“One, two, three, four — ” sang Joy Brown, featured vocalist for Wednesday night at Neighborhood Music School’s 30-year birthday of their Summer Jazz Program. She was doing her mic check.
By the time she got to 15, early birds in the audience were bopping their heads to Brown’s numbers. Brown was already proving herself to be the kind of singer who can make a classroom exercise sound like a jazz standard.
“…sixty-six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight,” she continued. The sound engineer had already walked away from the booth, satisfied, but she was having fun.
“I could go to a hundred,” she sang.
“This concludes our set of the night,” guitarist Rodney Jones joked into the mic.
It was around 6:30 p.m., half an hour until the start of the show and three hours until Brown would actually conclude the night with an iconic, squeezed-to-the-last-drop “In other words, I love you” from Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.”
Local jazz legends joined Brown on Audubon Street in Neighborhood Music School’s backyard “Park of the Arts” event. It was the first concert held in the space in seven years. NMS celebrated 30 years of their Summer Jazz Program with two sets honoring New Haven jazz percussion legend and program director Jesse “Cheese” Hameen II. Hameen, who was born and raised in New Haven before touring internationally in an extensive jazz career, came back to teach with the Summer Jazz Program for 26 of those years and is going strong on his 27th.
Usually behind the drum set, Hameen took the mic to set the scene for the night of jazz to come.
“I used to be the young guy on the block,” said Hameen, reflecting on a time he told his mentors he needed to go home and practice more.
They cursed him out.
“You gon’ stay and stay. You gon’ take this,” he remembers them saying. “By the time we’re through with you, you can go anywhere.”
Just as they predicted, by the time Hameen started touring in 1968, he was “floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, like Muhammad Ali — and hitting hard like Mike Tyson.”
Though Hameen had no famous family to back up his name, what he did have was the city he hailed from. Common knowledge in the jazz world at the time was: “New Haven could groove.”
Greg Mouning, a graphic designer at Yale and traveling actor in the crowd, knew this well. He grew up in the afterglow of the “Golden Age of Jazz” in New Haven, which sprouted in the Dixwell neighborhood and grew into a thriving ecosystem by the 1940s.
Mouning was excited Wednesday evening to hear tunes he liked to dance to, noting the swing tradition in the jazz standards at the core of many a classic New Haven jam. “That’s why this music is close to my heart,” he said. He arrived fresh from the Newport Jazz Festival last weekend, where he shimmied along with those who were “bold enough to get up and dance.”
The first set of the night was made up of instructors from Neighborhood Music School’s Summer Jazz Program, a week-long summer camp intensive connecting students age 12 and up (including adults) with some of the best local talents in jazz. The result is a music tradition so well-nourished the students become world-class teachers themselves.
“How long you been with us?” Hameen asked bass instructor Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere.
“I was born here!” Bell le Pere said, pointing down to the Neighborhood Music School ground.
Hameen watched Bell le Pere and drummer Ryan Abdul-Rahim Sands grow up in the Neighborhood Music School’s programs. Now Bell le Pere is himself an internationally known artist, “a big star in South Africa” as Hameen emphasized to the crowd. Sands is making his way as one of the new hot names in jazz, putting out his debut record Standing on the Edge of Tomorrow in 2022 and gearing up for a sophomore record next year.
Staying with the martial arts metaphors from his own childhood memories, Hameen resonated with a sensei’s proudest moment: when a student makes them feel no longer like a teacher, but a peer.
“I love you from the bottom of my heart,” Hameen said to the band on stage before turning to the crowd and adding, “I’m not even worried about them. The future is good.”
As if in prayer, at any given moment at least two of the six musicians on stage had their eyes closed. Playing or not, they were never not feeling the music. Every little gap was accounted for. The band’s synchronization was a well-oiled machine, inviting the audience to join in the feeling of leaping and knowing they’d be caught.
Will Cleary on alto saxophone let out a single, soulful thread, letting it unfold like a wisp of smoke in the evening air. Sands on drums backed him up with an effortless groove, capping off fast, smooth leadups with a light touch. Bell de Pere kept the structure tight with a gentle, resonant bassline. A dog barked in the distance.
Sands let his solo take him to a different plane, turning his head up to face the sky above. It was a true teachers’ jam, with no one out to compete with each other’s moment. Flourishes here and there reminded the crowd just how they became teachers, but there was nothing to prove. It already was. Players took their time easing into their solos, making the audience go wild mid-song.
The audience clapped, whistled, and hollered, and the band moved into a higher-tempo number, trading off the melody back and forth so each player could push it to the edge in their own ways.
When it came time for Hameen’s band to perform, even the night came on cue. The sun set at intermission, blanketing the “Park of the Arts” in shadow and giving the stage lights a chance to shine for a perfect nighttime jam. The band’s sound blended with crickets chirping their own songs.
“Our life is a rehearsal,” Hameen said. “You’re gonna hear our life.”
People settled into the folds of the music, with Brown joining on the second song to carry the crowd through to the end of the night with a journey of love, heartbreak, and love again. Jones had introduced Brown as “everything that’s good about jazz,” and she delivered. I swear I could almost see her vibrato rippling through the air like heat off a car.
Hameen, shining at the drum set, looked more at home than he had been all night. He showered the crowd with glittering cymbal closeouts and hard solos he pulled from his sleeve without a second thought.
Beyond just playing music, the band was playing around. Whether they were telling jokes and stories between songs or communicating through the music, it felt like a conversation that never stopped.
When Brown asked, “Is it OK if I slow it all the way down?” for Duke Ellington’s “I Got it Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” Hameen responded by slipping right into a light champagne-glass tinkle.
Jones’ nimble guitar notes repeatedly left Brown in a trance, making the normally flawless singer miss her cues as she watched. She laughed about it on stage, praising Jones as he geared up to cue her in again.
Brown’s high notes upturned into near-yodels at the end of her phrases, a complete control that allowed her to get deep into the emotion of the lyrics. As she sang “and that ain’t good” for the last time, she drew the mic away from her face so her voice would blend in with the ambient sounds of the night. Before finishing the note, she brought it back close and low right at the end.
Each time Hameen was about to go in, I saw it on his face first; not a strain, but a sly “throw a few in there, why not.”
Jones, who like Hameen was born in New Haven, calls the legendary drummer his closest friend. He said he could always count on Hameen “to show up with love” — a love strong enough to bring the Golden Age of New Haven to a whole new generation, sending rising legends out into the world knowing they’ll always come back to play.
