Brian Slattery Photos
Davis performing Tuesday evening at Stetson Branch Library.
The first phrase of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” flowed from Chris “Big Dog” Davis’s fingertips, instantly familiar. But the chord voicings Davis put underneath it felt thoroughly modern.
As he proceeded through the classic of American music, Ace Livingston on bass and Dexter Pettaway, Sr. on drums fell in behind him. Together the trio made the classic a quick trip through the history of American jazz, from its murky origins to its up-to-the-minute contemporary form.
It was an encapsulation of a show Davis staged Tuesday night at Stetson Branch Library on Dixwell Avenue, titled “Jelly Roll’s Jam.”
Billed as a warm-up for Long Wharf Theatre’s concert reading of Jelly’s Last Jam, to take place Sept. 17 and 18 at the theater’s soon-to-be-departed space at 222 Sargent Dr., Tuesday’s performance at Stetson also served as a statement regarding Long Wharf’s intentions with its new itinerant model to bring theater directly to the community. It was also a chance for the beloved Davis to take an audience through the history of jazz, the way the Grammy-nominated producer hears it.
Diane X Brown.
Stetson Branch Manager Diane X Brown — who is also on the board of Long Wharf Theatre — opened the evening by explaining Long Wharf’s new direction.
“Long Wharf Theatre will be closing its physical doors in December,” she said. The new direction, however, “is going to bring them into the community with programs such as this.” She pointed out that the Davis show was free thanks to support from the Mellon Foundation and the city. Future events might be free or priced lower thanks to similar support. “Be on the lookout,” she said. “Long Wharf Theatre is no longer going to have a physical home. They’re going to be coming to a neighborhood near you to bring events like this. So the enthusiasm we have here today, I hope continues as Long Wharf Theatre continues to grow.”
LWT's Padrón.
Long Wharf Artistic Director Jacob Padrón explained that Long Wharf had planned to bring Jelly’s Last Jam to New Haven since before the pandemic. “We don’t want to give up on this project. We don’t want to give up on telling this story, and we don’t want to give up on bringing the community together to celebrate the music and the legacy of Jelly Roll Morton. So this tonight is a bit of sneak peek into his artistry.” He thanked Davis and his band “for being on this journey with us … We’re going to be leaving our physical space, but it doesn’t mean we’re going to stop telling great stories. We’re going to let the city be our stage, because we’re a theater that belongs to everyone.”
Schloss.
Teaching Artist Clifford Schloss then gave an overview of the life of the wildly talented and complicated Jelly Roll Morton.
As a Creole man born at the end of the 19th century, Morton faced racial injustice all his life, but as Schloss pointed out, he was also a difficult, arrogant person.
“Morton was the first jazz composer and self-proclaimed inventor of jazz,” Schloss said. Morton started playing piano at 14 in New Orleans’s red-light district. Jelly’s claim to invention involved combining elements of ragtime, classical music, and Latin rhythms. He toured the country with minstrel and vaudeville shows, possibly introducing jazz to Chicago and scoring a hit with Benny Goodman in New York, for which he was never paid.
“He wasn’t a modest guy,” Schloss said. “He was really adamant about telling people that he was the person who made jazz, and because of that, a lot of people didn’t like him so much.” He competed with Duke Ellington and his band, and over time, he effectively lost. By the end of the 1930s, he was playing in a Washington bar, where he was stabbed in a fight. He never fully recovered, and died at the age of 50 in a hospital in Los Angeles, broke and bitter.
But Morton’s impact on music — whether one accepts his claim of fully inventing jazz or not — remained huge, in codifying, expanding, and popularizing the style. That was where Chis Davis and his ensemble began. By beginning with Joplin, he delineated the fertile ground that nourished jazz at the beginning.
He also offered, in one song, a quick lesson in the genre’s evolution.
“When I go back through the history of jazz,” he said, he enjoyed playing songs by early composers, but “then I flip them and make them my own. Jazz, you have to improvise on the spot. I want us to grow as the concert grows. We’re going to go into the new jazz of what Jelly Roll brought to us.” By the end of “The Entertainer,” we had already arrived in the present day.
Click here to watch and listen to him perform the song.
Davis then returned to the past. With trumpeter Harold Zinno, Jr. leading the way, the band tore through a rendition of Morton’s own “Kansas City Stomp.”
The band next made ample musical space for the huge voice of Dawn Tallman on the classic ballad “Stormy Weather.” Tallman’s performance garnered the first standing ovation of the evening from the audience.
Davis beamed.
“You think that’s good,” he said, “look at what’s coming up,” he said, egging the crowd on.
Zinno and Maysa performing.
Zinno then returned to the stage with singer Maysa for a take on “Willow, Weep for Me” that turned the slow ballad into a jamming contemporary jazz hit. It showed how solid the bones of that song were, as it could be be played in a very different way without losing any of its emotional effect. Zinno and Maysa took the chance to trade short, improvisational phrases until Maysa took off with a solo, drawing spontaneous applause from the crowd. The trio of keys, bass, and drums then leapt forward into the 1970s with “Maputo,” with Livingston distinguishing him on the bass, taking melody and soloing in a playing style that swung pleasingly between tough and lyrical.
Click here to watch and listen to Maysa perform.
In the second half of the show, after a ripping sprint through “Bye, Bye Blackbird” with Zinno again on trumpet, Tallman returned with the original song “For Me” and an inspirational slow take on “True Colors,” the song popularized by Cyndi Lauper. Tallman and the band slowed the song down even further, creating room for Tallman to truly explore the curves of the song’s melody and pull out exquisite extensions on it.
Tallman explained that she had loved the song when it first came out in the 1980s but “I didn’t really get it until I lived a little.” The experiences she brought to the song made it a deeper, richer experience that clearly affected the audience. When Davis instructed the crowd to “give it up for the queen,” they didn’t have to be told twice.
Maysa took the stage to wrap up the show, first with a groovy take on Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield,” then with an original, “Deep Waters.” The song, about a tumultuous romantic relationship, was a springboard for Maysa into a motorcycle ride through one song another another, crossing lines of genre and era, to the delight of all in the audience. It was, in a sense, the mirror to Davis’s move at the beginning. If Davis had begun with an old song and brought it into the present, Maysa took a new song and pushed it back into the tent — then turned it inside out and brought it back to the present. It was a big nod to the musical ancestors and an acknowledgment of how the music has changed, and stayed the same. Somewhere, the ghost of Jelly Roll Morton was probably sporting a diamond-toothed smile.
For tickets and more information about Jelly’s Last Jam at Long Wharf Theatre on Sept. 17 and 18, visit the theater’s website.