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Coronavirus Disease 2019
Not Hearing Live Jazz Is Giving Me the Blues
I am still not ready to return to the crowded jazz joints I used to frequent.
Posted September 20, 2021 Reviewed by Davia Sills
I think of myself as a bookish loner. But that description fails to acknowledge the countless evenings over the years that I have spent in small, dimly lit venues listening to terrific—and often little-known—jazz musicians. On more than a few occasions, I have sat in myself on vocals.
I have followed the siren call of jazz in joints from coast to coast and out into the Pacific. Bradley’s in Greenwich Village. One Step Down and Blues Alley in Washington, DC. The Tralfamadore Café in Buffalo. The New Orleans Bistro and Café Sistina in Honolulu. Numerous lesser-known rooms in Pennsylvania, where I now live.
Given the challenges of keeping a jazz club afloat in even the best of times, many of the spots I once frequented exist now only in memory. And as the coronavirus pandemic began wreaking havoc with live music in early 2020, club owners faced a brand-new set of daunting challenges. Sadly, these new burdens made it impossible for a number of jazz clubs to stay in business.
As a devoted jazz buff and sometimes performer, I would like to support the clubs in my area that are once again booking jazz musicians. But even though I am fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, I can’t now picture myself spending an evening in a crowded club and feeling remotely comfortable.
The number of coronavirus cases continues to rise in my state, giving me no confidence that the pandemic will soon be behind us. At the same time, I sense increasing hostility against those who wear masks in indoor public places, as I have been doing since the spring of 2020.
Recently, my beau and I went to one of our favorite restaurants—a family-owned business near his home—to pick up a take-out order. (I have not eaten inside a restaurant since the pandemic began.)
As we waited, masked, near the bar for our order, an unmasked man and woman seated at the bar trained hostile, contemptuous gazes on us. Call me paranoid, but it seemed they were trying their best to wordlessly convey that we were ruining their night out by quietly standing 10 feet away from them while wearing masks.
Some jazz venues are addressing the fears of would-be patrons like me by requiring proof of vaccination from anyone entering their establishment. Such a policy should help calm my anxieties. However, I have been living with these anxieties for so long—more than 18 months—that they have become almost second nature to me now.
At this point, I would need more than an establishment’s word that all patrons and performers are vaccinated to feel safe there.
While I am still leery of patronizing jazz venues, I am trying to cautiously expand the names on my meager list of safe indoor public spaces beyond my local supermarket, drug store, and big-box hardware store.
Earlier this month, my beau and I returned to another favorite haunt—the Philadelphia Museum of Art—for the first time in more than two years. The museum has a mask mandate for all visitors and staff, the rooms are spacious, and no area of the museum we visited had more than a few other people. I felt perfectly safe there, and I am already looking forward to my next visit.
I am also looking forward to venturing out to hear jazz again. It still seems too risky now, but I am hoping the pandemic numbers will eventually improve, and my anxieties will abate.
During the past year, I watched several livestream jazz events, with jazz trios or quartets playing in empty clubs to a remote audience via video camera.
The players were extraordinary, and the music was superb. But watching alone on my laptop in my home office was a pitiful substitute for the joy of sitting in a small club crowded with other devotees while three or four musicians weave their magic jazz spell a few feet away.
Someday soon, I keep telling myself. Someday soon. And perhaps by then, I will even have the courage to sit in on vocals, too.
Copyright © 2021 by Susan Hooper
