Philadelphia Weekly

"No group in this city has been as consistently undernourished and underappreciated as the jazz community." With those words, Philadelphia Weekly introduced its "first annual" jazz issue, dated Dec. 13, 1995. The centerpiece was Elena Bouvier's huge photo spread "A Great Day in Philadelphia," modeled on Art Kane's classic 1958 shoot for Esquire that inspired the documentary A Great Day in Harlem. It seemed this multigenerational jazz family, assembled for a group portrait outside the John Coltrane House on North 33rd Street, was finally getting its due. But the idea lost momentum, and PW's first annual jazz issue was also the last. It's well past time, without overpromising, to pick up where we left off.

Philadelphia jazz has continued to develop in the interim; it's the underappreciation that hasn't changed. Orrin Evans, a young in-demand pianist, felt the pang of recognition watching a Rocky marathon on TV. "Rocky is a great story about what Philadelphia does to its heroes," he says. "Kids were chasing Rocky down the street. He was riding high. Then he was just Rocky on the corner. You lose one fight, you're back to nothing. Much like our athletes, we're the worst at supporting our artists. I go to New York and people talk about [organists] Shirley Scott and Trudy Pitts and [drummer] Edgar Bateman and I've watched them, right here, not get the same respect they do when I'm on the other side of the turnpike."

Pride, defiance and apologetics are close to the surface when one talks about jazz in Philadelphia, an underdog music in an underdog town. With little prompting, tireless advocates like saxophonist Byard Lancaster ("Pennsylvania's first jazz lobbyist") and drummer Bill Carney ("Mr. C," Trudy Pitts' husband) will praise Philly jazz to the heavens and try to take New York and New Orleans down a peg. If their rhetoric smacks of overcompensation, it's easy to understand why.

Philly is where Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Benny Golson, Lee Morgan, frustrated drummer Bill Cosby and so many others got their start, where big clubs drew big talent, and jazz rang out from countless neighborhood bars. The older and even not-so-older generations know a time when Philly's jazz-mecca status wasn't in dispute.

Ask people, and they'll recall a half-dozen jazz spots from across the years, without duplicating each other's lists. The Showboat, Pep's, the Downbeat Club, the Woodbine, Jewel's, Gert's, the 421 Club, Aqua Lounge, Just Jazz, Morgan's, the Cadillac Club, the Blue Note, the Blue Moon. The names don't stop multiplying.

"I've played in every nook and cranny in Philadelphia, just about," says tenor saxophonist Bootsie Barnes, recounting jam sessions with Sonny Stitt and Dexter Gordon, and rattling off more bars: Chester's Fun Spot, Mr. Silk's Third Base, the Sahara. "Back then," he adds, "a jazz club became a jazz club as long you had jazz played in it."

What's more, black working-class audiences were there to listen. The point can't be overemphasized: Philly's jazz heritage is its black heritage, even if the players and listeners span all backgrounds.

Where We Are

The health of jazz is inseparable from wider turbulence in the music business, real estate markets and other socioeconomic spheres. Flip open that "first annual" jazz issue from 1995 and you'll see ads for Zanzibar Blue and Tower Records, as well as a story on Third Street Jazz and Rock, the beloved Old City record store. Gone, gone and gone. Today's musicians face a different world, with dwindling CD sales, apathetic media and fewer accessible performance venues.

Jazz is also evolving to the point where it is "hundreds of microclimates," as New York Times critic Ben Ratliff has written, and we speak of "the jazz community" in spite of its segmentation. In Philly today there are strong straightahead ("inside") and avant-garde ("out") currents, but their points of contact are few. They're all but different musics, bound together by their marginality.

It's too simple, though, to view jazz in Philadelphia as a story of loss and decay. Despite the divisions and the dramatic shrinkage of the club scene, the city has entered a comparatively healthy phase in terms of live jazz and improvised music. Maybe it's part of a broader upswing in a place with its share of "spiritual maladies," to borrow bassist Mike Boone's phrase.