From my unpublished memoir, Groovin' at Slugs'
(copyright 2017 Peter Occhiogrosso)
Listening to jazz at Studio Rivbea, located on a nondescript block of Bond Street east of Broadway, sometimes evokes the feeling you get from the window of an airliner descending through a cloudbank while coming in for a landing, not knowing for sure what you’ll encounter as you emerge: rain, mist, more clouds, a s
unbolt? Tonight a group led by the wiry alto saxophonist Byard Lancaster unspools a version of “Over the Rainbow” that’s mesmerizing in its sweetness, all high-register yearning and backed up by the whispery drums of Sunny Murray, while the young tenor pheenom David Murray (no relation) pumps out low-key harmonies. The accompanying texture sets off Lancaster’s alto like a subtle base of perfectly sautéed greens on which a small, elegant squab glistens under a brown reduction sauce. And so, another extraordinary performance drifts through the early morning hours and would be lost in the moment, part of the endless ephemera of the jazz world—except this one is being recorded (by Alan Douglas) and will survive for posterity. At this moment in the 1976, Studio Rivbea is the hottest jazz spot in the under-populated land just north of Houston Street and east of Broadway. In summer, Rivbea is the scene of many dark, sweaty nights, impervious to air conditioning. Yet you can arrive after midnight and ignore the dense air while listening to sounds that you have never heard before. Once there, despite the heat, you usually don't want to leave. Still, it takes some getting used to. I was already accustomed to hearing jazz in raw performance spaces like Ornette Coleman’s Artists House, or The Kitchen, with its bare floors, wooden folding chairs loosely arranged—no bar, no food, just music. Those loft spaces remind me a little of that scene in "The Hustler" when Fast Eddie (Paul Newman) arrives at the legendary pool hall called Ames and asks where the bar is, and the cashier says, “No bar, no pinball machines, no bowling alleys, just pool. Nothing else. This is Ames, mister.” Places like this are a far cry from the urbane Village Vanguard or the touristy Village Gate on Bleecker Street. But Rivbea is something else again. Located in a converted industrial building, it still feels like somebody’s home, which it is, right down to the overstuffed, slightly ragged sofas and the refrigerator off to one side. The upstairs is one long room with high ceilings, a few islands of furniture poking up, dark as an o***m den. But I like the anonymity, because I can disappear into a corner waiting for the band to hit. I watch as musicians occasionally grab a cold beer from the fridge, but no matter how thirsty I get, I’m loath to ask for one myself. It’s easier to step outside, have a smoke in the emptiness of Bond Street, and stroll back in without calling attention to myself. The downstairs is smaller and more intimate, but also warmer. When they do get the AC working, it’s largely ineffectual, and loud enough that it often has to be shut off. The loft’s owner, Sam Rivers, is a tall, angular man who hails from Oklahoma, where his dad sang gospel with the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and his mother was a piano accompanist. Sam cut his teeth playing with blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon in the Navy, developed a hard bop style that played off the innovations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and later hung with the avant-garde maestros Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor, so he could play it all. Then around 1970, Sam moved from Harlem to this warehouse building on Bond Street and invited some of the era's most innovative musicians and their fans into his home for performances, inspiring others to do the same. Sam was a few years older than most of the musicians in that crowd, and he may have seemed like a kind of father figure to some of them, especially those who had flocked to New York from all over the country. No sign outside announced that this was Studio Rivbea, not even a number on the door. Like an old speakeasy, you just had to know it was there. The underground theater where the music happens tonight is just a long room with folding chairs and an improvised curtain between the stairs and the seating. The ceiling isn’t as high as upstairs and has some fabric padding to soften the sound or maybe in a quixotic attempt to soundproof the room so the kids can sleep upstairs while the music rages on. Behind the stage is a hand-lettered sign that’s the only indication of where you are. What I love about this place, and the others like it, is hearing musicians I not only haven’t heard before, but haven’t heard of at all. Until I started writing about them in the early ‘70s, most of them had gotten no coverage at all from the popular press and virtually none from the jazz press, such as it was; few of them have recorded, as leaders or even as sidemen. For several years now players with distinctive sounds have been migrating from Chicago, St. Louis, Southern California, joining those already established in New York in an unprecedented flowering of creativity amid diversity. It’s a gold rush in reverse, hordes of musicians bringing precious metal to their new home instead of storming in to remove it. Like the prospectors, though, they have little money and few material resources, and often no assurance of paying gigs. But come they do, fueled by creative fire and a passionate love of the music. They resemble mystics gravitating to the holy mountain of Arunachala in South India to meet the cryptic sage Ramana Maharshi. And like those wandering sadhus and pilgrims, they have developed networks of fellow seekers, collectives devoted to finding the sacred source, the fount of all Music. I spend so many nights in this underground shrine, feverishly taking notes in the dark, that I’m sometimes afraid the musicians and their sounds will start blurring into each other. Moments come and go, from flashes of illumination to sustained rushes of blistering sound, with no way to describe it all except in relation to other sounds. One newcomer named Henry Threadgill, for instance, is playing a homemade instrument composed of automobile hubcaps, each one depending from a string attached to a large armature. It sounds vaguely like a xylophone, only chunkier, more metallic and earthy. Later he tells me that it’s called a “hubophone,” but it’s only one tool in his kit as he also plays alto saxophone and flute. On another night I hear a guitarist unleashing fantastic licks of sound that seem plucked from another plane—startling, unlike anything in the standard repertoire of most electric guitarists, jazz or rock. His name is James “Blood” Ulmer and he plays a cat-scratch style somewhere between the free sound-blasts of Sonny Sharrock—another “out there” guitarist—and the kind of stuff that punks in bands like X or The Contortions began playing a few years later. They are all related sonically, but seem to exist in parallel universes. I barely know what to make of Ulmer’s sound, but I know it’s different. In just a few years, he would go on to become one of the more successful musicians on the scene, recording for major labels. One writer later described his work as "conjuring images of Skip James and Albert Ayler jamming on the Mississippi Delta." But right now, never having heard him or even his name before, I try to figure out what he’s doing—and why. I don’t even know if I like it, but its tart strangeness makes me glad I’m hearing it, like discovering a dish with a flavor of bitter herbs at a roadside shack in some remote mountain village, something that you’re not sure you’d eat again but whose memory clings to you long after you’ve consumed it.
