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Jazz Where? Heats Up The New Haven Museum

Lucy Gellman | February 17th, 2020

Jazz Where? Heats Up The New Haven Museum

Jazz  |  Music  |  Arts & Culture  |  New Haven Museum

 

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Musician Paul Bryant Hudson, who serenaded the crowd for two hours with Jeremiah Fuller on keys. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

Paul Bryant Hudson was halfway through Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed” when someone started snapping in the back. A second set of fingers, then a third, then a fourth joined the mix. Suddenly there was a percussion section. The lyrics soared over the rotunda of the New Haven MuseumFor in romance/All true love needs is a chance!—and kept going right through the finale.

“I’m sure a lot of you grew up with that song like I did or just enjoy the song like I do,” Hudson said. “That’s a jazz song. Like, Stevie Wonder is a jazz musician.”

Friday, close to 50 New Haveners gathered at the New Haven Museum for the first Jazz Where? of the new decade, featuring Hudson on vocals, Jeremiah Fuller on keys, and the audience on impromptu percussion, unexpected backup vocals and enough cuddling to banish the cold outside.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, Hudson rolled out a set that jumped from love song to love song, leaning on the words of Stevie Wonder, Emily King, Vinícius de Moraes, Rodgers & Hart (as better known through Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald), Al Green and others by the end of the night.

Born on a rooftop last fall, Jazz Where? offers free, semi-monthly jazz pop ups at different locations in New Haven, from secret roof decks to house museums and history collections. It is organized by Inner-City News Editor Babz Rawls-Ivy and New Haven Independent Arts Editor Brian Slattery as an addition to the jazz brunches and New Haven Jazz Underground nights at Three Sheets, Mr. Crab Seafood, and now Cafe Nine that have popped up across the city.

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Rawls-Ivy and Slattery. 

The series is casual: think potluck meets jazz club meets front porch. People bring bottles of wine, sparkling water, sweet treats and finger food; they catch up in between (and sometimes during) songs, check out new-old spaces, and stay for the music. Some bring books, and hang out near the back for a free concert while they read. Friday, the acoustics in the museum made for a warm, sweet web of sound that filled the whole building.

Margaret Anne Tockarshewsky, executive director of the New Haven Museum, said she was excited to host the event. After Jazz Where? started last year, the museum offered its sweeping, column-studded rotunda as a possible venue. She and a handful of organizers filled it with tables and chairs for guests, running up and down the stairs with more seating as attendees continued to trickle in.

Throughout the night, she kept hearing from attendees who had never visited the space, but planned to come back with their friends and families. They included Hudson, who grew up in New Haven and graduated from Co-Op High School.

That’s part of the point, Rawls-Ivy suggested. In organizing the series, she and Slattery hope to bring together different parts of the city through jazz, of which New Haven has a long and storied history. They run the series with a big tent understanding of the form that spans continents and genres.

When they were putting a February date on the calendar and realized Valentine’s Day was a Friday, the intersection of love and jazz music was too much to resist.

“Love is the true revolution,” Rawls-Ivy said. “It is the only revolution. It is the revolution that we all should be working towards. And I think jazz is the vehicle through which music and love can exist. Good music is an equalizer and a unifier. Even if you don’t know all the songs, you are in the moment. You are here feeling the love.”

“This is what I want, because the world is crazy,” she added. “And for two hours, it’s not crazy in here.”

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Friday both musicians seized on that, turning love songs into jazz prophecies. Fuller, who also graduated from Co-Op, said that when he thinks of jazz, he channels Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and other greats—all musicians who “draw you in through their playing.”

As the two dipped into Stevie Wonder, he took it as a chance to probe the smooth and curling roots of the song, going deep on a piano solo that became a meditation onto itself. When Hudson crooned “My Funny Valentine” after a short break, the room fell from buzzing conversations to whispers to a hush in a span of seconds.

Somewhere near the middle of the song, the jazz standard met all the best versions of itself, and added one more voice to the mix.

JazzWhere - 3Around them, the space became kinetic: couples hugged and kissed, some came dressed ready for a night on the town and others wore jeans and snow boots. By the time Hudson and Fuller ended the night on Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” the whole crowd was singing in unison.

“For me, this is magic,” Fuller said afterward. “Like, jazz will draw you into a whole different type of world.”

For more from Friday night, visit the Arts Council of Greater New Haven's YouTube Page