We Can Still Listen

I used to tell James Velvet that he had one of the best catchphrases of any radio host: ​“See you around town.” Because after he said it, you would see him around town.

In the summer, that might mean an Ivory Bills gig at the Cityseed Farmers Market, a show in the bandshell at the Meriden Daffodil Festival, or a performance on the Green for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. Indoors in recent years, his various bands could be found opening for Drivin’ & Cryin’ at Cafe Nine or hosting the grand reopening of Best Video in Hamden.

You might catch him doing the rounds as deposit-box pick-up man for Best Video. He might be walking his dog in Wooster Square, or seeing a show at the Yale Rep, or strolling down Chapel on a Sunday afternoon with his wife Nancy Lee Abbey, visiting the art galleries. You’d see him at peace rallies and in the audience for the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day concerts held by Music Haven and the St. Luke’s Steel Drum Ensemble.

It’s heartbreaking to realize we won’t be seeing James Velvet around town anymore. The eminent New Haven music scenester passed away the weekend before last from complications following open heart surgery. But we still can listen.

A musical celebration of his life will be held Sunday at the Outer Space beginning at 2 p.m., and a special episode has been prepared for the Local Bands program James hosted since 1988 with Rick Allison, Sundays at 10 p.m. on WPLR-FM. Rick has been paying tribute on his The Allison Transmission show at the online Connecticut-based station Cygnus Radio. You can still visit his website right now and, beneath the awareness-raising ​“Cost of U.S. Wars Since 2001” ticker and a quote from me praising James’s ​“class songwriting and excellent people-pleasing skills,” you can access the recent songs of the month he posted and reminisce about what he was up to, around town, lately.

Few local entertainers have left a greater legacy. There are over a dozen albums, hundreds of original songs. There are two and a half decades of Local Band shows. There are the CD reviews James used to write for the New Haven Advocate, among other journalistic pursuits. There are essays and play scripts. James once told me how hard he worked on, and how proud he was of, a sermon he wrote and delivered at his church once. There are the thousands of thank-you notes, emails, postcards, and other scribblings he shared over the years.

Here’s a personal favorite, from last fall:

Hi Chris,
I was glad to run into you yesterday, happy to see you.
I’d love to visit the new homestead sometime, and would be happy to be a driving instructor.
Driving is one of the few things I’ve learned to do really well.
Best Wishes,
James

A Friend To The City

James was a friend. We shared many lunches and dog walks. We lent each other books — poetry, novels, Greil Marcus essays.

I first met him in the late ​‘80s when I had just moved to town and was freelancing for the New Haven Independent (the old weekly print version). My day job was as a receptionist and instructor at Berlitz Language Schools at the corner of Elm and Orange streets (strangely, the exact place where the New Haven Independent office is now). James found me there, dropped off a tape, and we kept in regular touch from then on.

You can socialize with a lot of musicians pretty well by hanging out at their shows, but James worked too hard and was simply too popular. The monthly gigs by the Mocking Birds at Cafe Nine throughout the 1990s were mob scenes, where rugby teams rubbed shoulders with academics and aesthetes while the band played three sets in rapid succession, setting up near one of the booths that used to be in the center of the room.

You didn’t want to interrupt or delay a Velvet show. He was ace at making his performances seem casual. You wouldn’t know he could suffer from stage fright and planned carefully for each gig. Those Mocking Birds shows were marvels of precise programming, starting early with a set of Velvet originals while the audience could still listen in close, and then — as the crowds grew larger and wilder and the night wove on — a slew of bracing and unpredictable cover songs, from Grandmaster Flash’s ​“The Message” to the T. Bone Burnett arrangement of the showtune ​“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” I remember James once asking me for a list of Gilbert & Sullivan songs that might be right for The Mocking Birds.

The Mocking Birds would also proudly cover songs by other local bands, such as The Furors’ ​“A Thing for Blondes.” James was looking for gigs in the same clubs as all the other bands in the area, but he didn’t have a competitive bone in his body. When he was asked to host a coffeehouse series, he used it to showcase the best local songwriters he knew, then published two volumes of lyrics from these writers as if they were poetry chapbooks.

James Velvet made the New Haven music scene better by hosting Local Bands. He also improved it by leading so many wonderful bands himself. After his long-running act The New Haven Radiators cooled down, there was a strong solo album, WhyDoYouMakeMeBlue, then a decade of the centrifugal bar-band force of The Mocking Birds; he gave up the gig when a redesign of the club meant they could no longer play on the floor near the booths. There were some funny rumors that made the situation seem more antagonistic than it was. James told me he simply sensed a time for closure, as the club changed management and renovated. He was talking to Cafe Nine about a Mocking Birds reunion gig shortly before he died.

James liked bird names, so when The Mocking Birds flew the coop he assembled The Ivory Bills, The Lonesome Sparrows, and The Acoustic Sparrows.

His duo act with Johnny Memphis — a former Radiator — was so much a part of the CitySeed Farmers Market ambiance that at one point, when the Wooster Square market felt it could no longer afford to pay its musicians, the neighborhood took up a collection to keep James and Johnny there.

James and Johnny also generously lent their talents to an annual book fair fundraiser I’ve been part of for a decade at the United Community Nursery School. I’d vary the line-up every year, not wanting to ask any act to volunteer their valuable time too often, but James would never let me not ask him. He’d always remember the time of the year it happened, call me, and tell me he’d play. One year, I remember he did it even though he had to catch a train within the hour to see Garrison Keillor perform in New York. (James and Nancy Lee shared a fondness for A Prairie Home Companion.)

James Velvet was playing parks long before he was in bird-named bands, as a member of the New England Commedia troupe that performed riotous masked comedies in city parks. Most of his musician friends didn’t know about it. Likewise, I remember one of his New England Commedia co-stars being shocked when I told him that James Wimsatt the actor had become James Velvet, the well-known singer, songwriter, and bandleader.

He and Nancy Lee were longtime Yale Rep subscribers and he supported small theaters in the area. He once told me how great he felt when he passed a young man on the street. ​“I loved your band Saturday at Cafe Nine,” the young man told him. ​“I loved you in that play at the Rep,” he was able to respond.

He also loved literature and art, and was chuffed to have been specially invited to an exhibit about Alexander Pope at the Yale Center for British Art last year because James’s father, Yale English Professor and internationally renowned literary theorist William Wimsatt, Jr. was quoted in it. His mother also taught at Yale and was a celebrated essayist and literary analyst.

One of the most remarkable things about James Velvet is that he could accomplish so much as an artist, and do much for the arts community, and be such a devoted husband, son, homeowner, and pet owner, while seeming so gentle and unflustered and positive and sweet all the time. His creative streaks were uncommonly calm. His friendships were genuine. He spread love and peace and tranquility, even through his most raucous rock & roll.

I once told James that “Wonderful World,” one of his songs on the 2012 Ivory Bills album Boom Boom Room, would always make me cry, even though it was a shouty R&B rave-up. That’s because of a lyric he wrote about watching Nancy Lee walking across New Haven Green and feeling “a great big hunger,” tempering that with the self-deprecating remark “and she’s still in love with me, I think,” and ending with the verse “as long as she’s in love with me, it’s a wonderful world.”

James Velvet really did create a wonderful world for countless loved ones, friends, and fans. This wasn’t the first heart operation James had, and though he’d been aged and chastened by his health concerns, he continued to perform and work and manage his home life and make a real difference in many lives. He’d felt extreme pain, and it’s a sort of blessing that he won’t have to feel any more. But he leaves us feeling a profound sadness, an immeasurable loss, and a great big hunger.

There will be a public celebration of the life and work of James Velvet 2 p.m. May 3 at the Outer Space, 295 Treadwell St., in Hamden. (203) 288-6400.