Culture & Community | Downtown | Jazz | Music | Arts & Culture | The State House
Bet Calix on bass, Albear Sheffield is pictured on drums in the background.
The rumble of palm-on-percussion flowed through The State House, so quiet at first that a listener had to lean in to hear it. Beside the stage, Eric Rey let his hands flutter over an Udu, listening to the stillness around him. Twinkling white lights snaked across the floor; a candle flickered in the center of the room. On stage, Jeremiah Fuller listened for an opening. When he took it, he pressed his fingers to the keyboard, and traveled to another universe entirely.
Welcome to Full Up, an hours-long odyssey into close listening, improvisation, and spiritual jazz at the State House in downtown New Haven. Born in September of last year, the near-monthly series is much closer to a meditation than a concert, dedicated to intentional music making, movement, and kindling community with no words at all.
A core group of musicians includes Fuller on keys, Stephen “Gritz” King on sax, Albear Sheffield on drums and Bet Calix on bass. The group has already released one full session recording as an album. During December’s iteration, held on the winter solstice, musicians Jessie Griz and Finn Wiggins-Henry also joined in. The next session has not yet been announced.
Jeremiah Fuller on keys.
“This is not a performance,” said State House Co-Owner Slate Liu-Ballard, adding that he’d love to see dance, poetry, visual art and spoken word all enter the fray. “There are performance elements to this—we’re in The State House and we have lights and a sound system and stuff—but this is really a practice. Although the musicians are up on stage, there is interaction that’s happening with us. We’re really co-creating this room.”
Full Up began last year with an idea, and the space to try it out. For months, Liu-Ballard noticed that The State House would host an event—a rebirth of The Jam on Juneteenth, for instance, or a concert that had people dancing shoulder-to-shoulder—and audience members would be talking all around him as musicians played. As a venue owner, he expects people to talk at concerts. But he also found himself “craving a space” where chatter stayed at the door.
“I have a real spiritual relationship with music,” he said. “I would be in this zone, really in a mindful place, really tapped into what was happening musically, and yet I would also hear people talking around me and like, chit-chatting. I really missed being in a place where the folks and the room are there to connect in a deeper way with the music.”
Stephen Gritz King on sax.
It turned out that Fuller, who has played the piano seriously since his childhood, felt the same way. Born in North Carolina, Fuller moved to New Haven in middle school, then studied band at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School. Since 2019, he’s helmed The Jam at The State House with fellow musician Paul Bryant Hudson.
He also sees music as deeply spiritual: he plays each week at Solid Rock's Perfected Praise and Faith Center Church of God in Christ in Meriden, and makes time to sit down at the keyboard or to listen to music each day. The first time he saw the movie Soul, in which a jazz musician’s soul is separated from its physical body, he remembered thinking “that character is legit me.” So when Liu-Ballard called last September, he was game.
“Music is very very dear to me,” he said in a phone call last Wednesday. I take it very serious. I'm very intentional with whatever I play. It comes not just from the heart, but it comes from God. it's what is being given to me. I carry everybody's feelings within that event.”
“It's literally an out of body experience,” he added. “My body goes to a whole other world, a whole other universe. To me, it's me and my piano in this universe, and I'm just playing my heart out. I have great beings in my band, and they come along, all along with me. We're all in the same universe together.”
On a recent Wednesday, music filled the space. As Rey played, Fuller came in on mellow keys, absorbed in the moment as he started soft, methodical but still loose enough for everything to feel porous at the edges. King slipped in on sax, the sound smooth as it burst forward. He leaned in toward the stage, and for a moment he and the instrument melted into each other, as if they could not exist separately.
He stepped back, and the music spilled over the stage in every direction. It slipped past its lip, and began to creep into every part of the room. On the drums, Sheffield responded with a rolling drumbeat and crashing cymbals. Keys soared. King’s knees bent. His feet lifted off the floor and came back down one by one. Behind him, an image of the milky way stretched out in purples, blues, and greens. Stars twinkled and floated through space.
Calix closed his eyes as he played, and a stillness came over his face, followed by the flicker of a smile. Another flood of notes, and he leaned forward, his chin nearly brushing the neck of the bass. In the darkness of the State House, attendees stretched their bodies with a kind of ease, extending their arms to the rafters. A few rested their heads on pillows they’d brought. A single table with an offering sat untouched at the middle of the dance floor, the light warm and golden from the candle at its center.
They slipped into jammy, smoldering jazz territory, the instruments simmering until it seemed that they had all become threads in a single tapestry. On stage, eyes opened and then closed again. Fuller burst into a smile, and his whole face glowed as he played. Full and round keys, so synthy it seemed like a vibraphone was in the room, slowed into an airy, chiming sound. Calix loosed a groovy, slow riff from the belly of his bass. Chords began to dance over each other.
In the dark, The State House seemed cavernous. Attendees spread out, some sinking into their knees and chests with the beat. Liu-Ballard moved with the music, transported somewhere that wasn’t quite New Haven, but wasn’t not New Haven either.
Then just as quickly, instruments quieted, as if to remind attendees of how still they could be. The high, breathy sound of chimes bubbled up from somewhere on stage, etherial. Keys floated beneath it. Griz sang from a spot across the room, and her vocals mingled with the music. If it was getting late, no one seemed to mind.
Listening for the right moment, Griz approached the stage, listening. She swayed at the hips, nodding to the music. Then, lifting the mic to her mouth, she threw back her head, her mouth a yawning O. Ay-yyy-hyy ayyyyyyyayay! She sang, pulling the mic away from her face so that the sound itself seemed to vibrate. Eyyy ya uh uh ay! Her hand pressed the still air around her, turning it electric. On stage, musicians accepted it as a call, and began to formulate the response.
Keys pounded and swelled. Time seemed fluid, bendable. So too moments later, when Wiggins-Henry approached the mic, and jumped in with the words Don’t you worry/Don’t you cry. Fuller beamed, folding in notes that sounded like “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” We are still here/We are safe here, Wiggins-Henry sang. Outside, State Street was quiet enough to hear the wind. Inside, the music showed no sign of stopping.
In a phone call after the event, Fuller pointed to Full Up as not only a spiritual experience for himself and fellow musicians, but also for listeners. After December’s session, one attendee told him that she had been grieving, and the music helped her work through it. The words stayed with him.
“This is why I do this,” he said. “That's more of a powerful thing for me than me doing it for me. It makes me feel good … I feel like it's a job well done. I'm feeling like, I did my job. I look at myself as like a musical messenger from God.
“People don't understand how powerful music actually is,” he continued. “Like, what is life without music? We listen to music when we take a daily walk. We listen in the shower. Music is an aid. It cures. It not only cures our soul, it cures our body, it cures our mind. Music is legit a spirit. It takes over your soul and your body. We hear music, we sing, we clap. It takes us to a whole different place.”
Liu-Ballard acknowledged that the series—like all shows at the State House—will ultimately have to find a new home. While he declined to share a date publicly, he said that a move out of the space is “imminent,” and that he is thinking about what the next iteration of The State House will be.
The building at 310 State St. is owned by Boston-based Beacon Communities, which owns several hundred apartments in the Ninth Square. In 2021, it received city approval for 76 apartments in that space and the neighboring 300 State St.
“As we have to close this location down, we really want to exit … in a way that allows us to provide for the community in a way that we can,” he said. “We'll continue to create a space for artists and musicians and for performances.”
Learn more about The State House at their website. Listen to the album above. For more vides, check out the Arts Council of Greater New Haven on Facebook.