Knowledgeable clapping, ecstatic sounds of the highest approval. 80 people in the boil. The small jazz club 55 on Christopher Street in the West Village is buzzing. The music bar, founded in 1919 as Speak Easy and continued during Prohibition, offers live jazz every evening. From solo to trio to big band, owner Scott Ellard brings together national greats like guitarist Mike Stern and international ones like Israeli drummer Dan Pugach.
For $ 20 entry and two drinks minimum. Seven days long. As if there had never been a pandemic. There is no longer any mask requirement at the bar or at the small tables. The staff and most of the people who stop here, residents and newcomers, have been vaccinated anyway.
The small 55 large jazz clubs have long since overtaken the rank. The internationally much better known Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue South, also in the West Village, has not yet returned to live gigs, but offers acoustic guitarist Bill Frisell on Zoom.
Right next door on Christopher Street, in the legendary Stonewall Inn, where the gay and lesbian revolt began in 1969, it is jam-packed on weekends. Christopher Street Day was a small event for the LGBTQ community this summer compared to the gigantic parades of the pre-Corona years. But at least it took place around the street that gave it its name. A small park dedicated to the veterans of the uprising was built diagonally across the street five years ago.
Latinas are now sitting between plaster figures and rainbow flags at lunch and some of the growing army of homeless people are resting on benches. Otherwise, many of the more than 50,000 people camp without a roof in and in front of the underground stations, as they did 40 years ago at the height of the homeless crisis. The subways rattle, thoroughly cleaned and disinfected, as clean and clinically pure as ever through the city.
Stoned youngsters and amazed tourists
The Stonewall Inn is more or less a tourist shack with programs such as the “Drag Extravaganza”, which is particularly pleasing to those arriving from the Midwest and to Latin Americans who have come mainly to take advantage of the free Covid19 vaccinations. And the tourists are coming. From Mexico and Colombia and from the motherland USA, as long as an entry ban is imposed over Europe.
They push their way through the streets in amazement. When the youth of the city show themselves stoned late at night until the recently imposed curfew and drunk in Washington Square Park on roller skates or at spontaneous jam sessions, they look away irritated.
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The restaurants in the catchment area of the tourist streams are well filled again, especially the canopies on the street that were built during Corona. These huts have already been captured and made more beautiful everywhere, since it has been clear that they can be left standing for at least a year. After all, the restaurant community of Italians, Indians, Koreans, Japanese, and Spaniards did not want to have persevered in vain when the number of seats outside was limited to 25 percent and nothing was inside. The prices have now gone up, around 30 percent. Sales life is also returning to the shops.
Fewer and fewer “shop for rent” signs are pounding the boulevards. The writer Paul Auster believes that where good business was done in the past, good business will return there. He doesn’t care about that. His colleague Sigrid Nunez also welcomes the return to normality in big city life. Just like taking the subway home at night from one of the many cultural events that have woken up again, that would not occur to her.
The big problem with gun violence
Because there’s this 150 percent increase in gun violence. That’s what everyone in New York City is worried about right now. Every day, more people die in armed attacks than from Corona. Pretty is gun violence proclaimed the new number one health risk. The Democratic Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, has declared a “state of emergency” and passed tough laws to curb armed violence.
Additional preventive measures in particularly affected, mostly poor Afro-American neighborhoods are intended to help prevent young people from sliding into crime. The Democratic mayoral candidate Eric Adams is also campaigning for this. The black ex-cop should win the elections in November. Curtis Sliwa, who founded the city patrol organization “Guardian Angels” since the 80s as “Mr. Clean ”applies to the Republicans. He is hardly given any chances.
In a first pilot in Central Brooklyn, more than 500 new jobs are now to be created with federal support. First of all, immediately in the summer camps. Mainly pastors, social workers and psychologists have come together to intervene on the spot. This rapid reaction force from the environment of the black churches is called “God Squad”.
Violent crime in underserved communities has always existed. But now, after the corona crisis has largely been overcome, it is spilling over into the subways and Broadway. Several drive-by shoots have taken place in Times Square, where the heart of the showbiz metropolis beats and tourists will soon be strolling again and stopping by. At the latest when the big Broadway shows like “Hamilton”, the longest running musical “Cabaret” or the world premiere of the play “Thoughts of a Colored Man”, one of seven new productions by black playwrights, start in mid-September.
It can then no longer be “unsafe” there, everyone agrees who is in charge and wants to bring tourists back with multi-million dollar “I love NY” campaigns. You have to bet that investors and business people who fled Corona to Florida or the Hamptons and right to Hawaii will return. A total of 300,000, mostly well-heeled New Yorkers left the city at the height of the pandemic, when up to 800 people died every day.
Jazz comes alive
Smaller theaters on Off-Off-Broadway have long since returned to a certain normality. In Manhattan’s East Village, the institutions La Mama, the Public Theater with Shakespeare plays in the park and the Theater for the New City provide long-missed live experiences. The latter will return to the streets, playgrounds and parks for free with its summer tour from the end of July. “Critical Care, or Rehearsals for a Nurse” is the name of the hit slapstick musical production by TNC founder Christel Field about Covid19, nursing homes, health insurance and Trump.
She has been doing political intervention theater since 1968, sometimes with the highest accolades, including 43 Obie Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, then again gnawing the hunger cloth. They couldn’t seriously throw the pandemic off track for a year and a half. Her new piece aims to reassure everyone that the pandemic is ending and that mutual survival is in sight.
The big museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney have also reopened their doors. They prove to be safe places to stay and for further training. Tens of thousands have long been jostling again at the weekend thanks to the astonishing world culture shows at the MET. All with a mask.
And jazz is not only coming back to life in the West Village. The Jazzmobile organization has been bringing top-class jazz free of charge to Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park, Grant’s Tomb on Riverside Drive and other stages since 1964. At the tribute to the 100th birthday of the Jazzmobile founder Billy Taylor, the “Restart” stage shook in Damrosch Park at the Lincoln Center. Taylor’s former trio musician, drummer Winard Harper and bassist Chip Jackson teamed up with pianist Cyrus Chestnut, trumpeter Jon Faddis, saxophonist Antonio Hart and pianist Aaron Diehl to form a true all star ensemble. And that for free. This is how it can and will continue this hot summer, of that Jazzmobile organizer Robin Bell-Stevens is quite sure. Until autumn she had long since planned top-class jazz outdoors and for free.
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