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      Where Jazz Lives Now

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      SurfacingWhere Jazz Lives NowThe jazz club, with its dim lighting and closely packed tables, looms large in our collective imagination. But today, the music is thriving in a host of different spaces.The vocalist, flutist and producer Melanie Charles sings at a rehearsal in her Brooklyn home, which has become a rehearsal space, recording studio and gathering spot.A disco ball threw beads of light across a crowded dance floor on a recent Monday night in Lower Manhattan while old film footage rolled across a wall by the stage. A half-dozen musicians were up there, churning waves of rhythm that reshaped over time: A transition might start with a double-tap of chords, reggae-style, from the keyboardist Ray Angry, or with a new vocal line, improvised and looped by the singer Kamilah.A classically trained pianist who’s logged time with D’Angelo and the Roots, Angry doesn’t “call tunes,” in the jazzman’s parlance. As usual, his group was cooking up grooves from scratch, treating the audience as a participant. Together they filled the narrow, two-story club with rhythm and body heat till well past midnight.Since before the coronavirus pandemic, Angry has led his Producer Mondays jam sessions every week (Covid restrictions permitting) at Nublu, an Alphabet City venue that feels more like a small European discothèque than a New York jazz club. With a diverse clientele and a varied slate of shows, Nublu’s management keeps one foot in the jazz world while booking electronic music and rock, too. On Mondays, it all comes together.The bassist Jonathan Michel, the drummer Bendji Allonce and the keyboardist Axel Tosca at Cafe Erzulie in Brooklyn.Cafe Erzulie, a Haitian restaurant and bar, hosts a wide range of music including a weekly Jazz Night.As New York nightlife has bubbled back up over the past few months, it’s been a major comfort to return to the legacy jazz rooms, like the Village Vanguard or the Blue Note, most of which survived the pandemic. But the real blood-pumping moments — the shows where you can sense that other musicians are in the room listening for new tricks, and it feels like the script is still being written onstage — have been happening most often in venues that don’t look like typical jazz clubs. They’re spaces where jazz bleeds outward, and converses with a less regimented audience.“The scene has started to fracture,” the drummer and producer Kassa Overall, 39, said in a recent interview, admitting that he didn’t know exactly what venue would become ground zero for the next generation of innovators. “I don’t think it’s really found a home yet. And that’s good, actually.”It’s an uncommonly exciting time for live jazz. Young bandleaders have wide followings again — Makaya McCraven, Esperanza Spalding, Robert Glasper and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah each rack up millions of plays on streaming services — and a generation of musicians and listeners is lined up to follow their lead, or break away. This year, for the first time, the most-nominated artist at the Grammys is a jazz musician who crossed over: Jon Batiste.The saxphonist Isaiah Collier gives a fist bump at the Arts for Art On_Line Salon at the Clemente in Manhattan.The saxophonist Isaiah Collier and the bassist Tyler Mitchell at the Arts for Art On_Line Salon.The drummer Andrew Drury performs as part of Jason Kao Hwang’s Human Rites Trio at the Arts for Art On_Line Salon.These players’ music has never really seemed at home in jazz clubs, nor has the more avant-garde and spiritual-leaning work of artists like James Brandon Lewis, Shabaka Hutchings, Angel Bat Dawid, Kamasi Washington, Nicole Mitchell or the Sun Ra Arkestra, all of whom are in high demand these days.Maybe it’s a case of coincidental timing. A confluence of forces — the pandemic, the volatility of New York real estate, an increasingly digital culture — has upset the landscape, and with the music mutating fast, it also seems to be finding new homes.Jazz is a music of live embodiment. Part of its power has always been to change the way that we assemble (jazz clubs were some of the first truly integrated social spaces in northern cities), and performers have always responded to the environment where they’re being heard. So updating our sense of where this music happens might be fundamental to re-establishing jazz’s place in culture, especially at a moment when the culture seems ready for a new wave of jazz.A musician warms up on melodica at Nublu’s Producer Mondays.The scene at Nublu, an Alphabet City venue that feels more like a small European discothèque than a New York jazz club.Producer Mondays sessions regularly fill the narrow, two-story club with rhythm and body heat till well past midnight.FIFTY-NINE YEARS ago, the poet and critic Amiri Baraka (writing then as LeRoi Jones) reported in DownBeat magazine that New York’s major clubs had lost interest in jazz’s “new thing.” The freer, more confrontational and Afrocentric styles of improvising that had taken hold — Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor’s revolution, for short — were no longer welcome in commercial clubs. So artists started booking themselves in downtown coffee shops and their own lofts instead.The music has never stopped churning and evolving, but since the 1960s, jazz clubs — a vestige of the Prohibition era, with their windowless intimacy and closely clustered tables — have rarely felt like a perfect home for the music’s future development. At the same time, it’s been impossible to shake our attachment to the notion that clubs are the “authentic” home of jazz, a jealously guarded idyll in any American imagination.But Joel Ross, 26, a celebrated vibraphonist living in Brooklyn, said that especially in the two years since coronavirus shutdowns began, many young musicians have become unstuck from the habit of making the rounds to typical jazz venues. “Cats are just playing in random restaurants and random spots,” he said, naming a few musician-run sessions that have started up in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but not in traditional clubs.Sometimes it’s not a public thing at all. “People are getting together in their own homes more, and piecing music together,” Ross said.The vocalist, flutist and producer Melanie Charles, 34, has made her Bushwick home into a rehearsal space, recording studio and gathering spot. And when she performs, it’s usually not at straight-ahead jazz clubs. Her music uses electronics and calls for something heavier than an upright bass, so those venues just might not have what’s needed. “Musicians like me and my peers, we need some bump on the bottom,” she said. “Our material won’t work in those spaces the way we want to do it.”Collier warms up with the pianist Jordan Williams at the Arts for Art On_Line Salon.The bassist Ken Filiano peforming with Jason Kao Hwang’s Human Rites Trio at the Arts for Art On_Line Salon.High among Charles’s preferred places to play is Cafe Erzulie, a Haitian restaurant and bar tucked along the border between the Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods of Brooklyn. With bluish-green walls painted with palm-leaf patterns and bistro tables arrayed around the room and the patio, the club hosts a wide range of music, including R&B jams; album release shows and birthday parties for genre-bending artists like KeiyaA and Pink Siifu; and a weekly Jazz Night on Thursdays.Jazz Night returned this month after a late-pandemic-induced hiatus, and demand had not ebbed: The room was close to capacity, with a crowd of young, colorfully dressed patrons seated at tables and wrapped around the bar.Jonathan Michel, a bassist and musical confidante of Charles, was joined by the keyboardist Axel Tosca and the percussionist Bendji Allonce, playing rumba-driven rearrangements of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” jazz standards and traditional Caribbean songs. The crowd was tuned in all the way, which didn’t always mean quiet. But when Allonce and Tosca dropped out and Michel took a thoughtful, not overly insistent bass solo, the room hushed.Charles sat in with the trio partway through its set, singing a heart-aching original, “Symphony,” and an old Haitian song, “Lot Bo.” Almost immediately, she had 90 percent of the place silent, and 100 percent paying attention. With the band galloping over “Lot Bo,” she took a pause from improvising in flowing, diving, melismatic runs to explain what the song’s lyrics mean: “I have to cross that river; when I get to the other side, I’ll rest,” she said. “It’s been hard out here in these streets,” she told the crowd, receiving a hum of recognition. “Rest is radical, low-key.”“Musicians like me and my peers, we need some bump on the bottom,” Charles said. said. “Our material won’t work in those spaces the way we want to do it.” Cafe Erzulie is just one of a handful of relatively new venues in Brooklyn that have established their own identities, independent of jazz, but provide the music an environment to thrive. Public Records opened in Gowanus in 2019 with the primary mission to present electronic music in a hi-fi setting. It had initially planned to have improvising combos play in its cafe space, separate from the main sound room, but its curators have recently welcomed the music in more fully.Wild Birds, a Crown Heights eatery and venue, has made jazz part of its regular programming alongside cumbia, Afrobeat and other live music. It will often start a given night with a live band and audience seating, then transition to a dance floor scenario with a D.J. In Greenpoint, IRL Gallery has been hosting experimental jazz regularly alongside visual art exhibitions and electronic-music bookings. Due south, in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, the Owl Music Parlor hosts jazz as well as chamber music and singer-songwriter fare; Zanmi, a few blocks away, is another Haitian restaurant where jazz performances often feel like a roux of related musical cultures.And jazz is proving to be more than just a feather in a venue’s cultural cap. The rooms are actually filling up. “For one, we cater to a very specific sort of demographic: young people of color, who I think really understand and appreciate jazz music,” said Mark Luxama, the owner of Cafe Erzulie, explaining Jazz Night’s success. “We’ve been able to fill seats.”Besides, he added, “it’s really not about the money on Jazz Night. I think it’s more about creating community, and being able to create space for the musicians to do their thing and have a really good time.”The scene at Producer Mondays, a jam session held weekly at Nublu in Manhattan.The pianist Ray Angry playing with the Council of Goldfinger, including Kamilah on vocals and Andraleia Buch on bass at a recent Producer Mondays night.FROM THE START, the story of jazz clubs in New York has been a story of white artists receiving preferential treatment. The first time history remembers jazz being played in a New York establishment was winter 1917, when the Dixieland Original Jass Band — all white, and dishonestly named (so little about their sound was original) — traveled up from New Orleans to play at Reisenweber’s Café in Columbus Circle. The performances led to a record deal, and the Dixieland band had soon recorded the world’s first commercially distributed jazz sides, for the Victor label.During Prohibition, jazz became the preferred entertainment in speakeasies and mob-run joints. The business of the scene remained mostly in white hands, even in Harlem. But many clubs served a mixed clientele, and jazz venues were some of the first public establishments to serve Black and white people together in the 1920s and ’30s. (Of course, there were notable exceptions.) In interviews for the archivist Jeff Gold’s recent book, “Sittin’ In: Jazz Clubs of the 1940s and 1950s,” Quincy Jones and Sonny Rollins each remembered the city’s postwar jazz clubs as a kind of oasis. “It was a place of community and pure love of the art,” Jones said. “You couldn’t find that anywhere else.”But when jazz grew too radical for commerce, the avant-garde was booted from the clubs, and up sprang a loft scene. Artists found themselves at once empowered and impoverished. They were booking their own shows and marketing themselves. But Baraka, writing about one of the first cafes to present Cecil Taylor’s trio, noted a fatal flaw. “Whatever this coffee shop is paying Taylor,” he wrote, “it’s certainly not enough.”The money piece never quite shook out on the avant-garde, and by the 1980s the lofts had mostly closed amid rising rents and unfriendlier civic attitudes toward semi-legal assembly. Still, that form-busting, take-no-prisoners tradition — whether you call it avant-garde, free jazz or fire music — continues.In recent decades, it has had a pair of fierce defenders in the bassist William Parker and the dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker, a husband-and-wife duo of organizers. The Parkers run the nonprofit Arts for Art, and since the 1990s they’ve presented the standard-bearing Vision Festival, often at the Brooklyn performing arts space Roulette. They’ve also long brought music to the Clemente, a cultural center on the Lower East Side, and during the pandemic they’ve added virtual concerts to their programming.It’s hard to argue with results, and if Arts for Art has never built a huge audience, it has retained a consistent one while nurturing some of the most expansive minds in improvised music. James Brandon Lewis, the tenor saxophonist whose album “Jesup Wagon” topped many jazz critics’ appraisals of last year’s releases, has that creative community partly to thank for shepherding his career. Zoh Amba, another uncompromising young saxophonist, is cutting a strong path for herself thanks largely to Arts for Art’s support.“What Arts for Art asks of people is that they really just play their best,” Nicholson Parker said. “If your music is about getting people to consume alcohol, then that’s different.”“You need places and people who support that kind of creative freedom,” she added.The drummer Kate Gentile at the Jazz Gallery in Manhattan.AT SMALLS JAZZ Club, the storied West Village basement, purebred jazz jam sessions still stretch into the wee hours on a nightly basis, inheriting some of the infectious, insidery energy that existed in its truest form into the 1990s at clubs like Bradley’s. But today it’s hard to argue that Smalls is the right destination for hearing the most cutting-edge sounds.And although they don’t usually say it publicly, seasoned players have come to agree that the code of conduct at Smalls’ jam sessions went a little flimsy after the 2018 death of Roy Hargrove. His frequent presence as an elder there had helped to keep the bar high, even as the room had come to be filled with musicians whose hands-on experience of jazz arrived mostly through the distorted lens of formal education.The Jazz Gallery, a nonprofit club 10 blocks north of Union Square, has combined the Bradley’s legacy with a dedication to bringing forward new works by progressive young bandleaders, and it’s become an essential hub. Rio Sakairi, the Gallery’s artistic director, cultivates rising talent and encourages mentorship between generations, often by offering targeted grants and commissions of new work.A light switch in Charles’s home is adorned with an image of Ella Fitzgerald.An array of instruments in Charles’s home.She’s come to terms with the Gallery’s place on the receiving end of jazz’s academic pipeline. “You cannot take the fact that jazz is being taught at conservatory out of the equation,” she said. “Younger musicians that are coming out, they all go through school systems.”Partly as an extension of the way jazz conservatories work, jam session culture doesn’t really exist at the Gallery. Shows end when they’re scheduled to. To Charles, it feels “more like a work space” than a club. “I’m glad those spaces are there,” she said.Looking at a jazz scene in transition, a fan can only hope that some of the energy accrued at the margins, in cross-pollinated clubs and more experimental settings, might flow back into spaces where the jazz tradition is a common currency: places like Smalls, the Jazz Gallery and the National Jazz Museum in Harlem (all of which have nonprofit status, and the economic flexibility associated with it).“It just needs to be reconnected: The Smalls people need to be talking to the Jazz Gallery people; the beat machine kids need to be talking to the Smalls people,” said Overall, the drummer. “Maybe there needs to be a space that acknowledges all these different elements.”For now, Charles said, the old haunts still feel needed, and loved. “At the end of the day I still end up at Smalls,” she said. “It’s like a church whose heyday is gone, but you still come and pay your respects.”Drury, the drummer, grabs a bite before performing with Jason Kao Hwang’s Human Rites Trio.Surfacing is a visual column that explores the intersection of art and life, produced by Alicia DeSantis, Jolie Ruben, Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick. 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      in Movies

      A Hallowed London Jazz Club Comes to Life Onscreen

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      The new documentary “Ronnie’s” tells the story of a venue that reshaped the city’s jazz scene, and the mysterious musician who lent it his name.Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club has been an enduring beacon of musical genius in London. Any self-respecting jazzhead had to make the pilgrimage to the venue during its 1960s heyday. Musicians, too: Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald played it, along with Buddy Rich and Dizzy Gillespie.Scott, one of its benevolent owners, was as hallowed as the establishment itself, but remained a somewhat mysterious figure throughout his life. A charming tenor saxophonist with a warm demeanor and great comedic timing, he also had a gambling addiction and endured bouts of depression. Even those closest to him didn’t feel like they connected with him.“He was a very hard person to know,” Paul Pace, the club’s current music bookings coordinator, said in an interview. “He was a very quiet, private man.”Scott died in 1996 at the age of 69. The venue he opened with a fellow saxophonist, Pete King, is still holy ground among jazz supper clubs in the United Kingdom, and “Ronnie’s,” a new documentary getting a wider release in the United States this week, offers a multidimensional view of Scott and the nightclub through the perspective of journalists, friends and musicians who knew him — and a host of live performance footage. The film celebrates how the spot with narrow hallways and a tiny stage housed all sorts of grand performances, including Jimi Hendrix’s last gig before his 1970 death. And it reveals that the secret of the venue’s success largely was Scott, himself, who drew in patrons like he was an old friend who just happened to know the best players of his era.The tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins first went to Ronnie Scott’s in the 1960s as part of a deal that allowed American musicians to play British venues and vice versa. That partnership was brokered by King, who served as the club’s manager and saw the need to book established jazz artists to draw bigger crowds. His work paved the way for other notable artists, like the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and the multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk, to play there.The club is still active today, drawing a range of artists from different scenes.Greenwich Entertainment“A lot of people hadn’t seen me in Europe,” Rollins said in a phone interview. “It was my first time in London, so I had a good time just looking at the scene. Every club has its own demeanor, and playing there was a wonderful experience. That was the place to go — Ronnie Scott’s club.”Scott, whose jazz career started in his teens, helped open the club in 1959 after a trip to New York City, where he heard Charlie Parker and Davis play at the Three Deuces along East 52nd Street. He was so taken by the jazz emanating from the New York scene that he wanted to replicate the feeling at home. “To walk in this little place and hear this band with this American sound we’d never really heard in person before — amazing,” Scott says in the film.With assistance from a £1,000 loan from Scott’s stepfather, he and King opened the club as a basement venue on Gerrard Street in Soho, a neighborhood with coffee shops and after-hour venues that catered to British counterculture. Before then, the space had been used as a tea bar and restroom for taxi drivers. Scott and King saw it as a place where British jazz musicians could work out material in a safe space — all strains of jazz were welcome — and get paid fairly, not a small thing in that era. The club, which moved to a bigger space on Firth Street in 1968, is known as the birthplace of British jazz.Yet the narrative wasn’t all sunny: Ronnie Scott’s had good and bad times financially, and sometimes teetered on the verge of closing until some last-minute lifeline kept the lights on. Then there was the issue of Scott’s gambling. “When things were really desperate,” King says in the film, “I used to come to work and there were guys in suits with notebooks there in the afternoon, making notes of how much the piano was worth, and how much the tables and chairs were worth. We were very close to just having to forget it all.”The film’s director, Oliver Murray, heard many similar stories about Scott while making his documentary. “Multiple people said to me that if he was able to gamble the club on certain occasions, he would’ve gambled away the club and then been absolutely devastated,” he said in an interview. “But that’s the complexity of the guy, just a true jazz man in that sense. He does live up to the stereotype of the musician with demons.”Ella Fitzgerald onstage at the club in a scene from “Ronnie’s.”Greenwich EntertainmentMurray was brought into the project by one of its producers, Eric Woollard-White, who frequented the club. One of Murray’s goals was to humanize Scott for a younger audience less familiar with the club’s golden era. “I wanted to make something that was like a passing of the torch from one generation to the next,” Murray said. The story felt especially ripe for this moment, when venues are in jeopardy because of ongoing pandemic challenges.Ronnie Scott’s remains vital, and “cultivates so much talent,” he explained. “It’s not necessarily even just the people that play, but it’s giving people in London a platform to see the very, very best, and that in itself raises the caliber of what’s going on in the city.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Beegie Adair, a Jazz Master in Country Music’s Capital, Dies at 84

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      In a city defined by honky-tonks and string ties, she had a 60-year career as a jazz pianist and a mainstay of the local scene.Beegie Adair, whose status as a renowned jazz pianist was all the more noteworthy for the place where she built her career — Nashville, the home of country music — died on Jan. 23 at her residence in Franklin, Tenn. She was 84.Monica Ramey, her manager and frequent vocal partner, confirmed the death. She did not provide a cause but said Ms. Adair had been in failing health.If you happened to live in Nashville and found yourself more a fan of Cole Porter than Porter Waggoner, chances are you came across Ms. Adair at some point in her six-decade career. Starting in the early 1960s, she could be found at least once a week playing at the Carousel, a downtown nightclub, or later at F. Scott’s, a restaurant in the Green Hills neighborhood.Being a jazz musician in Nashville is something like being a surfer in Las Vegas, and those who make it need flexibility and hustle — qualities Ms. Adair possessed in surplus.She played hotel lobbies and retirement homes. She and her husband, Billy Adair, wrote jingles for television commercials. And she was in constant demand as a session musician, appearing on more than 100 albums by a wide range of artists, including Dolly Parton, Henry Mancini, and Mama Cass Elliot.“She was omnipresent,” Roger Spencer, who played bass in the Beegie Adair Trio, said in an interview. “If there was an opportunity to play, she was there.”Ms. Adair mostly played American songbook standards, with a restrained, relaxed technique. She adapted to the venue: If it was a restaurant, she receded to the background; in a club, she could dominate the room.“I’ve played with her in just about every kind of musical setting you can play in Nashville over the years,” George Tidwell, a veteran Nashville jazz trumpeter, said in an interview. “And I never played anything where I didn’t think she was the right person to do it.”She released her first album, “Escape to New York,” in 1991. A few years later she formed her trio, with Mr. Spencer on bass and Chris Brown on drums. They toured frequently, including trips to Tokyo and London. Starting in 2011, they played annual gigs at Birdland, in Midtown Manhattan, and later added regular shows at Feinstein’s/54 Below, also in Midtown. They recorded 35 albums and, according to Ms. Ramey, sold some two million copies over the last four decades.Back home, Ms. Adair was the de facto leader of Nashville’s jazz scene, especially during a rough stretch in the 1970s and ’80s when venues closed and gigs were few. What kept her going was the knowledge, not always obvious to the outside observer, that the scene was larger than it seemed, with musicians playing country for the money and jazz for themselves, even if it meant nothing more than jam sessions in someone’s basement.“There are a lot of wonderful jazz players here that don’t get heard often because they’re doing studio work all of the time,” she told The Nashville Banner in 1997. “Every horn player that does studio work is probably a jazz player underneath their skin.”In addition to working steadily as a jazz pianist, Ms. Adair was in constant demand as a session musician.via Adair Music GroupBobbe Gorin Long was born on Dec. 11, 1937, in Cave City, Ky., a small town about halfway between Nashville and Louisville. She began taking piano lessons at 5 and by her teenage years was playing in clubs in Tennessee and Kentucky.Her parents, Bobbe (Martin) Long and Arthur Long, ran a gas station, where young Bobbe also worked when she wasn’t playing piano. To differentiate her from her mother, her father called her “B.G.,” after her first two initials, and the nickname stuck.Ms. Adair graduated with a degree in music education from Western Kentucky University in 1958. After teaching music for three years in Owensboro, Ky., she moved to Nashville for graduate studies in education at Peabody College, now a part of Vanderbilt University.But she was already building a career as a musician in the city’s downtown clubs, especially along Printers Alley, then and now a center of Nashville nightlife. By 1963 she had dropped out of Peabody to play music full time.Ms. Adair came under the wing of the saxophonist Boots Randolph, a resident musician at the Carousel best known for his 1963 hit “Yakety Sax.” He got her gigs and introduced her to the city’s many producers and studio managers, who, though they mostly recorded country and rock ’n’ roll, were always looking for talented, dependable session musicians.Another local music luminary, the guitarist and producer Chet Atkins, was the first to bring her on as a regular at his recording sessions, and his recommendations brought her a steady stream of work in and out of the studio. She played in the house band for “The Johnny Cash Show” and for the local TV host Ralph Emery (who also died this month).She married Mr. Adair in 1974. He died in 2014. No immediate family members survive.Mr. Adair was a prolific musician in his own right, and he built a career as an instructor, eventually becoming a professor at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. In 1995, the couple joined Mr. Spencer and his wife, Lori Mechem, to start the Nashville Jazz Workshop.The workshop trained a new generation of jazz musicians in Nashville, and in recent decades the scene there has started to make a comeback, with its former students starting to win national recognition. In 2016, Ms. Adair and her trio were invited to play Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. “The best thing of all for us was that there were a lot of our fans from Nashville in attendance,” she told The Nashville Scene in 2016, a few days after the show. “I think our appearance there is another indicator that people all over the country recognize that there are great jazz musicians here, and that there is an audience for the music.” More

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      in Theater

      Sardi’s Is Back After 648 Days, Its Fortunes Tied to Broadway

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      The caricatures are back up. But many shows are canceling performances just as Sardi’s reopens, a hurdle for a restaurant catering to the theater crowd.It felt sort of like old times, the other night at Sardi’s.Joe Petrsoric, back in his familiar red jacket, was lining up martini glasses at the second floor bar where he has worked since arriving from Yugoslavia in 1972. Manning the front door, his traditional dark suit now accessorized with a face mask, was Max Klimavicius, who started working in the kitchen in 1974 after immigrating from Colombia; he now runs the place.It had been 648 days since Sardi’s, a watering hole so closely entwined with Broadway that it was name-checked in the Rodgers and Hart song “The Lady Is a Tramp,” last served its cannelloni au gratin. And now, on the long night of the winter solstice, the oft-imperiled Main Stem mainstay with caricature-covered walls was ready to try again.The timing is nerve-racking. The Omicron variant is rampaging through New York City, wreaking havoc in the theater industry.There were 33 Broadway shows scheduled to perform Dec. 21, which Mr. Klimavicius chose for a soft reopening with limited hours, a limited menu and reduced capacity. But so many actors and crew members are now testing positive for the coronavirus that only 18 shows actually took the stage that night, and one of those made it to curtain only because the playwright grabbed a script and went on to replace an ailing performer.“The place has to live,” said Mr. Klimavicius, who greeted customers like the long-lost friends many of them were, but also helped make sure they had proof of vaccination. “It’s part of the fabric.”The restaurant is a combination of Broadway commissary and tourist magnet. As it reopened, the producer Arthur Whitelaw, who still remembers a childhood visit to Sardi’s more than seven decades ago (his parents were taking him to a new musical called “Oklahoma!”), settled into a cozy corner from which he could survey the room. A few tables away sat four friends from The Villages, the fast-growing retirement community in Florida, who were in town to see “To Kill a Mockingbird” on their annual Broadway trip.The restaurant’s owners did a substantial rehabilitation of the four-story eatery this year, but are hoping no one will notice, because Sardi’s customers are tradition-bound.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe work was made possible in part by help from the Shubert Organization, which owns the building, and in part with a large grant from a federal government program designed to provide emergency assistance to restaurants and bars affected by the pandemic. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway is a small town, but a big business — in 2018-2019, the last full season before the pandemic, 14.8 million people saw a show, spending $1.8 billion on tickets. Many of those patrons also spent money at hotels, shops, and at restaurants like Sardi’s — a symbiotic, and symbolic, economic relationship that is essential to Times Square and the city at large.“Sardi’s is a symbol of Broadway and the Broadway scene, and it’s been closed for far too long,” said Tom Harris, the president of the Times Square Alliance, which represents a theater-dependent neighborhood that occupies 0.1 percent of the city’s land mass, but contributes 15 percent of its economic output. With New York’s business districts threatened by remote work, and its brick-and-mortar stores by e-commerce, in-person experiences like live theater and dining are more important than ever.Times Square is still in recovery mode. “Office workers are coming back slower than anyone would have expected or wanted — occupancies are about 30 percent — and about 77 percent of businesses are open,” Mr. Harris said. “We still have a ways to go.”Sardi’s, which has been operating on West 44th Street since 1927, employed nearly 130 people during peak seasons before the pandemic arrived; it’s restarting with 58.The restaurant has weathered its share of challenges — booms, busts, and bankruptcy. It has been popular and it has been passé, but it has always been there, known more for its caricatures than its cuisine, drawing a mix of industry insiders and theater-loving visitors to eat, drink, kibitz and commiserate.It was established by Vincent Sardi Sr., who in 1947, at the very first Tony Awards, won a special prize “for providing a transient home and comfort station for theater folk.” Mr. Klimavicius is now the majority owner.Sardi’s has about 1,200 caricatures of famous people who have eaten in the restaurant, most of whom are connected to the theater industry. About 900 are on display at any given time. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe original caricature of Barbra Streisand was stolen, so now her image is the only one screwed into the wall, keeping watch over the empty dining room throughout the shutdown.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHabitués understand the risks now faced not only by Sardi’s, but by the industry, the neighborhood, and the city.“We haven’t proven that the pandemic is over, and that everything is not going to fail,” said Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatrical Productions, who likes to transact business at the upstairs bar while shows are running and the room is quiet. “But then, I grew up in California where the ground shook all the time and you never knew if your whole house was going to collapse on you, so I see it differently.”Sardi’s began the pandemic, appropriately, with a moment of high drama: On March 12, 2020, just moments after agreeing to shut down all 41 theaters, a group of Broadway bigwigs gathered at the bar to drown their sorrows. They ate, they drank, they hugged. Then many of them got the coronavirus.Among the industry gatekeepers who fell ill — with, to be sure, no way of knowing how — was Robert E. Wankel, the chairman and chief executive of the Shubert Organization, which has 17 Broadway theaters, and which is the restaurant’s landlord. On Tuesday, Mr. Wankel was there again, happily holding court over a vodka tonic and relentlessly bullish on Sardi’s, where he has been coming for 50 years, and lunches three times a week.“Sardi’s is going to do very well,” he said, “now that the theater is back.”Max Klimavicius, who grew up in Colombia, started working at Sardi’s in 1974 as an expediter in the kitchen. Now he owns the place.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAmong the restaurant’s most longstanding patrons: Arthur Whitelaw, a producer whose parents first brought him to Sardi’s in the 1940s. On the first night back, Whitelaw had a pre-theater dinner with his producing partner, Ruby Persson.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSardi’s has been a part of Broadway longer than some theaters, and has become part of the industry’s lore. As a line in “The Lady is a Tramp” has it: “The food at Sardi’s is perfect, no doubt / I wouldn’t know what the Ritz is about.” Alice Childress mentions it in her play, “Trouble in Mind,” now being staged on Broadway, while in the musical “The Producers,” Mel Brooks has a would-be showman dream of “lunch at Sardi’s every day.”Over the years, the restaurant has hosted luminaries from Eleanor Roosevelt to Ethel Merman, scads of Tony winners, Oscar winners and even, once a year, the dog that wins the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. “I went there with Elizabeth Taylor, for God’s sake,” said Charlotte Moore, the artistic director of Irish Repertory Theater.Among its current boldfaced regulars: the designer Michael Kors, who created a Sardi’s-themed cashmere sweater for Bergdorf Goodman (selling for $990).“When I walk into Sardi’s I feel like I’m living in ‘All About Eve’,” he said. “I know Times Square needs to come back, and I know Sardi’s needs to come back.”Joe Petrsoric has been working the bar at Sardi’s since 1972. “What am I going to do at home?”, he asked.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlthough the dining room and bar will look quite familiar to Sardi’s regulars — polished but unchanged — the kitchen was completely overhauled in order to modernize it, and some equipment has yet to arrive because of supply chain woes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSardi’s is among the last Broadway institutions to resume operations.Since June, 39 Broadway shows have begun performances, the TKTS booth is once again selling discounted tickets, and other industry watering holes, like Joe Allen and Bar Centrale, have long since reopened.But for months Sardi’s remained shuttered, with an eerie menu in the window still listing the specials for March 13, 2020: a tasting of five cheeses, meatballs over bucatini, sautéed sea scallops.Early in the pandemic, Mr. Klimavicius, like many, had his doubts — theater was dark, Midtown was dead, everything seemed uncertain. But this June, buoyed by $4.5 million from the federal government’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund, he began overhauling the space — redoing the kitchen, the gas lines, the ventilation, and the wiring, among other things — hoping to modernize it in a way that no one would notice. People who love Sardi’s are, to put it mildly, change-averse.“I was concerned when I heard ‘renovation’,” said Andrea Ezagui, a Sardi’s regular from Long Island, who showed up at 4 p.m. — the moment it reopened — and immediately repaired to the bar upstairs, where she celebrated with champagne and friends. “They kept it the way it should be,” she said, “a little piece of heaven on Broadway.”The restaurant’s famous caricatures came off their picture ledges for the restoration — all but one, that is. Barbra Streisand has the only caricature screwed to the wall, because fans stole the original; so now she remains, irremovable, with her admonition “Don’t steal this one” inscribed above her signature.On a recent afternoon, Mr. Klimavicius and his crew set about putting the hundreds of caricatures back up, starting with one of Lin-Manuel Miranda, “a good friend of the house.”As he settled into his domain on the second floor, Mr. Petrsoric, the bartender, was clearly relieved to be back on the job, after spending too many months in Mamaroneck, N.Y., riding a stationary bike and, by his own account, going crazy. “What am I going to do at home?” he said. “I love people. And think about 50 years behind the bar. You know how many people I know?”He started by mixing a Belvedere martini, a cosmopolitan and a lemon drop. “This is unbelievable,” he marveled. “But you know, it takes me one hour, and you’re back to normal.” More

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      Overlooked No More: Ruth Polsky, Who Shaped New York’s Music Scene

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      She booked concerts at influential nightclubs in the 1980s, bringing exposure to up-and-coming artists like the Smiths and New Order.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In the late 1970s and early ’80s, New York City’s nightclub scene was vibrant and daring, attracting an eclectic mix of creative types like artists, writers and musicians. It was also predominantly run by men.A notable exception was Ruth Polsky, who arranged concerts for cutting-edge rock artists, like the Smiths and New Order, at the influential Manhattan clubs Hurrah and Danceteria, whose regulars included Madonna and Jean-Michel Basquiat.Polsky had a knack for finding young talent, and helped both clubs earn a reputation for debuting new artists. Early in their careers, British bands like the Cure and the Specials played American shows at Hurrah, and Madonna performed one of her first-ever live shows at Danceteria, in 1982.Polsky’s choice of artists was diverse. She booked guitar-driven bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, influential minimalists like Young Marble Giants and challenging genre-busters like Einstürzende Neubauten and the Birthday Party, fronted by Nick Cave.There were potent, female-led groups, including Au Pairs, a politically-fuelled band from Birmingham, England, and kitschy Pulsallama from New York. She was an early supporter of Ru Paul, who performed with bands in the 1980s. (Ru Paul was occasionally referred to by a friend as Ru Polsky.)Polsky also arranged the United States premieres of alternative rock bands, many from the United Kingdom, including New Order, the Psychedelic Furs and Simple Minds, whose music eventually became mainstream soundtracks of the 1980s.“This is the place where anything goes,” Polsky said about Danceteria in a British television interview in the mid-1980s, “from oompah bands to Diamanda Galás to the funkiest thing happening on the street.”Her inclusive approach welcomed a clientele from all over the city, one that was racially diverse and of varying socioeconomic backgrounds. She turned her clubs into a hub for nonconformists, some of whom, like the actress Debi Mazar and the Beastie Boys, became famous.“It was kind of weirdos unite,” said Cynthia Sley, a member of Bush Tetras, whom Polsky booked several times. “Everybody who was an outcast from regular society would converge down there.”Her interactions with musicians went well beyond a professional obligation.“She was good at her job, and she had people power,” Bernard Sumner, a member of the band New Order, said in an interview. “She could handle people and charm them over.”And her dealings with performers didn’t end when the shows were over; she often invited them to her West Houston Street apartment to mingle with other musicians.Danceteria in 1980. The nightclub was a vibrant, daring scene that attracted creative types like artists, writers and musicians.Allan Tannenbaum“It was like a writers’ salon, but for punk rockers,” said Hugo Burnham, a founding member of Gang of Four, a taut British band who played several shows that Polsky booked. “She was the punk rock Dorothy Parker.”Her style was enhanced by the sort of devotion a loyal friend would show. It was a “mixture of strength and a kind of sisterly, kind of motherly instinct,” said Johnny Marr, a former member of the Smiths, whose first American show was at Danceteria.“You could stay up until 4 o’clock in the morning with her,” he added, “but then she would make sure that you went out and had a decent breakfast and a warm coat.”Part of her drive came from frequently being the only woman in the room, interacting with managers, booking agents and club owners who were mostly men.“She wanted to show that she could make a difference as a woman in a very male-dominated world,” said Howard Thompson, a former record company executive and a friend of Polsky’s.Ruth Rachel Polsky was born on Dec. 5, 1954, in Toms River, N.J., to Louis and Bertha (Rudnick) Polsky. Her father was an egg distributor, her mother a homemaker. From a young age, Ruthie, as she was called, was an excellent student. By the time she was a teenager, her love of books and writing was matched only by an obsession with music. Her taste, even then, was precocious: In high school, she saw the Doors and Led Zeppelin play live.Polsky attended Clark University in Massachusetts, where she wrote about music for the school paper. She earned a degree in English literature in 1976 and began writing for Aquarian Weekly, an alternative newspaper in New Jersey, covering up-and-coming music as a contributing editor. She also worked at a magazine publishing company.In her writing, she championed innovative sounds and encouraged fans to support them.“Right now, people need to dance,” she wrote in Aquarian Weekly in 1979, “not the well-oiled, machine-like dancing of a bland, conformist half-decade, but the individualistic style of a crazy new era.”That year, she started booking bands at Hurrah, a club near Lincoln Center, alongside another well-known promoter, Jim Fouratt. Three years later, she moved to Danceteria, a multilevel space in the Flatiron district.Polsky, left, at a party 1982. After the club shows she had booked, she’d often invite the performers over to her Houston Street apartment to mingle with other musicians. “It was like a writers’ salon, but for punk rockers,” one musician said.Howard ThompsonBefore long her impact began reaching well beyond New York City. In 1981, Polsky took a handful of American bands, including Bush Tetras, to London to perform for the first time in England. The show was called “Taking Liberties From New York.”In the United States, bands were able to use the money they earned from the concerts Polsky had arranged to go on national tours, furthering their exposure and success.“People in Columbus and Madison and Seattle and Minneapolis could see these bands that normally wouldn’t be able to tour America,” said Robert Vickers, a former member of the Go-Betweens, an Australian band that played several shows arranged by Polsky. “It made it possible for these cutting-edge bands, the post-punk bands, that Americans in these smaller cities would never have seen except for Ruth.”By the summer of 1986, Ms. Polsky had started her own company, S.U.S.S. — for Solid United States Support, a nod to a colloquial British term for astutely figuring something out — to help artists from abroad navigate their careers in America. She was managing bands, too, and writing a memoir about her nightlife adventures.Polsky died on Sept. 7, 1986, when she was hit by an out-of-control taxi outside the Limelight, a Manhattan club where she had arranged for one of her clients, Certain General, to play that evening. She was 31.“It just seemed like such an awful waste,” Mr. Sumner said, “because she was on an upward trajectory.”As alternative music was gaining in popularity, that path might well have included working directly with superstars, her ultimate goal.“She had the smarts, she had the passion, she had the good taste and she had the nurturing qualities,” said Mr. Marr of the Smiths. “She was tough and really ticked all the boxes to have been really successful with a band.” More

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      Dee Pop, Drummer and Downtown New York Fixture, Dies at 65

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      Initially known for his tight and soulful playing with the celebrated post-punk band Bush Tetras, he later became an entrepreneur of avant-garde music.Dee Pop, a drummer who first found grimy rock stardom as a founding member of the underground New York band Bush Tetras during the no wave and post-punk scene of the late 1970s, and who later became an elder statesman of the city’s alternative music scene, died on Oct. 9 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 65.His brother, Tom Papadopoulos, said the cause was heart failure.Some 40 years ago, an avant-garde punk movement was rumbling from the underground scene below 14th Street. Bands like the Contortions, Liquid Liquid, D.N.A. and 8 Eyed Spy led the charge, playing nightly at venues like the Mudd Club, Tier 3 and CBGB. Amid the fray emerged the moment’s must-see band, Bush Tetras, who disbanded just four years later but left a profound impact on the scene.The female-fronted quartet, often clad in headbands and leopard-print scarves, played a danceable breed of post-punk rooted in jagged guitar hooks and funky rhythms. Key to the band’s dub-struck groove was their leather-jacketed drummer, Dee Pop, whose tight playing laced some soul into the nihilism of the no wave era.“The funk part of it,” Mr. Pop recently told The Village Sun, “became central to our sound. I guess I kind of destroyed no wave by putting a 4/4 beat to it. That’s what made the Bush Tetras a little more accessible.”The band’s other members were the vocalist Cynthia Sley, the guitarist Pat Place and the bassist Laura Kennedy (who died in 2011). The group’s “Too Many Creeps,” a punk anthem about the frustration of having to dodge being hassled by men on city streets, was released in 1980 and became a dance-floor hit. The rock critic Robert Christgau wrote at the time that it “summed up the Lower East Side circa 1980.”Thurston Moore, the singer and guitarist of Sonic Youth, said that in his 20s he admired what he described as the band’s abiding Downtown cool.“When Bush Tetras first started playing out I was extremely impressed,” Mr. Moore said in an email, “and very envious.” Bush Tetras gradually started performing beyond the underground scene, at venues like the Roseland Ballroom and Irving Plaza, and shared bills with bands including X, Bad Brains and Gang of Four. They were a supporting act for the Clash during the band’s storied 1981 run at Bond’s International Casino in Times Square, and the Clash’s drummer, Topper Headon, produced their EP, “Rituals.” But before the group could record a full album, they disbanded in 1983.“When I first left Bush Tetras in ’83, one reason was that I felt we’d gone as far as we could,” Mr. Pop told The Village Sun. “I was very dissatisfied and looked at all of my influences — my love for Béla Bartók or King Oliver or 1940s and ’50s R&B — and that wasn’t what Bush Tetras was about.”Indeed, Mr. Pop’s musicianship stood out as more than a gutsy punk-rock attitude.“He was a very versatile player, and that’s not something that can be said of many drummers who came out of the East Village post-punk scene,” Andy Schwartz, the editor and publisher of New York Rocker magazine, the scene’s bible at the time, said in a phone interview. “He could play blues, jazz, free jazz, post-punk. He never seemed to stop learning.”After Bush Tetras broke up, Mr. Pop drummed across genres.He first joined the Los Angeles punk band the Gun Club, then played with artists like Richard Lloyd and Jayne County. He was a member of Radio I-Ching, an experimental outfit that dabbled in blues and Americana and incorporated unusual stringed instruments like the lotar and the glissentar. He went on to jam with free-jazz luminaries like Roy Campbell Jr., Eddie Gale and William Parker.Mr. Pop performing with Bush Tetras at a 40th-anniversary show in New York in 2020. The band broke up in 1983 and reunited three decades later, after Mr. Pop had worked across genres with several other bands.Sherry RubelDee Pop was born Dimitri Constantin Papadopoulos on March 14, 1956, in the Forest Hills section of Queens. His father, Dino Papadopoulos, was a vascular surgeon; his mother, Gigi (Bakalis) Papadopoulos, was a homemaker and artist.She was also a jazz enthusiast and introduced him early on to drummers like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. While his friends at school listened to Jethro Tull, Dimitri favored John Coltrane and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He graduated from St. Paul’s School on Long Island in 1974 and studied journalism at the University at Buffalo.In addition to his brother, he is survived by his mother; a sister, Tara Papadopoulos; a daughter, Nikki Ziolkowski; a son, Charlie Papadopoulos; and a granddaughter. Two marriages, to Elizabeth Vogdes and the musician known as Deerfrance, ended in divorce.In the late 1990s, Mr. Pop began hosting a weekly performance series that roamed the East Village showcasing live avant-garde music. He started it at a tiny coffeehouse called the Internet Cafe before moving on to CBGB, where he secured the club’s basement space on Sundays.“I wanted diversity,” he said of the series. “I wanted to challenge people.”After CBGB closed in 2006, Mr. Pop moved the series to Jimmy’s No. 43, and The Village Voice called him an “avant guardian.” In recent years he held shows at Troost, a bar near his apartment in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.Around 2015, Bush Tetras reunited. The group recorded an EP, “Take the Fall,” in 2018, and then put out a single, “There Is a Hum,” on Third Man Records. A boxed set, “Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras,” is to be released next month on Wharf Cat Records.Mr. Pop died the night before a release party was held at the Howl! Happening arts space in the East Village. The gathering turned into a memorial.As video clips featuring Mr. Pop’s furious drumming played on a projector screen, Pat Place and Cynthia Sley stood up in front of the crowd, holding each other as they remembered their bandmate.“He lived to drum,” Ms. Sley said. “He loved the Bush Tetras.”She choked up.“Bush Tetras,” she added, “is a force that cannot be stopped.” More

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      5 Pros in the Concert Trenches on Getting (Carefully) Back to Work

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      What’s it like mixing sound, building sets and taking care of artists’ health as the music industry hits pause and play?As live music revs back up, we spoke to five professionals around the industry about their experiences with fans, safety protocols, volume levels and tour plans. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Marguerite Nowacki, security supervisor at the Metro in ChicagoFirst and foremost, every patron needs two forms of ID: their government ID, and their proof of vaccination. Our venue does not allow any kind of negative test for entry. A lot of patrons have come up to thank us for actually checking every single person’s vaccination card.That was the main reason we wanted to be fully vaccinated: We want people to feel our venue is a safe environment, and it will always be no matter what. Everybody’s been polite, understanding and accepting, with everything that’s going on. We’re seeing a lot of young crowds, and international crowds, and even the older generation is coming back out to listen to live music, and just be in the moment.One of the new protocols is to look for anxiety or stress, and ask if a patron needs help. Being in your house, cooped up, and then finally being let out — a lot of people experience stress around high intensity music or light. We tell our team to look for irritation, shakiness, sweatiness. We give them a bottle of water and a towel, if they want, to calm them down. Sometimes they just want to go home.Alex Reardon, president of Silent House ProductionsEverybody still wants the best show, the biggest show, the flashiest show, the coolest show — whatever aligns with their thinking. Everyone has been sitting still for so long that we are now so busy, we’re almost turning down work. And as a result of that, we have to understand that all of the arenas and theaters everywhere are going to be booked solid. So there will be a time when we have to work out, “Well, if the routing means that you can’t get from here to here in time, and you can’t actually build the stage, then the stage has to become smaller.” We would then address that logistical constraint in our design while working with the promoters and agents.The silver lining is that most management teams understand the constraints of availability, so they are talking to us earlier on than they might have in normal times. I think there’s something in the DNA of everyone that works in live touring, which is that we come up with solutions very, very quickly, which comes from the concept of “The doors will open at 7 p.m., and people will be in the venue.” But until we know where the problems are, we can’t really do much about it.The logistics, we popped back into very easily — we have muscle memory, and it just reconnects. But I think what I’m seeing across the entire live entertainment industry is an enthusiasm and a joy that we’ve been really reconnected with. I was recently at Lollapalooza, talking to Tyler, the Creator and his manager, and I told them that it was an interesting experience to walk from the stage out to the front of the house, surrounded by the audience, and smell the beer and sweat. I used the analogy that it’s like bumping into an old friend you hadn’t seen for a long time. And I think Tyler just called me a hopeless romantic and wandered off giggling.Elisa Binger, monitor engineer at the Black Cat in Washington, D.C.At first, it felt a little weird to have a bunch of people back in the room again. The first few shows, I was actually surprised that almost nobody in the audience was wearing a masks. I’ve just gotten so used to seeing people with masks over the last year and a half, that it almost sort of felt like culture shock.We were actually pretty concerned that people would be on their worst behavior. But for the most part, everyone is very well behaved. Everybody’s excited to talk to the bartenders, and talk to us, because they’ve missed talking to people other than their friends and family for so long. There have been a lot of regulars coming back — I knew their faces before, and was sort of familiar with them, but everybody’s gotten closer, because nobody wants to take that social interaction for granted.One of the nice things that actually makes my job a little bit easier on the technical side is that bands haven’t played in a really, really loud environment for a long time. They’re playing quieter than they once did, which brings the whole noise floor down onstage. Most of us are coming back with a fresh perspective after spending many months not working at all. When bands would load in, it used to feel like sort of a hassle — but now, whenever we have a band loaded, I’m excited for the running around, and lifting heavy things, and crazy things like that. It reminds me that we’re back at it.Don Muzquiz, production manager for Alanis MorissettePart of my job is to avoid surprises. It’s not about the noise, or the news, or the propaganda or whatever you want to believe or want to support. It’s about if anybody gets sick or not.Everything’s affected, because as we go into a city you’re having to involve a lot of local workers at the venues. Some artists that have been touring regularly have slimmed down their production. Every tour is going to have their own restrictions or their own requests, but we are requesting that all locals staff be vaccinated, and that everybody wear masks throughout the day, vaccinated or not. It’s just taking every precaution — you’re trying to protect as much as you can, because you’ve got a lot of people traveling together in confined spaces, on your buses.I think the biggest thing for everybody is that the access to backstage is going to be almost zero, in terms of anybody that’s not working. Any sort of visitation from anybody that’s not on the working personnel or touring staff, it’s probably just not going to happen. There’s no fluff, no extra people, not one guy that’s just out there to carry towels around.I can’t speak for everybody, but I think the overall feeling is that the artists are excited to get back to what they love. If there’s any nervousness, it’s really about just being able to make it through the tour without there being an issue. In total, with opening acts, we’re about 85 people traveling together, and we’re having to interact with local workers daily in different cities every day. The goal is to not get anybody sick, because then it’s just a domino effect.Erica Krusen, managing director of mental health and addiction services at MusiCaresMental health issues existed way before the pandemic, and continue to endure beyond it. We are seeing more requests come in daily, and we’re here to support them. A lot of the festivals and venues and bands are pivoting to require all of their crew and band members to be vaccinated. What we’re hearing is the anxiety increasing: Are they going to get it? How safe is it backstage? Are the venues adhering to protocols?All of our directors, including myself, are licensed therapists, social workers and chemical dependency counselors. We can assess and get music industry professionals the resources that they may need — that can be directing them to a local therapist, finding therapists that do Zoom or FaceTime or Skype, making sure that they know where the local hospital is.What we saw in the music community is how everyone began to confront mental health and talk about it and address it. For a long time, the music industry was behind in that, and now we’re seeing a lot of really good changes. Managers and agents are coming to us to say, “What can we do to help?” The more we talk about it, the more we destigmatize it, and the more that people will not be afraid, and not be shamed into thinking that they can’t get or find help. More

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      A Pandemic, Then a Hurricane, Brings New Orleans Musicians ‘to Their Knees’

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      When Hurricane Ida swept through New Orleans late last month, it took a piece of history with it. The Karnofsky Tailor Shop and Residence, a decrepit red brick building that had served as a kind of second home for Louis Armstrong during his boyhood in the early 1900s, was reduced to rubble.At the Little Gem Saloon next door, where some of the first jazz gigs were played, a three-story-tall mural paying homage to the pioneering cornetist Buddy Bolden was also ruined.Most of the city’s active music venues fared far better, suffering minor roof and water damage. But the storm was only the latest in a series of blows to the people and places that make up the jazz scene, in a city that stakes its identity on live music.“We’ve been without work for over 18 months now,” Big Sam Williams, a trombonist and bandleader, said in a phone interview from his home in the Gentilly neighborhood. “It’s a struggle and we’re just barely making it.”Doug Trager, who manages the Maple Leaf Bar in the Carrollton neighborhood, said that after 446 days of shutdown because of Covid-19, “we were just getting going” again before Ida hit. Now that the storm has created another setback, he said, “we’ll just try to keep waiting it out.”The Little Gem Saloon days after the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesLittle Gem Saloon and the Karnofsky Shop sit on the same block.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesIt has now been a year and a half since the pandemic first prompted a citywide moratorium on indoor performances. On Aug. 16, the city imposed a mandate requiring all patrons at bars and clubs to be vaccinated or recently tested for Covid-19, seeming to open the door to a new phase of reopening.But as the Delta variant surged, the city’s two major jazz festivals, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and French Quarter Fest, both already pushed back from their usual springtime schedule, were called off. That meant that, for the second year in a row, musicians would have to do without the most active period of their work year, when hordes of tourists arrive for the festivals and spillover gigs at clubs often provide enough work for area performers to pay the rent for months.A week and a half after the storm, many in the city’s live-music business say they will not be resting easy, even after things come back online.In interviews, local advocates said that zoning laws had long made small venue operators’ lives difficult, and that neighborhood clubs have run into needless red tape during the pandemic as the city has sometimes enforced strict permitting regulations around outdoor entertainment.“They’re counting on the continued presence of the culture bearers and the musicians, and they’re mistaken this time,” said Ashlye Keaton, a co-founder of the Ella Project, which provides legal assistance to and agitates on behalf of New Orleans artists. “The storm, coupled with Covid, has brought musicians to their knees.”While some venues have survived since March 2020 with substantial help from federal grants, including the $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, other small and vulnerable clubs, particularly those nestled in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, often lacked the capacity or the wherewithal to apply. Many have held on largely thanks to fund-raisers and whatever performances they can safely pull off without raising the hackles of regulators and neighbors.In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city will continue to enforce permitting for outdoor live entertainment events on a temporary basis, pointing out that the mayor had lifted its usual cap on those permits during the pandemic.“The Department of Safety & Permits fully supports and is actively working with partners in the City Council to enact legislation which balances the desire for outdoor entertainment, supports local artists and venues as well as preserves the quality of life for the neighbors and residents of each community,” the statement says.Preservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesTipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, will require some repairs to its roof.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMany of the city’s active venues were spared serious damage in the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesPreservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida, and is slated to reopen once power is restored. Tipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, located closer to the water, will require some repairs to its roof.The New Orleans Jazz Market, a stately performance center in Central City, appears to have held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming nonetheless — just days after what was supposed to have been a triumphant reopening for its fall 2021 season.“This is very reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, and what we went through during that time, and I know a lot of New Orleans musicians are displaced,” said the drummer Adonis Rose, the artistic director of the Jazz Market and leader of its resident big band, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. He called the storm a “tragedy, when we were just starting to see some glimmer of hope.”The New Orleans Jazz Market held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming after the hurricane.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, turned his club into a community gathering space during the pandemic.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a renowned trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, said in an interview on Monday that the electricity had just come back on at the popular neighborhood club, and he planned to get the place ready to rock.During the pandemic, Ruffins’s club served as a gathering spot and a kind of improvised community cafeteria. He moved concerts outside to the club’s patio, and cooked free meals of red beans and rice for residents of the surrounding Tremé neighborhood, and for musicians who were out of work.“I figured if I cooked for myself, I’d cook for the neighborhood,” Ruffins said.Howie Kaplan, the proprietor of the Howlin’ Wolf, a venue in downtown New Orleans, also began providing meals and other services to musicians in the early days of the pandemic. The program was subsumed into the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic earlier this year; he restarted it at the Howlin’ Wolf last month, in response to Hurricane Ida.“We’ve got a James Beard Award-winning chef on the grill right now, making these fantastic steaks that came from who knows where,” Kaplan said in a phone interview, adding that restaurants had come to donate food that they wouldn’t be able to prepare because of the power outage.Shortly after Hurricane Ida passed over the city, Jordan Hirsch — the editor of the online resource A Closer Walk, which provides detailed information on New Orleans’s heritage sites — set out to determine how the city’s most vulnerable music landmarks had held up.The program providing meals returned to the Howlin’ Wolf after Hurricane Ida.Jillian Marie PhotographyWhen he got to the Karnofsky shop, on South Rampart Street downtown, he saw that the building had become wreckage and the Bolden mural nearby had crumbled. But other equally old jazz landmarks along the block, the former Eagle Saloon and the Iroquois Theater, had miraculously pulled through. All four structures are on the national historic register; it’s safe to say that no single block in the United States today houses more early jazz history.A Cleveland-based developer, GBX Group, recently bought out most of the addresses on the street, and plans to rebuild it into a center of commerce that will also trumpet its role in jazz history. After the storm, GBX hired workers to collect the Karnofsky shop’s bricks, said its C.E.O., Drew Sparacia, hoping to at least partially rebuild the structure using the original materials.But Hirsch asked why the city had not done more to demand that the owners of these historic places, which to the outside observer appear to be mostly abandoned, keep them protected from the elements.“Tropical storms and hurricanes were sort of a constant threat for those buildings,” Hirsch said. “People have been sounding that alarm for 30 years.”Some other sites that made it through Hurricane Ida remain deeply endangered, according to preservationists. John McCusker, a jazz historian and photojournalist who has worked to preserve historic buildings in the city, said that Bolden’s former home in Central City and the old Dew Drop Inn — a midcentury music venue, hotel and community hub — were both in states of relative disrepair.McCusker lamented that the sites’ landlords hadn’t been compelled to restore and preserve the buildings.“We have this wealth of these buildings connected to the birth of this music, and the mechanisms of government have just proven maladroit at protecting them with the same vigor that they would enforce an inappropriate shutter in the French Quarter,” he said. More