“Jass” As It Was Written

Written Quincey & GÜD PPL
LowDown
Tulsa
Sept. 21, 2024

The Sanctuary — a dimly lit Chicago nightclub where jazz, blues, and poetry collided — was a pivotal place in the movie Love Jones, where a young poet named Darius Lovehall (Larenz Tate) attempts to woo Nina Mosley (Nia Long), an aspiring photographer. Tulsa has its own version of The Sanctuary at LowDown, where Written Quincey (still young) recently took the stage as a teacher, a poet, and a rapper, in front of a crowd that loves jass. (I’ll explain what that means in a minute.)

“We suddenly navigate images and perceptions of what it means to be great, how you maintain greatness when you age, and how does aging make you feel?”

For this all-acoustic set, Quincey walked to the stage dressed in a black cloak. The hood over his head pointed down to his book as pianist Paul Humphrey played in the background, while Quincey’s poetry breathed life into listeners whose snaps filled the air like Facebook Like buttons. Even when describing the unrealistic, his words become reality. Or maybe we relearn what reality is. He is an educator, and that gift was on full display this night as he told the history behind jazz, originally called ​“jass”: music that originated in Louisiana before it traveled all around the world. 

There are some covenants to abide by when attending a Written Quincey show. First: No thinking; you can only feel and use your heart. Second: Engage. When he looked to the crowd and said ​“awe-ready,” the crowd laughed as they repeated the word back to him; it’s not a term you’ll see in Webster’s Dictionary, but it’s so rooted in your soul that it doesn’t need to be defined. And the third and last covenant: You have to introduce yourself to three people and interact with them. This was a nice icebreaker — it felt like being in your favorite elective class in school, who cares when it ends.

LowDown is a listening room made for hearing the instruments, and Quincey brought out the best. The heart of the band was the drummer Wallace Montgomery III, who at the end of the show proved that, for hip-hop, all you need is a drum and the rest just happens. The star instrumentalist was keyboardist Cordaro Booker; he had multiple solo performances, sometimes playing multiple keyboards during a song. Every band needs that reliable, experienced, multi-instrumental player who can do it all and that’s what bass guitarist Marcus James is. Last but not least was the wildcard, violinist Liza Villarreal, who kept our ears perked, her strings playing against the beat as if she were a second emcee. When she played along with the popular song ​“Nolia Clap,” it was as if the violin were singing the chorus. (Performances like this are the reason instrumentalists should get paid way more.)

“Unchurched ears”: it’s a term that Quincey coined during his performance. He started out with the joke that he’d probably been baptized 27 times, and then clarified that it’s probably closer to seven. But as he read the first lines of ​‘In between the lines of a stanza,’ we all had a different kind of religious experience:

“See the rooftops where the air is fresher, there I’d rather hush the chatter, sip a flute and from a flute, watch you enjoy the serenade. Where notes are played, Ode to Billie Holiday and Bitches Brew and Coltrane, St. Simone, Nina, woodwind, section, brass and Horne’s, Lena. Lady sings the blues from nights spent with Howling Wolf. She looked at me and said, Written Quincey, I want to experience you now…”

We all binge-watched Quincey’s performance, and while there was a brief commercial break, we enjoyed that, too. We marveled at just how many hats he wore: a teacher who taught us about jazz and that it’s okay to be a little unchurched at times, a poet whose soliloquies serenaded our ears, and an emcee whose words were like needles threading through the beat. Which hat does he like the best? No one knows. But what is known is that Written Quincey knows his jass.