In my senior year at Wabash, I played a trombonist named Jonesy in a production of Warren Leight’s Side Man directed by Professor Michael Abbott ’85. One of several washed-out musicians who live and breathe jazz at the expense of nearly every other aspect of their lives, Jonesy still had that fire in his blood, even in old age, and even if most of the contemporary world had passed him by.
Last year, five years after wrapping the show, I finally began to understand him.
Jazz has a vocabulary and style that lends itself to obscurity. You either get it or you don’t. Like a language, if you’re born into it, with that syncopation in your DNA, you understand it without ever knowing why. If you pick it up later in life, you’ll always be an outsider, prone to those subtle errors that mark a non-native speaker.
I didn’t understand any of this when I joined the floor team at Ronnie Scott’s. Set in the heart of London’s Soho district, Ronnie’s has played host to some of the greatest jazz artists of the past 50 years. It’s a small venue, intimate and close, seating around 230 in what feels like the smoky bars of old.
The walls are crammed with portraits of all the greats who’ve ever played Ronnie’s. Chet Baker, Jeff Beck, Ella Fitzgerald, Terence Blanchard, Chick Corea, Nina Simone, and a host of others have played that stage.
For me, Ronnie’s was a master class taught by some of the finest artists in the world. I merely waited tables there—I’m not a musician. But standing in the shadows every night brought me closer to the richness of the human soul, while simultaneously throwing my spirit’s own poverty in my face.
I had been at Ronnie’s for only three weeks when my manager pulled me to the side.
“Okay, there’s a big name coming in for the late, late show, and we’re going to put him at your table,” he said. The late, late show at Ronnie’s is an institution in Soho. After the main act ends around 11 p.m., the club stays open until three in the morning.
And you never know who’s going to show up.
That night Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director for jazz at New York’s Lincoln Center and one of the world’s best trumpet players, walked in and sat at my table. He was dressed in a cream-colored three-piece suit like he’d just taken the train in from 1953. He’d brought his trumpet along with him, and it wasn’t long before he sauntered up to the edge of the stage, instrument in hand. An electric anticipation hung in the air as he tapped out a few cheeky notes on the house piano, a handcrafted Yamaha S6 shipped over from Hamburg. A few playful runs with one hand and the air felt like it was going to shatter.
“TRUMPET!” someone shouted. He gave a slight smile, a tease and a challenge.
“TRUMPET! TRUUUUUMPET!” others hollered and whistled.
When he finally put it to his lips, he blew the highest, clearest note I’d ever heard. He made it look effortless.
And I really can’t describe it.
Those of us who appreciate the genre struggle that way. Watch any jazz head try to describe his favorite song and he’ll inevitably break down into “And then it’s like ba da daaa da da, dadadlu da da, per per prrrrrrrrrrrrr! Damn, man. Damn!” If you’re right there with him, you know exactly what he’s talking about. His excitement is infectious. If you don’t know jazz, you’re in the dark. Sometimes music moves in ways that can’t be put into words.
But there was a woman I met there who could do it. Jade: a 48-year-old chain-smoking jazz cynic trapped in the body of a woman half that age. She gets jazz. She speaks jazz. Let her play you a piece from Terence Blanchard’s score for When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee’s broadside against American inaction in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a drunken tumble, she’ll put it like this: “It’s an insidious complex with a battling hope that feels defeatist, but it’s about triumph over everything. Despite it all, there are voices screaming. It kills me.”
The best thing about working at Ronnie’s is being exposed to artists you never would have heard otherwise. That’s how I discovered Chris Dave and the Drumhedz. It was a Sunday night and about 95 percent of the customers were men. They all wanted to sit close to the drum set. They weren’t ordering anything. A beer here, a beer there. Nothing above five dollars.
The few women in attendance looked like they’d been dragged kicking and screaming into the club.
And that’s when it finally clicked—These customers were all drummers. And the jokes about drummers are endless: What do you call a drummer who’s just broken up with his girlfriend? Homeless. How can you tell if a drummer’s at your front door? The knocking speeds up. You get the point—drummers are a culture of their own.
And Chris Dave had them from the very first beat. It was amazing to watch nearly 200 people bob their heads in sync with the music.
Those were the best nights—when an artist was so engaging that those of us on the floor could just sit back and enjoy the show. The Japanese pianist Hiromi did that better than anyone I’ve ever seen. She played with hypnotic innocence and a joy that flowed through her to the stage. With a quirky sense of fashion and her dark hair piled on top of her head, she loved to play, and you could feel it. The audience was enraptured, sure. But Hiromi swept the club staff—a group hardened by the best that the world had to offer—off our feet.
That’s what jazz can do.
I had a friend at Wabash who majored in math and physics and played jazz guitar: Haris Amin ’08. He used to walk around in a fog; if you didn’t know him, you’d think he was stoned 24/7.
He wasn’t.
He just always had a jazz lick pealing its way through his head. We’d yell at him, “Haris…HARIS!” He’d snap back to Crawfordsville with a confused “huh?” We’d shake our heads and move on. We couldn’t understand his world, and he didn’t want much to do with ours. His music was his life.
In Warren Leight’s play Side Man, my character, Jonesy, gets arrested for heroin possession. The cops will let him go if he squeals on his dealer, but he won’t; and he tells his story to his fellow side man, Gene, who visits him in jail:
“They broke my teeth. I don’t think I’ll ever play again,” he says, and he can’t hold back his tears as the lights go black. He is a trombone player. Without his chops, he is nothing, and with the music gone, what does he have left?
That’s jazz—a heart breaking in a quiet, shattered world. From Wabash to London I’ve learned a bit through jazz about what can bring us together and tear us apart. I may not have the language for it, but I, like so many others, can feel it deep down and know that it is important.
For some, jazz is dead. I don’t think anyone’s told jazz yet.
Sterling Carter was born in Flora, IN, earned his master’s from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, served in the Peace Corps for two years, and has worked for Global Witness, Human Rights Watch, and Search for Common Ground. He is the political editor for Trebuchet Magazine and is a frequent contributor to WM. He is currently serving in South Sudan as a civilian peacekeeper.