The Brooklyn Rail

For nearly twenty years, the artist Fred Tomaselli has made artwork based on the front page of the New York Times. He’ll usually take the main photograph used above the fold as his jumping off point, doctoring it in any number of ways—exploding it with color, turning it psychedelic, making a free-associative counterpoint to the sober news stories filling the page. Most of these were done at the actual size of the folded newspaper, but in more recent years, he started to make versions that were much larger. When I asked him why, he answered, “The news got bigger.”

Lately, it can seem that the news has grown huge, even metastasized, with stories of election denial, climate change, and war, as well as a general assault on reality crowding out our ability to think clearly. Amid the news bloat, there is an irony to the fact that perhaps the biggest, most globally invasive news story of our time—the pandemic—resulted in months of seemingly no news. The usual “What’s happening? / Not much,” exchange never before took on such a strange caste. All the dynamic events of city life—concerts, movies, shows, dinners, etc.—just stopped.

Much of the experience, in particular the attendant illness and huge sense of isolation/desolation, was awful, but there were odd outcroppings of hope. We learned to tune in to smaller things: walks out in nature, the sometimes eerie quiet, when uninterrupted by sirens. One of my favorites was locally produced music. On trips to the park, there was often a band of musicians—their gigging life totally dried up—playing for passersby and buoying spirits. Amid this trend was another, native to Brooklyn, in particular the large homes in Flatbush: porch concerts.

The saxophonist Roy Nathanson was one of the first to try this out. Having grown up in the neighborhood, and inspired by the balcony singers who performed for Italian citizens during the dark early days of the pandemic there, he gathered musicians to play on his porch. Their opening song at the first show in March 2020 was “Amazing Grace.” What followed was a string of eighty-two consecutive porch concerts, each taking place at 5 p.m., drawing neighbors out of their homes and fostering resilience and hope in this uncharted time.

Now this community experiment, which caught on in other neighborhoods as well, has resulted in a very personal recording called 82 Days (enja & yellowbird records). Nathanson has always been a musical adventurer, as well as an antic spirit, from his days playing with the Big Apple Circus to his co-founding of the Jazz Passengers with trombonist Curtis Fowlkes. He roams from spirituals—like the opening “Go Down Moses,” rendered with biblical sweep—to an unusual original, “All the Bones Had Names,” that evokes the harrowing personal losses suffered during the pandemic. Nathanson learned that people wanted to hear familiar songs at the porch concerts after feeling unmoored by the conditions they were facing; he responded with songs like “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” and “Smile,” though they are heavily rearranged here, with powerful fragments of their melodies bringing them back into the realm of the recognizable. A funky take on Monk’s “Green Chimneys,” co-arranged by Isaiah Barr of the Onyx Collective, pulls the project back in the direction of jazz.

One of the great things about the recording and the project as a whole is how it mixes innovation and nostalgia, betraying no fear of either. It’s a reminder that music usually starts as something homemade, before overlays of production or concerns about the need for originality get in the way. It is our lingua franca, and the way it seeps down into us is a crucial part of its power. At a time when we were sequestered in our homes or peering at each other uneasily over masks in public, community gatherings like the porch concerts let us find some kind of unity—not through sing-alongs or dumbed-down versions of classic songs, but through innovative playing that still managed to reach in and strike that common chord of melody.

Earlier this year, I saw Nathanson perform in a very different context, but one that prompted another deep emotional connection. The Jazz Passengers, first formed in 1987, reunited in a crowded space in the Lower East Side, the Ki Smith Gallery. The band brought back musicians from its powerful line-up—including vibraphonist Bill Ware and guitarist Marc Ribot—to play the funny, freewheeling compositions that landed with such force when they first arrived on the scene. The group often favored elaborate narratives, as in their theatrical production The Jazz Passengers in Egypt and Nathanson’s own Fire at Keaton’s Bar & Grill (Six Degrees), and they brought guest stars like Debbie Harry and Elvis Costello as contributors to these projects. The result was music rooted in the jazz tradition but with a brilliant contemporary spirit.

Sadly, the occasion for the reunion was the declining health of Fowlkes, and the show provided him with a final occasion to play with the band—he passed away in August. The band retained the effervescence of their playing, with Fowlkes the perfect low-key yin to Nathanson’s exuberant yang. It was easy to slip back into memories of their earliest performances at spaces like the old Knitting Factory on Houston Street.

Seeing the band after so many years got me thinking about the passage of time, and the difficulty of reckoning with it. Forget about decades, which once seemed tidy and recognizable (the swinging sixties, the sprawling seventies). Even years can lose their meaning as a useful frame of reference. In the end, it seems, what we have are the days. Music is invaluable for grounding us in the present, with the miraculous ability also to transport us to the past. Now, as the world turns and burns, and the future gets a bit murky, it seems especially important to have music in our lives: to bind us to our days and give them a fleeting but certain meaning.

Roy Nathanson will play selections from his recent recording as part of the 2024 NYC Winter Jazzfest on January 13. That’s a day, and a date, worth noting.