Free-range jazz

Tulsa’s Jazz Hall takes it outside for an ever-evolving jam session

With due apologies to novelist Thomas Pynchon, sometimes a musical riff comes yammering across the cityscape.

Last summer, I was on my way to City Hall/One Tech Center downtown. I was off to a late-morning briefing on Tulsa’s then-new community supercomputer. On the way I heard what sounded like improv jazz wafting across the street. 

I wandered over to the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame where a tiny cadre of performers strummed away. While it was hardly the first time I’d stumbled upon stray tunes downtown, it was an unexpected sonic wave, a grand one. I later learned that these midday sounds were spawned by outdoor jam sessions that happened around the old Tulsa Union Depot.

Obsessions
I’ve been obsessing lately over a set of musician biographies. One is on a fellow informally known as Moondog, a street musician/provocateur on steroids about whom I wrote in this column some time back. Moondog’s given name was Louis Thomas Harding. He was a wild musical innovator, instrument-maker, and composer who influenced minimalist contemporary composers such as Philip Glass and Steven Reich. 

The other is Oklahoman Charlie Christian, a ’30s-era jazz artist and an Oklahoma Jazz Hall inductee. Christian was a fabulous guitarist and early champion of swing. He was also an insistent (and at times stubborn) innovator who introduced the jazz world to the electric guitar. He was an early adopter of the bebop and cool-jazz movements, as well. He died in 1942 at the age 25. 

Christian and Moondog, if they were subatomic particles, would be called “stranglets.” We can argue that this duo typifies the wild forces that often drive art and musical advances everywhere. 

Tunes from the “Center of The Universe” 
I recently talked to Tim Shadley, a Tulsa-based jazz pro and the sort-of chair of the Jazzwich Trio, the source of the tunes I’d heard on my walk to City Hall. The group, weather permitting, performs every Thursday and Friday starting at 11:30 a.m.— two days, he said, that “complemented the Wednesday music offering at the Guthrie Green.”

“If people want access to food trucks on Thursday and Friday and some free music, we are here,” Shadley said. He (on piano) and his trio peers, Jordan Hehl (on bass), Nicholas Foster (on drums), and the whole Jazz Hall crew plus a student confab are working to build a mobile food and music ecology around the area that many now call “The Center of The Universe” on the Boston Avenue bridge. It’s a rotating ensemble of players and singers who gather for the show, he said.

The music on tap is not playbook stuff. “We cover all kinds of music. We go beyond the regular jazz idiom. I play in a Latin band in town, and we play tunes from Latin America, from Brazil, from Cuba. We can roll out different representations of Salsa music. We try to offer variations,” Shadley said.

Shadley once suggested that I watch “Pal Joey,” a 1959 film with Frank Sinatra and others, about the lives of some jazz performers during a hopping time in the genre’s history. It might give me a decent feel for what it’s like to be a musician, to be a “side man” on a gig, he said—you go and get your horn and you back up somebody else, but it’s also about the rapport the musicians have with each other and the dynamics that they have across the board. “Who the leaders of the sections are, the different skill levels [in play]  – all these different things mashing together,” he said. 

“Pal” was not necessarily a good representation of the jazz that was happening at the time, in the late ’50s and ’60s, Shadley told me. “The music that you saw in the movie was very mainstream and accessible to a wider audience. The better the jazz musician, the deeper in the hole they wanted to dig into to explore the art. Something just doesn’t always translate well to a movie,” he said. He suggested Clint Eastwood’s “Bird” about Charlie Parker, and the deeply atmospheric “Around Midnight,” on what the legendary Dexter Gordon was doing during this period, instead. 

Jamming
What we have with the Jazzwich Trio and its mother ship, the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, is a rich conflation of improvisation space, performance warren, and players co-op, a nearly-continuous jam session. It allows Green Country jazz musicians and other performers, according to Jazz Hall CEO Jason McIntosh, “to grow and deliver.” With an array of singers who perform at weekly concerts at the Hall and sometimes sit in with the Jazzwich performers, as well as at Depot Jams on Tuesday evenings, the Depot is humming. Talents like Shelby Eicher and Joy Harjo and repeat visitors like renowned film composer David Amram and superstar drummer Washington Rucker round out the offerings.

“In so much of life and in music—as you get older, get out of school, or whatever—your circle, your ability to connect with [a range] of folks can drastically shrink if you allow it,” McIntosh said. “We want to make sure musicians get a chance to practice their craft, to ‘hone-tune it’ (what one of my friends calls it, a portmanteau that suggests both honing skills and fine tuning them), seeing what other people are doing, making new friends, and learning from acquaintances. Our Jam and Jazzwich sessions have all these things.”