OUT OF THE CLUBS

BOSTON'S JAZZ VENUES
By Warren Allen

Photo by Stefan Malner

By day, the main exercise studio for Brookline Tai Chi is full of men and women in leotards, swaying to otherworldly rhythms. The room resembles an elementary school gymnasium, all high ceilings and yellow floors, except for the Yin-Yang hangings and touches of modern art. On a Friday night, however, folding chairs are arranged in neat rows. Red, blue and purple exercise mats are set out for those who wish to lie down. And front and center of a Japanese dressing screen, sit the members of the Fernando Holst-Molly Flannery Latin jazz quintet.
Brookline Tai Chi has been holding these concerts for two years now. They are one example of a new type of venue shaping the face of the local music scene. Jazz in Boston no longer is confined strictly to dim, smoky bars, where wrinkled hipsters talk politics and poetry between sets. Indeed, many of those classic clubs are no more, and the Boston jazz scene has adapted. With more musicians than ever, many of whom committed to playing improvisational music that isn’t always accepted in mainstream rock clubs, smaller settings have started to open up their doors.

“The whole idea of living room concerts, salon concerts really took place in Europe at the turn of the century,” says Daniel Ian Smith, a tenor saxophonist who teaches at Berklee School of Music and has played multiple concerts at Brookline Tai Chi. “Club owners don’t want to put jazz in, because people don’t spend a lot of money, they don’t buy enough drinks. Ever since the drinking age changed and the smoking bans, people don’t go out as much as they used to.”
At one point, the Hub was filled with jazz venues. Though never rivaling the New York scene, Boston used to feature a number of classic clubs, including the Jazz Workshop and Storyville. With music schools such as the Berklee and New England Conservatory, Boston has always had a steady pipeline of the best young jazz players in the country.

But the opportunities for these students-and even their established teachers-are few and far between. Only Wally’s, a fixture on Mass. Ave near Symphony Hall since 1947, remains from the golden era of the fifties and sixties. They still feature nightly jam sessions, generally featuring the best of the Berklee crowd. Ryle’s also caters to local talent, and the chic Beehive has recently emerged as a hip place to hear local jazz.

With fewer traditional clubs to play in, jazz shows are springing up in unlikely places. Jamaicaway Books and Gift now hosts a weekly jam session on Sundays. Les Zygomates Wine Bar in the business district has given a home to some of the acts from Bob’s Southern Bistro. The Church of Our Saviour and the Fireplace restaurant have both featured live music. And Brookline Tai Chi has been a sort of leader, offering a place for jazz groups to play for the past two years.

“We were talking about the music scene in Boston, trying to make heads or tails of it,” says attendant Django Carranza, who first started organizing Brookline Tai Chi’s concerts with fellow musician Jim Hobbs. “It’s gotten to the point now where you’ve really got to pay to play, or rent a space. So I’d been working here at the Tai Chi studio for about six years. We just worked it out that we would give them the opportunity to have a good space at no cost.”

Previous concerts have seen audience members lie flat on their backs, arms outstretched and eyes closed, or seated in the lotus position, rocking with both music and mantras. People dance the samba, as they do for the Fernando Holst quintet. At the same time, some concertgoers gripe about drafty floors or the unusual acoustics.

Musicians have a slightly different take. They know going in that they have to be ready to adjust their sounds. Carranza, a drummer, readily admits that the performance room has difficult acoustics. Drummers and horn players have to hold back. If they blast, the sound will boom outward. When James Merenda, a local saxophonist known for a wild vocabulary of honking sound effects performed in the auditorium, he played with his back to the crowd, sometimes nearly soloing into the potted plant in the corner.

At the same time, musicians recognize that there’s a dearth of jazz venues, let alone venues that tolerate some of the avant-garde experimentation that Brookline Tai Chi encourages. The venue’s MySpace page says that they’re interested in “Harmless Honest Music Makers who challenge. Especially if you are doing something that isn’t likely to make much money.”

“We started booking it ourselves a couple years ago,” says Django Carranza, who first started organizing Brookline Tai Chi’s concerts with fellow musician Jim Hobbs. “It wasn’t doing so well actually. We didn’t really have the support of the community or the musicians, maybe because of the area, the location. So we decided to turn it over to this friend of ours, Chris Rich.”

Chris Rich was responsible for building up the respectability of the Middle East, and it appears that he’s been able to bring similar success to Brookline Tai Chi’s weekly concerts. An audience of 40 people still counts as a large crowd but, depending on the act, the average is gradually creeping over 20. Lately there has been an increase in the number of restaurants bringing in jazz groups for free shows once or twice a week, such as the Mission Bar at Brigham Circle and the Vermissage Restaurant in Brookline.

Whether this is just a passing trend remains to be seen. But for now, musicians will continue to lug their horns and drum kits into Tai Chi parlors and bookstores. Brookline Tai Chi plans to keep going. “We’ll do this for as long as we can,” says Carranza. “I think it’s important just to have a place like this for the arts.”
“Thank goodness,” says Smith, “because if there weren’t, then there would be nothing.”

www.myspace.com/brooklinetaichi