Sud de France 4.5: All Dat Jazz

My relationship with jazz has been a sometime thing. Growing up in New York I’d take the subway home after late night dates and there’d always be some musicians on the trains. Slouched over their bass cases and trombone bags, tapping their feet to the rhythm of the car wheels, they were going back up to Harlem in the wee hours of the morning. 

Tired and drained after a gig at some midtown hotel dining room or a club in the Village, their fingers  would unconsciously practice a riff on their unreachable fret boards and valves. 

These were the anonymous foot soldiers of jazz. Black musicians who loved to play but never made any real money at it. Every once in a while I’d recognize a face (say was that Miles?) but usually they were the sidemen who supported the big “names” and remained in their shadows. 

It was the late nineteen sixties and I was learning to play guitar. My heroes were another bunch of black musicians; blues men like Bukka White, Son House and Lighting Hopkins. With the anti-War movement and the rise of folk music, the action in Greenwich Village shifted from the Blue Note to the Café Wha and middle class white kids hauling banjos and washtub basses filled Washington Square pretending to be authentic Appalachians singers. 

I stayed in touch with jazz though because my best friend was a jazz enthusiast with a huge collection of vinyl LPs. Pretty regularly I'd get a call to come over and listen to some new record he had just gotten. Or we'd get together and hang out in a tiny Easy Village jazz club. By now I was performing in a folk band made up of college kids and I too was pretending to be a country boy. It didn’t last, there was this war on called Viet Nam and I had to move on leaving the band and New York behind. 

1967 rolled in and I found myself in San Francisco in the heat of the "Summer of Love. It wasn’t the sex, drugs and rock and roll thing the media made it out to be. Instead it was a sad, desperate time with lost kids from places like Topeka, St. Louis or Dallas, running away from the stifling world of Middle America hoping to find something; hoping to find anything, really.

Rock was the theme music of those days  but jazz held on. Groups like Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band and performers like Leon Redbone were rooted in the jazz of the 1920s and musicians like Charles Lloyd with his big old Afro and color splashed batik shirts brought jazz to a new, “hip,” young audience. Jazz stayed very much alive although undervalued and sidelined.

After a year in San Francisco I headed north and for the next couple of decades I was the photographer for Seattle Center, the city's performing arts facility. I shot hundreds of concerts including the small number of jazz performances that were included in the big Labor Day Bumbershoot Arts Festival.

Usually presented in the Center's smaller venues, it meant that I got to meet and hear artists like Ray Charles, Marian McFarland, Buddy Guy and Etta James, in intimate rooms and halls.

In America today the audience for jazz has been aging while here in France it seems the jazz scene is healthy and the audience is young. 

For example, within a few weeks of arriving we were invited to a jazz “house party” in a private house in a nearby, very small village. For 8 Euros you got a glass of wine and some food and then sat down in the living room for an evening of live jazz performed by a local group. 

Pezenas is a renaissance age village in the South of France.

Then other day we were having a meeting with the owner of the house we are hoping to buy when out of the blue he turned to me and said, “I do hope you like jazz.” 

It turns out that Pézenas, the next town to ours, is a hotbed of music. The town’s old train station has been remodeled into a theater and there's a schedule of all sorts of music and art performances (and lots of jazz) throughout the year. 

And for a town of only 7500 people what’s even more surprising is its lively and active music club scene. 

Typical of what I mean is this notice I found in the local paper this morning.

Son du Swing

“At Club Butel (Pézenas) at 20:00. 18 December 2010. Le Son du Swing a collective of musicians based in Southern France who share a common passion for ‘jazz manouche’ or ‘Gypsy Jazz’. The line-up of the group is inspired by and celebrates the 'Quintet du Hot club de France'."  

The thought of all this jazz so close to my new home is heartwarming. In a way for me, it honors the legacy of those hard working musicians I shared all those late night subways with so long time ago. Men and women whose lives were all about all dat jazz.

And, of course, there's always Django.