Back to the future: returning to the Village Vanguard
The famous red canopy hovers over a blackly glistening pavement. Further up Seventh Avenue, the towers of Midtown have buried their glowing heads in a thick bank of cloud, grey against the black of the sky. To look uptown is to have the sense that you’ve been granted a window into the future, only to see that a meteorological disaster is gathering pace, getting ready to engulf you.
My friends and I have joined the line for Kurt Rosenwinkel’s second set at the Village Vanguard. We’re standing by the window of the pizza place next door, in which a neon sign is prominently displayed. This sign is supposed to advertise PASTA and HEROS, but due to the lack of adequate spacing between the words, and the way the neon designer has joined the P to the A, it instead proclaims the existence of RASTA HEROS. It’s cold, colder than any of us had anticipated when we checked the weather before leaving our respective homes. We stamp our feet to keep warm, discussing the rasta heroes of our mutual acquaintance, eyeing the numinous uptown gloom.
Finally, the doors swing open and the first-set punters begin to issue. A middle-aged man whose bolo tie is revealed on closer inspection to be a neck strap for a saxophone emerges first — he is shaking his head and smiling, blowing out his cheeks — and then comes a foursome of Spanish students who sling their arms around each other and take a cumbersome group selfie, angling themselves so that the red doors are in the background — and eventually, when the way is clear, it’s our turn to descend the steep and shallow stairs. We’re one of the first groups in. Greg says that the sound is best near the back, beside the bar, so we ask to be seated there. The usher is bemused, given all the empty seats at the front, but waves permission. It’s my first time sitting at the back of the room. I’m struck by how odd the mural on the rear wall is: a sinuous humanoid figure that looks to be suffering through some kind of cosmic birthing event. I see Ted looking at it, too. ‘Is that new?’ he says, incredulous. ‘Has that been there this whole time?’ I spread my hands in ignorance.
We take our seats, watching the crowd file in. There are lots of short, anoraked middle-aged men that look like they have entered the venue directly from 1990. There is a sizeable contingent of young saxophone players, too, identifiable not by their instruments (most haven’t brought any) but by their unmistakable ‘skinny sax bro’ look. Last to be admitted is a group of incongruously fashionable twenty-somethings wearing an assortment of fleeces, expensive-looking shell tops and wide legged trousers, one of whom boasts an impressive pair of scrunchied blonde pigtails. Zoomers, I murmur to Greg. New School, he says in reply, has to be. We both nod, sagely.
And now comes the band, drummer Joe Farnsworth first. He is broad and burly, clad in a fawn suit and a pair of Oxfords. He lopes toward the stage with a forward tilt as though he plans to shake hands with it in an aggressive fashion. He looks like an off-duty baseball coach, and I say as much to my friends. Baseball jazz, they say, yeah, it’s a thing. Basketball jazz, too. But I don’t get to learn what the visual markers of basketball jazz are, because Turner and Rosenwinkel are passing us and we fall silent.
Rosenwinkel is clad in some kind of beret and a loud shirt with a large print — floral? No, I eventually realise: it’s some kind of animal. Tigers, maybe? Owls? I have the sense that he is wearing this outfit askance, somehow — Rosenwinkel is, after all, serious about being zany, as the videos he posts to Instagram make clear. Alex Claffy, an earnest-looking young bass player from Philly, angles his reading light toward his music stand, and they begin.
Greg was right. The sound is perfect from back here, even with the occasional shaking of a cocktail and the sporadic gnashing of the receipt printer. The stereo image presents itself to us entire. In those first moments of live music, as the voices of the instruments weave and fuse, I experience a deep sense of relief. It is as though all the dislocation and confusion and loneliness of the last two years is being mended before my eyes, torn edges hemmed, trailing threads carefully snipped — as though a tired, precious old garment were being made beautiful again.
I have never heard Turner before. His playing is a revelation to me: every note so clear and sure of its purpose. Turner’s tone has what i’ve sometimes heard classical singers call ‘spin’: each note he plays seems to whirl on its axis like an arrow in mid-air, certain to hit its target from the moment of launch. ‘Clarion,’ is the word I keep thinking as I listen. Turner isn’t playing, he is calling. He and Rosenwinkel are a perfect pair. At times, they sound like one voice, playing intricate melodies in unison before diverging with a swoop, like a pair of birds high overhead.
Rosenwinkel’s harmonic language is unmistakable. Afterwards, my friends and I agree that there is something childlike about his compositions. It’s not that they are in any way unsophisticated. It’s rather that they have an exuberant, wide-eyed feel, conjuring a world of wonder and surprise. And they seem to emanate from his personality in much the same way that a child’s stories often do: as you listen, you think, ‘well, nobody else could have made that up,’ before shaking your head in admiration.
Before long, the cheque has been deposited on our table, and then the lights are up, and we in turn are disgorged from the underworld onto the street above. As always, upon emerging from that room, I have the sense of having left behind something sacred, as though a secret were buried under Seventh Avenue, guarded by those dark green walls.
