayo and Jason who have become household names as jazz masters. 

The guitarist John “Bucky” Pizzarelli died on the same day at the age of 94. Pizzarelli was a highly skillful guitarist who had performed with luminaries such as Benny Goodman, Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra and recorded with pop musicians ranging from Paul McCartney and Michael Franks to Aretha Franklin and Carly Simon. Both presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton invited him to perform at the White House. He also performed frequently with his son, guitarist John Pizzarelli. 

Onaje Allan Gumbs may not have been a household name, but he was a highly established pianist whose music inspired me as a teenager in Finland. Gumbs died in New York on April 6th at 70. 

Then ten days later, on April 15th, the world lost two great senior statesmen of modern jazz. Lee Konitz passed away from COVID-related pneumonia at the age of 92. It is impossible to capture the importance of Lee Konitz in a paragraph. He was one of the greatest and most original alto saxophone players of all time. He was born in Chicago to a Jewish immigrant family and started his professional career with dance and blues bands in the Windy City in 1944. He moved to New York City in 1947 and soon performed and recorded with greats, such as Gil Evans, Miles Davis, Lenny Tristano, Stan Kenton and Bill Evans. His trademark was an alto sound that was pure and his expression was devoid of anything beyond the musical essential. He recorded the last album of his incredibly productive career, Old Songs New, in 2017 just after his 90th birthday. 

All of these deaths are tragedies, of course, but one that made me saddest was that of Henry Grimes who passed away in Harlem on the same day as Konitz at the age 84. From the late-1950s, Grimes was an active participant on the jazz scene, playing with greats such as Coleman Hawkins. However, he made his mark especially as part of the free jazz movement with others including Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor and Don Cherry. He fell on hard times in 1968 when his bass broke on a tour with Jon Hendricks. Henry was left stranded, broke and without an instrument in Los Angeles where he stayed working as janitor until 2003 when he was discovered by a social worker who luckily recognized the great musician. He made a celebrated comeback on the New York music scene where jazz aficionados had never forgotten about him. He was a warm and open person and even I managed to connect with him on social media.

The list goes on and I could add so many names, but here I have only focused on those firmly in the jazz world. Just to pay my respects to others, here are some: Trini Lopez, Kenny Rogers (who, incidentally, was a jazz bassist before he found fame as a country star), the renowned bass guitarists Matthew Seligman and Adam Schlesinger, Dave Greenfeld of the Stranglers, John Prine, Alan Merrill (best know as the co-writer of ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll’), and the composer William Pursell.

A totally unnecessary casualty of the pandemic was the Japanese pianist Tadataka Unno who was badly beaten by a bunch of thugs upon entering the subway in New York City in September. While the details of the attack are blurry, there is reason to believe that this was a racist attack as he remembers his attackers calling him Chinese. One of the many unfortunate side effects of the inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump who insisted on calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus.” 

These have all been terrible losses to the music world. But apart from those who died, many more have seen their livelihoods disappear. Behind this is also the greater change in how music is consumed. With the shift to streaming, musicians can no longer make a living wage through recordings—and there are so many people who, quite inexplicably, think that music should be free and who do their best to avoid paying even the paltry fees that services like Spotify and Pandora would transfer partly to the artist (can you imagine people suddenly deciding that farmers or doctors should not get paid for their work because they “enjoy” it and provide something that is good for the world?). All of this is very bad for musicians, especially those who create a novel kind of music that doesn’t get millions of instances of airplay. But that’s another story for another time.

The closing of live music venues and concert sites and the halting of tours has left countless musicians with very little possibilities of earning an income. There are some creative ideas around, of course. I’ve personally contributed to a number of music projects through crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter. Live music has been partially reinvented through live streaming from artists’ homes and some clubs. One of my favorites, the fabulous pianist Yoko Miwa, for example, has shared a lot of music from her home in Boston.

Here in DC, the Kennedy Center streams concerts, as do clubs like our premier jazz and supper club Blues Alley and New York’s famed Blue Note. I listen to these events on occasion—and always make a point of paying the “entrance fee” even it would be easy to skip it. The fabled New Orleans club Tipitina’s broadcasts live music from the club in as realistic manner as possible. According to the current owners of the club, members of the jam band Galactic, the silver lining is that very few people could actually get a place in the front row if they were physically at the club, while at home we can all have that experience. I guess one could also turn the heater and the space humidifier on full blast, grab a few beers, and let go at home—at least until the neighbors complain. 

The spontaneity of live performances can be created this way and you can still hear new music, but obviously the experience is different both to the listener and the performers who will miss the feedback from a live audience. As Jimmy Page, the legendary guitarist and founder of Led Zeppelin, said in a recent NME interview: “I will never be one of those people who’ll record alone and send someone a file. I never went into music in the first place to do that, it was for playing together and this is what it means.” He states his conviction that “music means nothing without live shows.” 

As long as we need social distancing because of the pandemic, seeing performances online is better than nothing. Apart from the US and UK, some other countries around the world, like New Zealand, Japan and Finland, have been somewhat less severely hit due to better policies and a more disciplined population. There, live music may make a comeback sooner, although tightly packed enthusiastic crowds will remain risky for a long while. Eventually, this current pandemic will wane and we’ll all get vaccinated (worryingly, there is a large proportion of population hesitant to take the vaccine). Although it may take years before we can again mingle freely in crowded places—and there are other novel viruses lurking in nature waiting to spill over to humans as we continue to abuse the environment—there is hope that live music will come back.

But the likelihood is that most of the venues that have now closed will not reopen, as the operators have moved on and reopening would require a lot of money in a situation that remains highly uncertain. Furthermore, there has been a movement of people away from city centers during the pandemic and that, obviously, is bad news for clubs that depend on dense concentrations of customers. 

The website of Jazz Standard in New York has an upbeat message: We’ll be together again! I believe that there are millions of people around the world who feel the same. That should be our best hope.