I don’t realize it until that moment as I pass him on my way to the bathroom. I turn to say hello, for I had played with him here last week, and stop. He sits alone, a garish double-breasted pinstripe suit over his portly frame, his leather shoes gleaming, his gray moustache well-groomed, a silk handkerchief in his coat pocket matching the silk tie around his neck, a fedora resting on the table beside his trumpet. This was no casual Monday night attire, this was more meticulous than even Sunday best. For what? To sit alone at a booth and play “Stella by Starlight” in an impromptu quartet with three other trumpet players?
I had been so intent on finding a jam
session when I arrived in San Francisco, and so disappointed when bartender
after bartender had apologized and explained that they don’t host jam sessions
anymore, that I hadn’t stopped to take in my surroundings when I first set foot
into Rasselas. I was just thrilled for a chance to play. But now, this man, so
blatantly out of time and place, forces me to look around. The youngest
musician here is the bass player, easily forty, and everyone who brought a horn
to sit in looks well over fifty. The sparse crowd, which claps politely between
songs, ranges from thirty to beyond, all older than the late twenty-something
Ethiopian bartender working to pay for college and return home. And then
there’s me: Twenty-one years old.
The first night I had come to Rasselas I
was surprised to recognize the name of the house piano player, Mark Levine. His
books are almost ubiquitous among jazz educators, (I own a copy myself) and his
resume includes recordings with a pantheon of jazz heroes. As he slowly made
his way over to the bar during the break, the aura he exuded was overwhelmingly
very old and very tired, only augmented by his eyes which never quite pointed in
exactly the same direction.
Another piano player whom I had met at
the bar (and who, I would come to find out, mobbed Levine every week like a
teenage girl to a pop star) quickly approached him.
“Mark, hey, you sound great tonight! I
have to show you a new jazz record I found, I’m sure you’ll love it.”
Levine clearly did not share his thrill.
“I don’t listen to jazz anymore. Now I only listen to Gypsy music. Have you
ever heard the gimbri?”
“Um, no…”
“It’s beautiful, you should. I don’t know
what the Giants think they’re doing tonight, though.” He gestured at the
baseball game on the TV in the corner, and that was the last he would mention
music for the evening.
The youth are not here at the spacious
and half-empty Rasselas on Monday nights which tries to be high class, but
where what appears to be leather turns out to be vinyl. No, I had found the
youth last week on Wednesday at Amnesia, a dive in the Mission with no
pretensions, so packed it’s difficult to make your way to the bar from the door
in the dim lighting, where the cheapest beer is two dollars instead of eight,
and a riotous gypsy jazz band replete with an accordion provides the backdrop
for swing-dancing couples to perform acrobatic feats.
I was surprised, as I ordered a glass
from the bar and fell into conversation with a group of Asian business students,
by the vitality in this room saturated in century-old music from a band that
even looked like it had been transplanted from a prohibition-era speakeasy.
Walking into the room was like experiencing a museum piece—not a relic of the
aristocracy, but the history of the people, and this crowd had bought in completely,
riding the raw energy emanating from the bandstand on their journey through
time.
After the last tune ended to riotous
applause, another group started moving equipment onstage to replace them. I
recognized the piano player as he walked in; he had played on the Stevie Wonder
tribute I saw on my first night in the city. When I had approached him before,
I’d had some difficulty engaging him in much of a conversation beyond
formalities, though we both did manage to agree on our mutual love of jazz
pianist Robert Glasper, whose latest album, Black Radio, had dropped a
month earlier and would go on to win the Grammy for R&B Album of the year,
a rare feat for a jazz musician.
The trio tonight was clearly an homage to
Robert Glasper, from the stuttering hip-hop grooves to the effects-ridden
saxophone, but this sounded nothing like Black Radio. The mind-bending
syncopations, extended solos, and cacophonous sound effects referred to an
earlier Robert Glasper, when his records still stood firmly planted in the
territory of ‘hip-hip-influenced-jazz,’ with ‘jazz’ at the forefront and
‘hip-hop’ merely an aesthetic choice.
There were just a handful of us in front
of the stage, completely entranced by the technical prowess of the musicians
before us. The vast majority of the crowd had already left the building, though
a residual mass still clustered around the bar, talking now rather than paying
any attention to the music.
“Why isn’t anyone listening?” I couldn’t
help think to myself, for to me the real show had just begun. This music had
developed in the last five years, this was the cutting edge, this was the
avant-garde. But what did that mean to an audience who couldn’t understand what
was going on? And as the band explored further regions of uncharted musical
territory I realized they weren’t playing for the people. They were playing music
only a jazz musician would truly appreciate, so it was only natural, then, that
only a jazz musician like me would pay any attention.
And weeks from now, the offhand remark of
a tipsy Brit I would meet listening to another band at another bar would seem strangely
appropriate:
“I didn’t realize this was a jazz club, I
would’ve worn my jazz clothes.” He would say, his tan complexion and curly
black hair reminding me of Mr. Mittel, my Jewish 8th grade English teacher,
though the accent would be nowhere close.
“What are jazz clothes?” I would respond,
for to me jazz is not something static to be represented by any particular time
or image, but a process evolving for over a century.
“Oh you know, black and white. Like in
black and white films.”
“Um, did you know that we have color
films now?”
“But does jazz know that?” And I would
laugh at his jab at the anachronism of the music called ‘jazz,’ though it would
sting a bit too true for me.
So here, finally sitting at the piano in
Rasselas, I do my part. I give my best solo on “Stella by Starlight” and back
up all four trumpet players, each seemingly trying to out-trumpet the next, but
there’s no transcendence, no moment of epiphany. I might as well be at a jam
session back home, or playing along to a record for that matter. And after the
last cymbal crashes to polite applause, I return to the bar, pay for my
eight-dollar beer, and walk out the door for good.
