Monthly Archives: April 2024

Swing Time at the Gotham Jazz Festival 2024

In the alternative world of the Gotham Jazz Festival, held at the opulent circa-1859 Down Town Association clubhouse near Wall Street, Bix Biederbecke is a bigger star than Prince. That’s judging from the number of times bandleaders called tunes with the legendary cornet player, who died in 1931.

The New York Hot Jazz Camp ensembles were superb. This is Jazznauseam. (Jim Motavalli photo)

This was my second Gotham, a joint effort of Patrick Soluri’s Prohibition Productions and the Bria Skonberg/Molly Ryan New York Hot Jazz Camp. It packs the city’s best swing bands (plus some out-of-town visitors) into three floors of continuous music that starts at 1 p.m. and goes on until near midnight.

Andy Schumm and his Gang are from Chicago, and play there regularly. Schumm is a cornetist, pianist and arranger who really respects the old songs. The first number I heard was “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me,” circa 1919 and played in the style of clarinetist Jimmy Noone, dead in 1944. Yes, Schumm doubles on clarinet, and he was accompanied by a brilliant group featuring bass sax, piano (the amazing Dalton Ridenhour, a stride specialist) and trombone.

Later, a banjo/guitar player (who’d been given wrong time zones) showed up. The Gang was brilliant with or without him, and an absolute time capsule. “Where the Sweet Forget-Me-Nots Remember,” as performed by Ben Pollack and His Park Central Orchestra circa 1929, when was the last time that snappy number was performed live? When I moved on they were swinging into an adaption of Bix’ 1928 version of “Somebody Stole My Gal.”

Ramona Baker, ragtime piano. She also makes her own clothes and makes prints, as seen in the foreground. (Jim Motavalli photo)

Down in the first-floor lounge and bar, ragtime pianist Ramona Baker (dressed in period clothes she made herself) was holding forth. She sounded great to me, and only 23 years old. Her songs were from 1902 (“Tell Me Dusky Maiden”), 1905 (“Dixie Queen,” which Freddie Hubbard used to play) and even “Southern Hospitality” from 1899.

I really enjoyed the sets by the New York Hot Jazz Camp students last year, and they were just as enjoyable in 2024. I heard Marit DeHoog sing “St. Louis Blues” with Jazz Cappuccino a la Créme, and faculty support from pianist Rossano Sportiello—a Gotham All-Star. A stirring “Dinah” by way of Fats Waller was next.

Julie Boyle was the featured vocalist with Jazznauseam, and the song was “After You’ve Gone” (1918). These are full bands sounding rehearsed and ready. Boyle could really sing, and was fully gowned in 1920s style.

Jon-Erik Kellso (left) on trumpet, with John Allred (trombone) and Neal Miner on bass. (Jim Motavalli photo)

Jon-Erik Kellso is a trumpet star in swing circles, and plays Sunday nights with his Ear Regulars at the Deer Inn. All About Jazz says, “The music is a hybrid, with one foot planted securely in the time-honored Dixie tradition, the other marching steadily toward swing.” I’ll buy that. Matt Munisteri was featured on guitar, and Neal Miner was brilliant on bass. “At the Jazz Band Ball” was a very early composition from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, circa 1917. To hear what their descendants sound like, check out Jon-Erik Kellso and The EarRegulars Live at The Ear Inn on Arbors (2023).

It was Munisteri’s birthday, so he got to sing and play on “You’re Bound to Look Like a Monkey When You Get Old,” which is from 1930 and was first recorded by The Hokum Trio.

The evening session was even better. In the Reading Room on floor 1.5 (don’t ask) I saw Eyal Vilner’s Swing Band swinging wildly for a full floor of dancers. The room went into pandemonium when Vilner called “Big Apple Contest” for “all you lindy hoppers.” I had no idea that many New Yorkers knew how to do the lindy hop, a fairly complicated African-American art form. To see World War II-era lindy hopping in all its glory, watch this 1941 selection from Hellzapoppin’:

Alphonso Horne and the Gotham Kings were entertaining. He’s a New Orleans trumpet player and vocalist a la the great Kermit Ruffins.

I’ve written extensively about Catherine Russell elsewhere on this blog, but here is that major jazz treasure with “I Found a New Baby,” accompanied by the New York Hot Jazz Camp faculty all-stars:

The all-stars deserve the name. Mike Davis is a monster period trumpet player and vocalist who leads his own ensembles. Ron Wilkins was all over the festival on hot trombone. Dan Levinson should be better known on saxophone and clarinet. They tore through numbers like “Three Little Words,” “Tin Roof Blues,” and, yes, “Somebody Stole My Gal” again.

Mike Davis (center) and the New York Jazz Camp Faculty All-Stars, Dan Levinson (left), Ron Wilkins (right). Tal Ronen (bass) and Kevin Dorn (drums) are in the background, and pianist Rossano Sportiello is obscured. (Jim Motavalli photo)

Have you heard the Anderson Brothers, Julliard grads Peter and Will? They’re huge talents on saxophone and clarinet. The twins played with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Wycliffe Gordon, Cecile McLorin Salvant, Paquito D’Rivera, Wynton Marsalis, and are on the soundtrack of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire with Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks. At Gotham, they backed organizer, Molly Ryan, a strong vocalist on “You’d be So Nice to Come Home To.”

The Anderson twins, Peter and Will. (Jim Motavalli photo)

Bria Skonberg is central to Gotham’s success, and we were lucky she found time to get on stage and pick up her muted trumpet. She also goes way back for her repertoire. “Tiger Rag,” with tuba for bass, is another Original Dixeland Jazz Band number, from 1917.  Skonberg’s a fine vocalist, too, whether tackling vintage numbers or the Great American Songbook.

Bria Skonberg (right with Arnt Arntzen (left) and Jen Hodge (middle). (Jim Motavalli photo)

Accompanying Skonberg was another pair of brothers, the Arntzens from a musical family in Saskatchewan, Canada. They both sing, and Evan plays clarinet and Arnt banjo and guitar. Their grandad, Lloyd Arntzen, bought his first jazz records from money he made killing gophers, Arnt said. Skonberg generously gave them some stage time to rip through a song they got from granddad, “Viper Mad.”

I had to leave to catch a train, so caught only one number by The Hot Toddies, featuring Patrick Soluri on drums and the protean Justin Poindexter on guitar and vocals. Alas, missed other singers that were slated to join them, Queen Esther and Hannah Gill. I missed much music I’d have liked to have heard: Charles Turner and Uptown Swing, The Hot Sardines, the all-star Mona’s Hot Four jam, Terry Waldo.

Altogether another wonderful, out-of-time Gotham Jazz Festival. On to 2025.

A Review: Andre Dubus III’s Illuminating Essays

Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin by Andre Dubus III (W.W. Norton)

A life-changing event for Andre Dubus III was the 1999 publication of his third book, House of Sand and Fog, which was a number one New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award finalist, an Oprah Book Club pick and a successful movie. Also, for those who read it, a first-rate tragedy.  

You won’t be taken onto the set of the film, which starred Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly, or even learn the title of the book here. What you will learn about, from several different angles, is the money it brought in, and how it transformed a life that was heretofore lived at the margins.   In interlocking essays, separately published and sometimes repeating information, we hear different perspectives on the great preoccupations of Dubus’ life: violence, family, poverty, and the redemptive power of making things with your hands.  

Dubus is the son of the acclaimed short-story writer Andre Dubus, but his father and mother separated early. Dubus’ single mother moved her children dozens of times from one hardscrabble New England mill town to another as she struggled to find meaningful work. The kids were often hungry and cold. Dubus was bullied until he bulked up and fought back, a story vividly told in his memoir Townie.   Ghost Dogs is a different kind of memoir, told in overlapping stories—all brilliantly written. He’s one of our finest prose stylists, especially good at capturing working-class (and working) lives. His fiction is embedded in work sites, cheap apartments, diners. The author’s latest novel, Such Kindness, is a hugely compelling example, a tragedy set mostly in a low-rent motor court.  

Dubus isn’t much different writing about himself, though the essays here do tend to circle back over some central incidents. From years spent huddled with his siblings in cold apartments watching endless TV, he and his brother were suddenly thrust into the light and vivid life of his mother’s parents’ rustic camp home in Louisiana. “Pappy” is about his grandfather, a pipefitter/craftsman who is never still. He puts these soft New Englander kids to work.   Dubus doesn’t spare himself, the person he was at different points in his life. He’s particularly good on violence, especially his own. “Relapse,” the final essay, is about the grown family man who used the House of Sand and Fog money to build (with his brother) a safe home away from urban dangers. He’s been pacifistic for decades, and yet the call of the wild is always there. He recounts two incidents, chance encounters that could have erupt into physical confrontations.  

In 2001, having just won a Guggenheim, Dubus and friends are leaving an upscale restaurant where they’ve been celebrating when a young man leaning against a pickup truck yells out a sexual taunt. In an instant, Dubus is in his face and saying, “Watch your fucking mouth.” He recounts, “What you should know, what I’m not proud of writing now, is that I wanted to drop this man.” It’s all tangled up in ideas of American masculinity, virtually the whole theme of Townie. When Dubus does deck a man in a bar who makes fun of his shirt, decades of a softer life are instantly gone and he’s feral once again:   “It is as if my last fight was not nearly 30 years ago but just an hour earlier, like I’ve never stopped fighting at all, like it’s something I still do all the time,” Dubus writes. Pride and regret mix when he describes events like this, to his peers and to his children. And when those kids are themselves getting into fights, what’s the right thing to say?  

Perhaps the finest essay here is “If I Owned a Gun,” which recounts every encounter—many of them sordid, a couple of them near-misses—he’s had with firearms, and his determination not to have one in the aforementioned family sanctuary. He knows that people who own handguns are 400 times more likely to be victims of them than people who don’t, and—from experience—that “its not loaded” often constitutes someone’s last words. “Yet part of me, inexplicably, still loves guns,” he writes. The weight, the gleam of their polished stocks, the smell of gun oil, all part of another uniquely American rite of passage.

And then there’s the work of the hands. Dubus’s father was never seen to hold a tool of any kind (except, perhaps, his large gun collection) but Dubus became a carpenter and a construction worker—who, until House of Sand and Fog at least—wrote after those jobs were done. He never sits down at a table in this book without mentioning that he built it himself, as well as the loft bed in one of those hardscrabble apartments. He’s definitely house-proud about his refuge in the woods.  

Some readers might find this annoying but he writes so damned honestly about all of it. You don’t have to read all these essays, because they do get a bit repetitive, but don’t miss “Relapse” and “If I Owned a Gun.” And, come to think of it, the one about the ghost dogs of the title is also full of revelatory admissions from this self-revealing man. Most people, having kicked their poor pooch, would keep it to themselves.     And, finally, if you want to know what it’s like to suddenly come into money, “High Life” is the answer. The stories of big working-class lottery winners going on insane spending sprees are legion, and Dubus lets us know that near-winners of the National Book Award—especially if they grew up poor—are not immune from similar impulses.