District Works It Out

As evening settled across District New Haven on James Street, Nick Di Maria and the New Haven Jazz Underground slid into another standard that filled the lawn outside the building with their sound.

Passersby slowed their walks out to the parking lot to listen, or catch it on their phones. A yoga class directly in front of the band moved through its poses. And District staff used the show to work out the technological kinks for a series of future shows the organization is planning on starting in late September — featuring multiple bands outside, live-streamed, and in front of a live audience.

“With the venues shut down, it’s almost like an absence of nutrition,” said Al Bhatt, executive director of the nonprofit District Arts and Education. ​“We’ve got the bags of rice. We’re rescue workers for live music.”

District Arts and Education has been running streamed shows from its outdoor spaces all summer, from jazz and funk to folk and rock. Starting in late September, it is planning to escalate its efforts by starting with multiple-band evenings in its amphitheater outside, opening up the possibility of a live audience and a full audio setup for both amplification and live streaming, said sound engineer Scott Amore.

For now, however, District was test-running the ability of a software platform to handle multiple cameras, provided by iPads and iPhones, with sound from a single pair of condenser microphones. Late September, Amore said, would have the full setup. ​“This is more like run and gun,” he said.

But a simple audio setup was all Nick Di Maria and the Jazz Underground needed. As the yoga instructor thanked the band for playing, the class got started, with participants working in unison.

DI Maria and the group started off with a simple blues to warm up, then settled in. Soon they were switching up tempos and rhythms, their solos growing more adventurous, more acrobatic. Amore and staff moved from place to place, trying out the gear. The connection to the livestream was lost and quickly regained, lost and quickly regained again. But Amore’s ​“run and gun” approach on the audio turned out to be just right, as did the software to move from camera to camera. It was all part of the learning curve of moving into the future of delivering music during a pandemic.

Bhatt was sanguine about that future, not only for District, but for New Haven generally. ​“Change is fundamental,” Bhatt said. ​“The issue is being willing to adapt without changing our core values.” He believed New Haven was on this path.

“It’s a city that knows how to solve problems,” he said.