I Hear a Rhapsody

The communication among jazz players as they perform feels, to me at least, to be among the best experiences of what it means to be human. It's seeing friendship (often), both experienced and witnessed, a willing dependence on and trust in your fellow musical trapeze artists, and cooperation that leads to music that at its best takes us on an adventure as it inspires and entertains.

One of the owners of Cincinnati's Caffè Vivace likes to say that seeing jazz performed live, as opposed to hearing it recorded, is comparable to seeing a lion in the wild instead of in a zoo.

Set in the city's Walnut Hills neighborhood, Caffè Vivace is a cozy, almost intimate urban venue. I recently (2022) saw Christian McBride play there with one of his groups. Even though he regularly plays with well-known veterans, he was not afraid to tour with young musicians in his quintet, following in the footsteps of bandleaders like Betty Carter and Art Blakey, a path Christian trod himself as a young player.

I don't go to many live shows now. The truth is, I never have gone to a lot of shows, relative to hard-core jazz fans, anyway. But McBride's show inspired me to think about the shows I have seen over the last 40 years or so, and what they meant to me. I surprised myself realizing the quality of the shows I've seen, and I came to appreciate how they have enhanced my life.

One of the first live shows I saw was Count Basie and his orchestra with Ella Fitzgerald at Dayton, Ohio's Victoria Theatre in the early 1980s. This had to have been one of Basie's final tours. Hearing Ella sing live, seeing the emotion and the apparent joy she brought to performance, for me, carried all kinds of messages. I realized I was seeing an early giant in a line of immensely talented Black women who overcame ugly, uniquely American obstacles to become stars. Music has power.

A couple of years later I saw a young Pat Metheny play there too. Metheny's flowing, curly locks somehow complemented his amazing guitar work as he plucked out an entirely different but relatable and original sound. I became a life-long fan. It was a little like rock and roll refined, subdued to where his music carried the show but didn't blast your ears off. His was (and is) a gentle, fluid, rhythmically rich music. Both these shows were seminal in my appreciation of jazz music. Maybe I was growing up a little.

Not too long after that, I saw Scott Hamilton at the Blue Wisp Jazz Club in Cincinnati's eastside O'Bryonville neighborhood. That club's location jumped around Cincinnati as deftly as Hamilton could glide through a melody on his tenor. I still listen to Hamilton a lot and believe his sound stands with the best tenors. His show sent me on a quest for recordings from some of them, from Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Lester Young up through Stan Getz, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Joe Henderson, Joe Lovano and, well, the list goes on.

You may have figured out I got into jazz a little later than some, because I was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio and started out as a big rock-and-roll fan. (Dayton had a fine downtown mostly jazz club, now closed, called Gilly's that I regret I didn't visit often enough.)

In 1985, I moved from Dayton to Philadelphia to work at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and this time I was ready for an expanded world of live jazz. The Inquirer's grand old building on Broad Street was just a few blocks down from a small club called Jewel's. Jewel Mann-Lassiter operated her namesake club for about ten years starting in 1979.

I worked a night shift, and occasionally went to Jewel's after I got off work. I caught what was usually the final set from some legendary musicians, like Betty Carter and Jackie McLean. In Philly, my devotion to jazz got more serious. I had played clarinet as a kid, so I started taking alto sax lessons. I was inspired not just by the jazz I was hearing but by the jazz legacy the city boasts. After all, this is the city where John Coltrane took sax lessons when he got out of the Navy.

Coltrane I was not. But I still noodle around on the alto now and then, and I don't annoy my family or neighbors too much. I haunted some great record stores in Philly and spent way too much on jazz and blues LPs.

The last jazz show I saw in Philly before I moved to Cincinnati in 1988, was the outstanding alto player Frank Morgan. He performed in a small art school auditorium, accompanied only by piano. He sounded great but I can't forget him showing some perfectionist tendencies by complaining about the sound system. His playing more than made up for his grumpiness, though. That perfectionism, admirable but slightly annoying then, makes clear to me now that the best jazz musicians take their music and the way it sounds to audiences very seriously. I couldn't help but think everyone, especially me, could learn something from this kind of devotion to a calling. I was not only hearing great live music, I was absorbing a life lesson.

These live-shows, including a couple by the superbly entertaining and enduring Cincinnati's Blue Wisp Big Band, are a big part of what jazz has meant to me over the years. I'm 72 years old and have seen and heard great musicians act, react and interact with each other on the bandstand. That is a thing to behold, and witnessing that music being created has formed a treasured experience.

Christian McBride's show reminded me how lucky I've been to see and hear jazz of the best sort performed live as often as I have. And confirmed to me that I'll keep listening to it as long as my ears will let me.

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