Lullaby of Birdland

Cross-country connections & jazz past and present

It’s ten p.m. on a Wednesday night, and everything is new.

A chronic out-of-homebody, I somehow ended up on the 51B in my good friend’s best friend’s golf sweater from high school. I’m cloaked in memories that aren’t mine when my name is called, pronounced like Rhiannon with a G. I fumble the key of the song embarrassingly for someone in music school (it’s in Ab major, but as an alto, I should be singing in F). I am shaking from the inside, there’s a random jazz band to my back, and here they are, giving me a four bar intro.

Breathe in, breathe deep, and the words will come. They’ll come. They will! They’ll–

Lullaby of birdland / whisper low

Bass does not whisper; it reverberates, filling the smallest of nooks and the widest of crannies.

The opening piano starts slow, then rockets into dissonant ascending intervals, making your pulse spike as the bass sings low below its barrage. Geoffrey Keezer attacks the keys with a delicate sort of brutalism, masterfully zigging and zagging through scales, yet it is the bass’s entrance that makes you sit straight up and lock in on the sound.

A masterful sweeping drum rhythm holds the whole thing together, circular brushing motion on snare drum. Pitter-pitter-pitter-pat. Pitter-pitter-pitter-pat. There is an instance of shock–

Shock!

–in the changing from brush to stick, the switch from stand-up to electric, the clever interplay of the piano bridging between them.

There grows power in a trio. There is universality in a trio. There is nothing else in the world like a jazz trio.

I sit in a trio at the bar, an old friend to my right and a newer friend to my left, marveling at the fact that I am here, in Birdland, that my worlds are converging and colliding. I still can’t believe my feet are on solid ground in New York City. I’ve lived on the fringes of iconic cities my entire life, but I have never truly believed I’d make it to NYC; it has always seemed just out of reach, like placing a finger to a mirror, knowing the gap in its reflection will never close.

I strike up a conversation with the bartender before the show. He tells me how to eat beets after I admit I don’t like them (I admit now that I still haven’t taken his advice). I learn that Hazel and I both prefer gin-based drinks (I realize we have never been at a bar together). I learn Wave is from Delaware (I assume everyone is from Los Angeles). The bartender learns I flew in from San Francisco and says, “Not that far off then,” but it is too far to see the movie he recommends.

This is all underscored with a sort of nervous thrum, a tipping point, a balancing of my lives pre and post, on the West and East Coast. A friend of mine once told me I come from “destinations,” and in the first three weeks of September, I’ll have hit a perfect trio: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Someone better pull the rug out from under me, or else I’ll think I have it too good.

Kiss me sweet, / and we’ll go / Flying high in Birdland

Birdland is touristy, and though I am a tourist in this city, even I can admit the design is pretty gauche, grey-black walls with contrasting purple lighting that is almost offensively unattractive. There is a strange sense of sterility in a place that houses so much jazz history, and it temporarily shatters my illusion of Birdland as the “jazz corner of the world,” a term coined by Charlie Parker that has become a prominent feature of the club’s advertising since then.

To be fair, this Birdland is its third iteration of NYC’s most famous jazz club. The first Birdland, operating from 1949 to 1965, was known for its legendary performances by jazz stars– Miles Davis and John Coltrane, notably.

I would argue we don’t have jazz “stars” today, at least not in the “mainstream” manner. The most talented of artists do not tend to cast long shadows outside of the jazz community; even I admit I did not know the Geoffrey Keezer Trio before seeing them live. It is not the artist that drew me to Birdland, but the history of the renowned venue, of the great ghosts of performances past who never once walked upon the floor I currently occupy.

High in the sky up above / All because we’re in love

Birdland electrifies once the live music begins, and in no small terms, it changes my life. I was caught in disappointment, and now I am tangled in a delicious limbo of soundwaves and static.“It begins almost Gershwin-esque,” I write of the trio’s take on “Eternal Child,” although that may be because I have Gershwin on the brain after Hazel pointed out a triple album of his at Jazz Record Center that morning. The short set is steeped in triumph, calling to heaven and glory. As the lights blare up, I feel I have just emerged from the cocoon, my wings saturated and too heavy to yet move. I know I’ve just had my moment in the jazz corner of the world.

Yet, the musicologist in me can’t help but overanalyze. Though each member of the Geoffrey Keezer Trio is a “jazz star” in their own right, they don’t have the sort of household name someone like Miles Davis once did, and this rings true for most of the performers at Birdland. The crowds coming in are tourists, fresh out of Times Square and willing to pay the mandatory twenty-dollar cover alongside their already-hefty ticket prices. The music at Birdland is still fresh, riveting, and technically brilliant, but it is certainly not accessible.

Jazz is plentiful in New York City. My first stop in NYC, Jazz Record Center, is where I dig for the deepest of cuts, albums that have never been digitized. At Jazz Record Center, you can buy an album of incredible sounds for less than five dollars and cart it carefully home across three states and a BART train. When Hazel and I walk through Central Park on our way to the Met, we stumble across a four-piece jazz band performing for the public. It makes me wonder, why go to Birdland? What makes Birdland more worthy of the title of “jazz corner of the world” than Central Park?

Lullaby of Birdland, that's what I / Always hear when you sigh

In physicality, Tomi Jazz in Midtown best exemplifies what I thought the “jazz corner of the world” would be. I stand on the street with Hazel and Luke after a long day of dim-sum and rainstorms, sagging on concrete steps as I watch the winding queue in front of me slowly descend to basement level. We wait on the street for two hours, yet, as the foreboding, Prohibition-era iron door swings open, I realize every second was worth it. We tip-toe, slack-jawed, into a speakeasy lit by candlelight and mismatched glass lamps, packed with chatter and music and kitsch. Tomi Jazz is a revelation in dried flowers, old photographs hung haphazardly on the walls, cross-stitch proclaiming “God Bless Our House” presiding over the cramped corner where a jazz trio plays.

We three brush through beads, and I take in dusty doilies, feathers, and fans. We have no view of the band, but their sound permeates the cramped underground; gentle cocktail jazz, carried through the half-walls by a woodsy bassline. Hazel orders a cocktail named after the song “Misty,” which I privately think of as “my” jazz standard – the first I ever sang in front of an audience. A model train is making its way around the ceiling’s perimeter. The trio launches into “Love Is Here To Stay,” a Gershwin standard of all things, and a song title on the tip of my tongue before Hazel is the one to name it. I came to New York expecting Miles Davis, and it is Gershwin’s ghost that looms large over my shoulders.

I admit, I liked the experimental jazz at Birdland “more,” but I can’t complain when the trio at Tomi launches into Bill Evans’ “Skating In Central Park,” and I certainly can’t complain about the ambience, a cluttered and cozy contrast to Birdland’s starkness. “I want my apartment to look like this!” I exclaim as plates of udon and curry start to be dished out. “I’d move in here if I could,” Hazel agrees. An hour into the dinner, Hazel and I have to say goodbye indefinitely, and the room feels a little colder when she goes. The band takes their break, and the thermostat freezes over.

Never in my wordland could there be ways to reveal / In a phrase how I feel

I have been up for thirty-two hours by the time I sink, exhausted, into a seat on the Yellow Line. After a whirlwind two-and-a-half days in NYC, I am back in San Francisco. I think on how I burned three rides on the NYC Subway because I couldn’t figure out how to push the turnstile cage all the way through. We emerge from underground in Daly City, late afternoon sunbeams casting the train car into soft, sentimental light.

In the face of a tired artist, plastic-wrapped portfolio in his lap, charcoal and sketchbook in his hands, I see my time spent in the Met, the laughter as Hazel and I walk up the iconic front steps, me pretending I’ve never seen stairs before. I see the portrait artists crowding the sidewalk outside, and the cacophony of pigeons descending upon them.

I see a father wearing a hat that proclaims “Public Health For All,” and I hear Hazel’s voice, an iconic New Yorker phrase: “Medicare For All.” I see two subway rappers that thankfully leave me and my Bill Evans undisturbed, and I think on how Hazel and I griped about our irritation with subway breakdancers. I see a couple smiling at each other with a sort of palpable love, and I sit there solo, bags under my eyes, New York and North Carolina and Washington, D.C. behind me, filled with the sort of warmth that comes not only from seeing an old friend, but falling into new friendships, new experiences, new gratitude.

I don’t think Birdland is the jazz corner of the world. I think Tomi Jazz looks the part, but I don’t think it makes full marks either. Today, jazz is about connection, a universal language. The whole of New York City is filled to the brim with that language, with cocktail hour trios and park professionals. If you don’t like the avant-garde interpretations of the Geoffrey Keezer Trio, you can hit Tomi Jazz the next night for a healthy dash of standards and sake. If you can’t pay fifty-five dollars at Birdland, or Tomi Jazz’s ten-dollar cover, you can sit on a bench in Central Park and listen. If you want to bring old and new together, you can go to New York City, the beautiful, messy, diverse jazz corner of the world.

Lullaby of Birdland / Whisper low (refrain)

It is October 9, and I have just finished spontaneously singing “Lullaby of Birdland” at a Downtown Berkeley jazz jam. My good friend Hazel has just sent me videos of the annual Beatles jam she attends in Central Park. New York is behind me, and in the month between places, I have centered jazz more fully in my life than ever before. I have brought something back with me, a love that’s here to stay, a lullaby of Birdland that thrums through my veins.

We are not so different. We are three hours and 2,500 miles apart. But when we have feet on the ground in the same place, once a year, once a month, once in a lifetime,

I am grateful.

Words: Gianna Caudillo

Photos: Luke Jensen, Waverly Choy, Kyle Garcia Takata

Design: Khankamol Chor Kongrukgreatiyos (Jan)