Sophisticated lady, sophisticated lady …
She is hip to politics but loves her jazz
She’s got lots of rhythm she’s got lots of class …
— “Sophisticated Lady,” by Chuck Jackson, Marvin Yancy and Natalie Cole”
Sunday is Mother’s Day, a time for husbands, sons and daughters to wonder what changes they can ring on the yearly celebration. The answer: Take the sophisticated lady out for “a little night music.” When it comes to jazz in the Washington area, the options are abundant.
From pricey supper clubs to church basements, the venues come in every stripe and hue, with cover prices from free to stratospheric.
The music, too, springs from a cornucopia of style and content, ranging from the newest funk-inflected rap-jazz to classics straight out of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s to experimental stuff for which no words seem to suffice.
The scene offers new faces as well as performers who have been around forever, part of a local artistic community driven or at least informed by the desire to make homegrown music that honors the long jazz traditions going back to native son Duke Ellington.
• • •
Possibly the most romantic artist for moms on the town is singer Dick Smith, a Washington Redskins defensive back and running back from 1966 to 1967 who appears often at the Henley Park Hotel’s Blue Bar at 10th Street and Massachusetts Avenue NW.
At 60, Mr. Smith is drop-dead gorgeous and has a voice that plays like a Stradivarius. Every phrase seems cut from glass, honeyed with a tenderness and warmth that speaks straight to the heart.
The Blue Bar is jammed whenever he plays it, as he will this weekend. The swank restaurant and bar crowd can’t seem to get enough of him and his songbook, which includes George Gershwin, Cole Porter and everything Frank Sinatra did but then takes “a cool curve,” he says, to include gospel and rhythm and blues.
“I sang all through college at Northwestern,” he says in an interview between sets at the hotel, which on most jazz nights — Thursday, Friday and Saturday — is filled to overflowing. Regular customers include former CNN superstar Bernard Shaw and drop-bys from staff at the nearby National Public Radio offices and the Cato Institute.
Northwestern University asked him to headline its annual entertainment extravaganza, a show produced by the Women’s Athletic Association and Men’s Union that gave the likes of Charlton Heston, Ann-Margret and Warren Beatty their theatrical starts.
But, he says with a laugh, “like most guys, I wanted to play football,” and he recalls that he also turned down an invitation to sing on Broadway after college.
He left the Redskins In 1968 for the Canadian Football League and the Montreal Alouettes, and for four years he led that league as its premier running back. When he left football, he returned to the District to continue singing while raising a family of two boys and a girl and holding down a job as a teacher. The Ohio-born performer retired in 1997 after 26 years of teaching high school equivalency courses at Lorton Penitentiary in Virginia.
“Jazz, actually, is spiritual,” he says. “That’s why I do the church thing, too.”
• • •
The “church thing” is Mr. Smith’s work for Westminster Presbyterian Church’s Jazz Night in Southwest on I Street. Without fanfare and with practically no press notice, he began five years ago serving as music coordinator for the Friday jazz night at Westminster, across the street from Arena Stage.
Community jazz performers such as Keter Betts — who played bass with Ella Fitzgerald years ago and is one of the headliners at this weekend’s Jazzmatazz festival for Children’s National Medical Center in the District — is a regular performer at evening presentations at Westminster.
They are designed to affirm “that God loves jazz and rejoices with us in our expressions of love and jazz,” says the Rev. Brian Hamilton, who with his wife, Ruth, serves as co-pastor of the church.
“The way culture gets practiced in our country, our city,” Mr. Hamilton says, “is that we put a few people up on high places. We glory in their gifts but don’t realize that the real artists are among us, that all culture is local.”
That’s why the church supports the musical community, he says, noting that through Mr. Smith, more than 300 jazz artists have performed at the Friday-evening shows.
Food is always available — fish, chicken, vegetables and dessert — and the $5 asked at the door is turned over to the performers, he says.
“You can’t really be in a place like Washington without putting jazz on the front row,” says the Maine-born Mr. Hamilton, recalling the city’s long association with Duke Ellington and the rich tradition of jazz within the black community ever since.
• • •
“That’s all we do,” says Tony Puesan, director of jazz hot spot HR-57, a nonprofit community organization that describes itself as the Center for the Preservation of Jazz and Blues.
At 14th and U streets NW in the Shaw neighborhood, it faces John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church, the home church of Duke Ellington’s family — the perfect place to carry out its mission of building and preserving the jazz tradition and all that goes with it.
HR-57 takes its name from a concurrent resolution passed by Congress in 1987 designating jazz as a “rare and valuable national American treasure.” The club opened its doors in 1993 but really settled in five years ago, when the wreck of a commercial laundry housed in the building was ripped out and a stage and 90 or so seats were positioned in the rear of the building, with a bar, a fast-food snuggery and some chessboards and computer terminals stationed nearer the front.
In April, Downbeat magazine added HR-57 to its list of the top 100 jazz clubs in the world, calling it “the place for jazz artists new in town to find out who the players are … where D.C. artists, young and old, connect, work out new ideas and develop alliances.”
“That’s our secret,” says Mr. Puesan, who grew up in the Dominican Republic. “We’re about jazz and community.”
Regulars have included hoops legend Michael Jordan; Rep. John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who co-sponsored the House resolution for which the club is named; House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas; former White House counselor David Gergen (who last year held his birthday party at the club); university types from nearby Howard University; and “lots of community folks,” he says.
As Mr. Puesan speaks, in fact, a bus pulls up to disgorge 29 youngsters and three of their teachers from the Denver School of the Arts in Colorado, one of the five schools to win this year’s Kennedy Center Alliance for Arts Education Network award.
The young dancers, band members and jazz ensemble are just in from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and will perform later on the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage.
“We had to stop by,” says teacher David Hammond. One of the band members, a 16-year-old trumpeter named John Stanesco, found HR-57 on the Web, Mr. Hammond says, “and there was no way we could miss Ellington’s old neighborhood and all the music here.”
High school and college students are regulars at HR-57, Mr. Puesan says. Students come from both city and suburban schools, majority-white as well as majority-black. “Suburbanized” black youngsters need to see and hear this music to stay in touch with the community, Mr. Puesan says, while white and mixed-race children should have the opportunity to understand “the long history of jazz” in the black community.
“We encourage them to use the place, hold lectures and workshops here. We work with area high schools and others to do that and invite the youngsters back to enjoy various genres of jazz, even to participate in them,” he says.
So it is that after Mr. Puesan deftly welcomes the youngsters, gets them served snacks and soft drinks and talks them through the club’s collection of jazz posters, programs and scores, he puts young John Stanesco onstage with his horn — as the musicians of the evening headliner, the Thad Wilson Jazz Orchestra, quietly walk to their positions and begin without fanfare to back up the dazzled youngster.
“We’ll have something special for Mother’s Day, too,” Mr. Puesan says. “Some good food, and maybe asking moms to bring in their children to see all this, or even to sing and play something.”
• • •
Across town in Glover Park on Wisconsin Avenue NW, a different sort of jazz experience takes place. This week, Grace Chung sings Mingus and Mercer, Van Heusen and even Hammerstein in a swank little restaurant and bar called Saveur.
She’s impossibly beautiful, slinky thin, and comes with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in computer speech. Her voice is as supple as rose petals, colored like a bird’s wing, at once almost “recognizable” as famous, yet it belongs to a woman born in Hong Kong and raised in Australia before she came to the United States.
“I’ve always been interested in speech and how people ’do’ it,” she says, explaining that her day job is to help develop a computerized voice-recognition system.
“Day-to-day conversations are quite difficult for computers to understand, while, oddly, singing sometimes turns out to be something computers ’do’ quite well,” she says.
Yet for her, music is “simply about falling in love with the sounds of Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McCrea, Betty Carter, Shirley Horn, David Porter, Sandra Wilson and lots of others,” she says.
She remembers listening and lip-syncing to Sarah Vaughan “over and over until one day it was clear that I could sing jazz, at least well enough for others to enjoy.”
“I have this little joke about it,” she says in an interview. “The music turns me into someone else, putting me into their space, and I am expressing that person in the lyrics and music of the song. Sometimes I’m not entirely sure where that comes from, who that person is speaking those words … but it takes me elsewhere, to other lives, and that is beautiful.”
Then she’s off with an old Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart classic, singing “Falling in Love With Love” with the greatest expression.
• • •
The Quartet Sin Nombre is another regular at Saveur, a changing roster of drums, keys, horns and guitar anchored by bass player Alan Lewine. The band name means “quartet without a name,” and parts of the group play at other area venues, including St. Columba’s Episcopal Church in the District, where some of the offerings are very ambitious; Bossa in Adams Morgan; and even Westminster Presbyterian’s Jazz Night in Southwest series.
Band members hold daytime jobs in fields including law, computer science, real estate, banking and small business. Mr. Lewine is the busiest, practicing law and running a booking agency for the players. He recently kicked off the DC Film Festival with a lecture on copyright and intellectual property rights. On the side, he writes his own jazz compositions.
He is quite an arresting sight onstage. The strapping 49-year-old is missing a leg, the result of a motorcycle accident as a young man. He admits to the loss “bumming me out for a while,” but with the help of his mother and father, he got a law degree from Georgetown University and taught himself music.
“Music is a way to express that which isn’t expressible in words,” says the Ohio native, who as a single father is already teaching the musical scale to his 3-year-old daughter, Alia.
“If words could express what’s in our hearts, in our minds, the things that delight and frighten us, I suppose you wouldn’t need music. … But we do need music, or at least I do,” he says, seeming to relish scrambling about the two-storied Saveur workplace, hauling his wide-body bass through narrow stairwells and up and down flights of steps without apparent difficulty.
Composed and joyful whether beating out old standards for a sleepy crowd or the new, lively stuff he composes for the quartet, he says it’s music that keeps him and everyone in the band in good spirits.
“That’s why I compose, and do it in jazz, which is probably the most intellectually driven of the musical forms,” Mr. Lewine says. “A mature person sometimes needs to face difficult things, like, maybe what life is all about, what love is.”
Lady won’t sing the blues at these places
Looking for a way to sur- prise the “sophisti- cated lady” in your life? Here are a few old-line Washington-area standbys and new favorites for enjoying jazz on Mother’s Day or any day.
DISTRICT
Adams Morgan
• Georgetown
• Glover Park
• Mount Vernon Square
• Shaw
• Southwest
• Tenleytown
• MARYLAND
Takoma Park
m 7014 Westmoreland Ave., Takoma Park. Probably the most eclectic avant garde jazz programing, from experimental jazzlike compositions by visiting artists to live performances of classical old-time jazz, blues and R&B. Admission $10 and up, no minimum. 301/891-3214, www.sangha.ws
Weekend-long fest of fun and giving
Over Mother’s Day weekend, local radio station WJZW-FM and the area’s six Lexus dealerships sponsor a three-day jazz festival to raise funds for the Children’s National Medical Center in the District.
Jazzmatazz 2004, the sixth annual festival, runs tomorrow through Sunday, Mother’s Day. It features a series of dinners, black-tie events and banquets this year at the Ronald Reagan Building downtown, the Birchmere Music Hall in Alexandria and the Wardman Park Hotel near Rock Creek Park in the District.
Headlining is trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis. As honorary chairman, he also performs and joins a slew of jazz artists, including Jonathan Butler, Peter White, the Keter Betts Jazz All Stars and the Mary Ann Redmond Band.
The Children’s Hospital Jazz Band, led by physicians Phil Pearl and Jorge Rodriguez, gets in some pretty good licks, too, as does the nonprofit Blues Alley Youth Orchestra, along with Larry Harlow and the Latin Legends and other local talent.
There are two shows at the Birchmere with Grammy-winning alto saxophonist David Sanborn. The festival closes on Mother’s Day with a brunch and performance by rhythm-and-blues balladeer Will Downing at Wardman Park.
Tickets run from $42.50 to $125 for what promises to fill the hospital’s coffers while showcasing internationally recognized and local jazz artists in the spirit of fun and giving. More than $1 million was raised last year.
For tickets and more information, see www.dcchildrens.com/foundation/events_jazz_purchase.aspx.
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