Anachronism

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.