Brian Slattery Photos
It wasn’t even 9 p.m. yet Tuesday, but Cafe Nine was already full of people. Some had come to hear New Haven-born drummer Ryan Sands and members of the house band play for the first New Haven Jazz Underground live session since the Covid-19 pandemic began. But many more had come to play with Sands, as the evening promised not only a hot set from the featured performer, but an open set to follow, and the kind of music making that brings a community together.
Nick Di Maria, director of the New Haven Jazz Underground, had been looking to restart the twice-a-month sessions since early this year. “The scene was restless,” he said. As bars and clubs reopened in the spring, musicians began asking him about bringing back the jams that the NHJU had run every other Tuesday at Three Sheets for three years.
Di Maria initially hoped to return to the Elm Street spot, but Three Sheets was “not ready to have anything,” he said. “I respect that, but we needed to have something happen.” So early in the fall Di Maria approached Cafe Nine owner Paul Mayer about hosting the jam session at his club on State and Crown instead. “I said to Paul, ‘There’s a real void. We were doing this thing on Tuesdays that was a real hang,’” Di Maria said. Mayer, according to Di Maria, “was very supportive.”
“It’s the same formula. This time it’s the second and fourth Tuesday instead of the first and third.” Every evening features a different hired house band, which starts off the evening at 7 p.m. with an hour-long set. At 8 p.m., the band opens the session to anyone who wants to play with them for the next two hours. “You have to break through that exclusionary vibe that sometimes can happen,” Di Maria said. “And everybody’s welcome to sit in. Anyone of any age, and any caliber, can come play. And you won’t have to wait until the last 10 minutes of the three-hour stretch before you’re invited up.”
Tuesday evening featured a quartet of Ryan Sands on drums, Matt Dwonszyk on bass, Dan Liparini on guitar, and Di Maria on trumpet. Di Maria floated his trumpet lines over the grooves with a searching ease, while Liparini’s playing, even when soloing, was as much tastily marked by the spaces he left as the notes he played. It was Dwonszyk on bass and — true to the billing — Sands on drums who provided the music’s muscle. Dwonszyk powered the beat while working his way up and down the fingerboard, elaborating in his own voice upon the tunes’ harmonic structures, while in each song Sands started simple, then found the rhythms within the rhythms, light, flickering patterns that swung and skittered among his more powerful beats. His playing was full of intention, intelligence, and humor, and as the bar steadily filled with spectators and other musicians, the applause got thicker and thicker.
“I’m hoping to get that magic that we had, because that Three Sheets Tuesday night jam was something special,” DI Maria had said before their set. The last session at Three Sheets in 2020 was “right before Covid, and it was standing room only. I want to keep that spirit going. It’s good for this town, and it’s good for the musicians in the state to have something regular…. I can’t let the community go away. I feel like, without a place to play, what we built just scatters.”
Tuesday night showed that the inverse still held true: with a place like Cafe Nine to play, what the New Haven Jazz Underground built before the pandemic returned in force. At 8 p.m., the house band concluded its set and Sands announced that they were opening their session. Dwonszyk stepped down from bass to let another player take the wheel. A keyboard player set up his instrument. Liparini soon ceded his guitar spot to other players. Soon Sands, from the drums, was laying down beats for an entirely different band, and one with a rotating cast of horn players.
The music heated up as the room continued to fill, and each player’s solos were greeted with cheers and hollers of encouragement from spectators and fellow musicians alike.
“At the end of the day, it’s really about getting the scene back on its feet,” Di Maria said. That meant figuring out how to still be conscious of the pandemic, but learn to live with it, too. “Listen to your doctor, get your vaccine, and come out,” he said. But Di Maria knew — and the musicians on Tuesday night showed — that it was more than that. Together, they were finding a way forward into the future, one note at a time.
The New Haven Jazz Underground is a crowdsourced entity through Patreon. Find out what’s happening through its Facebook page. Visit the Elm City Big Band’s Instagram page for upcoming events; its next show is at the State House on Dec. 19. The NHJU is also bringing drummer Mike Clark (of Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters project) to the State House in early January.
Congratulations to Nick DiM, Paul and the crew for getting this up and running. The Elm City needs more jazz! We have been lacking in venues and sounds for long enough. Don't forget there is also the Saturday, 4-7 jam session at Cafe Nine... but precious few other spots downtown these days.