as a drummer in a hot trio at a tony club, the club owner got very drunk -- something I gather he often does.
In the middle of a set in which we three musicians played our asses off for a packed and appreciative house, the bar owner walked up to the stage and, while everyone watched in shock, he launched into a long, loud, drunken rant about how the band was playing way too loudly and it was screwing up his business and it was all my fault. Me. The drummer. He stood squarely in front of me and my drum set. He shouted in my face that all of the volume problems started with me, and his patrons upstairs needed to make conversation, and the band sounded like a train running through the building, and he was the boss and I had better do something about it.
In a room where the audience had been giddy with our performance, you could suddenly hear a pin drop.
The rest of the details don't matter. Suffice it to say that I was both cool and blindly furious, and the crowd sided with the band, and the drunken club owner ended up making a meaningless apology, and I'll be damned if I'll ever set foot in his cursed little club again.
This is part of the turf that a jazz musician walks: Having the most intense art form that America itself has ever produced relegated to gin mills where people yak and drink too much; having this country's most creative musical intellectuals (and I'm not talking about myself, but about jazz musicians at the very top of the art, who as a threat to white superiority still face a certain stubborn denial and disrespect of their role in the culture) treated as mere entertainers.
Sure, I, or we as a band, may have been playing too loudly for the conversational upstairs crowd who felt our playing through the floor. But what is John Coltrane's music -- we played the seminal "Giant Steps" that night -- doing in a bar where a sloppily wasted white tavern keeper feels entitled to publicly lecture hard-practiced black jazz musicians? Why was the club owner trying to humiliate me when he could easily have avoided the spectacle with a private conversation? And who the hell was he to even play cultural critic in the first place? What is such compositionally and improvisationally brilliant music doing in a speakeasy, anyway? What was I doing there?
That's the problem with being jazz musicians in the United States. We have our hands on something that the dominant culture feels it can't afford to fully recognize: black creativity that is part Beethoven and part shaman. Over the decades, we have cleanly played our hand with our former slavemasters, seen them and raised them, upped the cultural ante on what they feel is their very best, and their response at the table has been a sullen silence, eyes averted, with the occasional self-comforting and inherently racist outburst about our being too primal for their company.
Talk about dysfunction and ingratitude.
This is precisely why Europe and Japan -- having less of a vested interest than America in undervaluing the breakthrough Afri-Euro aesthetic of the Louis Armstrongs and Josephine Bakers and Aimé Cesaires -- remain magnets for black American artists who want to be seen for who we actually are and for what we actually do.
Meanwhile, here on the 2012 American plantation of cultural production, it's still too often pearls before swine. But there is also this: the mere fact that this awful nightclub story isn't my typical experience as a jazz musician, and that the crowd stood with we musicians against the drunken owner, and that jazz and its audiences manage to thrive from corner bars to Lincoln Center, says a lot about the loving indestructibility of music and of humanness in the face of even the most wickedly pervasive machinery.
[2/8/2012 12:30pm EST: I re-edited the final paragraph to better express all that I see and feel here.]
