Redemption? The (D)evolution of Smalls
Aaron Parks at Jazz Alley in Seattle
Aaron Parks’ Invisible Cinema (Blue Note, August 2008)
The rise, fall, and resurrection of a little jazz room on West 10th Street and 7th Avenue in Greenwich Village is one of the more remarkable stories in our corner of the contemporary jazz world. In 1994, a nightshift nurse named Mitch Borden mortgaged his New Jersey house, rented out rooms, and moved his family in with his parents in order to open Smalls, which he named after the legendary Harlem club Smalls Paradise. A contingent of veteran masters from the New York jazz scene such as Frank Hewitt, Lou Donaldson, and Jimmy Lovelace became regulars. Younger performers cut their teeth at the all-night jam sessions (lasting until 9am!) and the club quickly became a breeding ground for new talent, with some of the most significant new voices — players like Jason Linder, Omer Avital, and Kurt Rosenwinkel — getting their first regular headlining gigs because they were heard and booked by Borden. From its inception, Smalls was a place that provided the kind of “loose hang” atmosphere that has always fostered creative development in young aspiring musicians.
The famous Village Gate had closed its doors earlier that year and Borden envisioned his club as continuing the legacy of that club with the “feels like you’re in your living room” vibe. “There needs to be a Smalls,” he has said. “There was a Smalls. It was called the Village Gate.” In its original version (10 youthful years) Smalls featured a ten dollar cover and a bar that wasn’t a bar. There was no bartender and instead patrons would sit on barstools on the “employee” side. (Mitch was the only employee: owner and talent seeker, doorman and janitor; he was never behind the bar.) It was BYOB and audience members would show up with six packs from the bodega down the street or a bottle of wine from the local liquor store (hoping someone had a corkscrew); there was free tea and juice set up on a table in the back; there was a smattering of round tables, a random assortment of chairs, a bunch of candles, some on tables, some lined against the longer right wall of the room, where a cushioned bench snaked from stairs to stage. A Steinway grand piano, rented by Borden for $1300 a month, occupied the far left hand corner of the room. The low stage barely separated performer from audience, a distinction that disappeared entirely at “around midnight” when the all-night jam session would commence. A large framed photograph of Louis Armstrong in his youth, sitting Buddha-like, derby cap slightly askew, hung behind the musicians.
Having (in my bright-eyed, pimply-skinned youth) heroically stayed until close for a handful of these sessions, I can personally attest to the “jazz spell” cast by the room, and will never forget the eerie visions when emerging from the club into the morning light to look with wonder and incomprehension at the throngs of rush hour commuters (moving at what seemed incredible speeds) toward the Christopher Street subway station, taxis hurtling down 7th Ave., and bums asleep against sidewalk curbs, The New York Post shielding their eyes from the light.
The visions fled and yielded to reality in May of 2004 when Smalls closed its doors. In the ensuing months, I heard a variety of stories: the neighbors complained, and then a deluge of calls and letters from government agencies and lawyers; failed health inspection (faulty smoke detectors in the bathroom or something of the sort); citations for underage drinking; Borden’s failure to pay $7,000 in workers’ comp. (To whom? Himself? The musicians whose careers he helped bring to life by providing a space to play and a young and enthusiastic audience?) There were the mounting bills and no way to meet them with only the measly ten dollar door cover charge (about fifteen dollars less than what you would have to pay to see comparable talent anywhere else in the city). No liquor was sold. The bottom line is that Smalls was not profitable enough for the famous Greenwich Village, which now largely trades on the immense cultural capital produced during its bohemian glory days while scoffing at any attempt to keep that cultural vibrancy alive in any type of non-profit-driven manifestation.
Later that year a Brazilian bar owner took over the lease and renovated, turning the space into a sleek, tourist trap with some lame-ass name (I think it was “Ipanema Bar” or something). The interior was completely done over, and a bigger stage was added. (Probably top-of-the-line smoke detectors in the bathrooms also). After about a year of lackluster business, Borden (who had started booking bands at the nearby pool hall Fat Cat) finally persuaded the owner that the Latin-themed club wasn’t working. Borden was hired to book jazz talent again, only this time at a twenty dollar cover charge and with drink minimums. While many of the younger generations of musicians came back to play at the club, the clientele had shifted, and the unique atmosphere was long gone, as were the all-night jam sessions.
Encouraged by popular demand, the following year Borden partnered with musicians Spike Wilner and Leo Kostrinsky, re-purchased the club and opened Smalls again, attempting to restore the original pre-“Ipanema” vibe, but needing to make the place financially viable. The result: a retained twenty dollar cover and one drink minimum, one bartender, one waitress; a renovated look with the modern bar, hallway, and bathrooms intact; and a restoration of the older type small stage facing rows of used-furniture-store chairs.
In other words, patrons wishing to spend the night at Smalls will need about three times the cash they used to in order to soak in that bohemian living room vibe. But ironies aside, the saddest thing is that it prevents the music from getting heard by enough young people. Smalls used to be a place hip college students would come and just check the music out and hang out all night without worrying about having to spend too much; the club has retained its reputation among jazz enthusiasts and young students of the music, but it seems like now they are the only ones willing to pay the cover to see their favorites. The cover and drink minimum effectively prevent just “dropping by” on random nights.
Incredibly, despite all of this, Smalls (the new old version) is still one of the most affordable places to see the best players in the city, as the twenty dollar cover (good for the whole night) remains five to fifteen dollars cheaper than its more famous “competitors,” The Blue Note, Birdland, The Village Vanguard, and The Iridium, three of the four of which have succeeded in turning the art form into a status symbol and tourist “destination.” At Smalls there is no announcement over the PA about flash photography, no polite reminder about cell phone usage and “quiet time,” and no tired looking waitress handing you your bill in the middle of the set. It’s all about the music. And yes, the Buddha-like Armstrong photograph was restored to its proper place.
In contrast to the self-consciously experimental character of the jazz that used to happen at clubs like The Knitting Factory and Tonic, the original group of musicians drawn by Borden to Smalls played in a more “straight-ahead” vein, a phrase in jazz lingo that means a rough adherence to the shared, swing-based musical vocabulary as it has developed over the last fifty years from bebop to postbop. These days, for a post-Marsalis generation of younger players, the purview has widened again and the communal vocabulary is developing by incorporating elements from new generation x and y genres like alternative rock and indie pop. Brad Mehldau, who exemplifies the new turn, and Joshua Redman, a kind of bridge figure, have both used the club as a launching pad and gone on to become two of the most celebrated jazz musicians in the world.
Like other greats, Mehldau has created his own unmistakable idiom on his instrument (in this case the piano), and currently casts the largest shadow on newer players. The 24 year-old pianist Aaron Parks, who I had the pleasure of hearing last week at Smalls, seems to embrace the influence, working through it rather than around it. On this particular night, he was a sideman in the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel’s band, and he was consistently up to the daunting challenge of having to play a solo either before or after jazz’s latest guitar hero. Parks mesmerized the Smalls crowd with an incredible blend of chops and melodic ideas, but it is his sense of musical narrative, of improvisational architecture, that already sets him above even many of his musical peers, and makes him an ideal partner for Rosenwinkel.
Parks, who grew up in Seattle, is the classic case of the musical prodigy, entering Washington University at age 14 to triple major in math, computer science, and music. Shortly thereafter he realized that he was “addicted” to improvisational music and moved to New York. He joined trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s band and began a five year tenure which yielded numerous film soundtracks and three spacious, wide-ranging albums including 2005’s Flow. Parks made his debut as a major label leader earlier this month with Blue Note’s release of Invisible Cinema, which features ten of the pianists’ compositions played in a mostly quartet format with Mike Moreno on guitar, Matt Penman on bass, and Eric Harland (a member of Blanchard’s band) on drums. Parks says that the title of the album has many meanings, and one of them is that music for him (and for many of us) is kind of like an invisible cinema: “You can’t see it, but there’s all this drama between the musicians, all these stories that can be told.” This might sound like cliché, except that the music on the album is anything but.
The opening “Travelers” is reminiscent of Chick Corea’s seminal Blue Note debut, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs (1968), but garbed in a 21st century aesthetic. On the opening track, “Travelers,” Parks’ buttery, Corea-like piano lines sing, taking off in flight directly above the simmering techno-influenced rhythmic propulsion of Penman’s bass and Harland’s electronic snare drum. After a deceptively simple melody, Parks darts through sections of song which shift between meters of 15 and 4, creating a giddy, off-kilter feel. “Karma” uses another techno inspired groove, and a spacious landscape is set up, over which Parks and Moreno execute in unison a series of heavily chromatic melody lines which begin and end in surprising places; like twin sports cars, they speed around hairpin melodic turns, careening in and out of view at dangerous speeds. The open, “cinematic” sound of many of these tracks calls to mind recent albums by Parks’ immediate predecessors Mehldau, Rosenwinkel, and Blanchard, but also the sense of space present in music of the artists grouped on the German ECM label during the 1970’s, especially the work of Keith Jarrett’s great “European” quartet.
Parks, Moreno and Harland can also sound like fusion players from the 70’s, as on “Harvesting Dance,” a Balkan-inspired groove with a snake-like melody, Moreno’s tone calling to mind Larry Carlton’s nasty lead guitar on the late Steely Dan albums, and Harland sounding like The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s thunderous and machine-like Billy Cobham. On the meditative “Praise,” Moreno and Parks and blend beautifully, with Moreno deftly using volume pedal swells to create amplified shadows behind the piano melody.
Parks is a young jazz musician with a gift for musical narrative and an ability to speak to the musical “here and now,” absorbing a variety of influences past and present, and transmuting them with a prodigious talent and vision. Invisible Cinema is an exciting debut, an auspicious start for a promising composer and improviser who might just start casting some shadows of his own.
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