Skylar Floe Quartet
Fiction Bar
Williamsburg, NYC
Jan. 6, 2024
Dim lights and original, vintage trim along the walls. The warmth of wood. Mirrors to make it all seem big. On the bandstand a quartet of trumpet, keyboard, upright bass, and drums powered through cuts from the standard repertoire, exploring these well-trod tunes with ears tuned to today.
As th Skylar Floe Quartet went to work, Miles Davis’s “Solar” became a vehicle for blistering breaks and deep ruminations. “Beatrice: by Sam Rivers was augmented with trap and pap adjacent straight-eights, what once was tender is rendered jagged and groovy. The jam-all-night classic “Caravan” by Duke Ellington was brought to burble with a restless, syncopated thump by funk-fingered bass.
The boys in the band cooked it up right. The night is swing and laughs and drinks. Couldn’t ask for much more from an evening spent at a jazz club.
There’s a sepia-toned, smoke-choked, and muddy-guttered era in our cultural memory where New York City was nothing but poetry reading and jazz clubs. The rise of the beat poets, the reign of Charlie Parker and the blazing fire of be-bop — this is the New York that, within a certain set, everyone is nostalgic for. Even Basquiat, who lived in what many of this same set would describe as the next big cultural “moment” in the city (the post-Warhol’s Factory, firmly CBGB’d return of grime to the arts and art to the streets), couldn’t escape fond, wistful feelings for what was, at the time, his father’s New York.
And those of us who would claim to yearn for the days of Basquiat, no-wave, and all that was good before grunge, would be hard pressed to say that our melancholy here isn’t sourced in the same feelings of having missed out on something big. The present never feels like history.
Good news, reader: I can attest from experience and provable knowledge that New York City is once again hot with jazz and tittering with poetry. What’s gone around has come around!
But is it of Ginsberg’s variety — angelheaded, heavenly connected, impoverished, high-into-the-night, and endlessly contemplative? Or is something else happening here? Is the repetition pastiche or parody?
With this in mind, my partner and I went to Fiction Bar, a new jazz club in Williamsburg. Yes, dear reader, you read that correct — a new jazz club.
My partner, more familiar with yard birds than Charlie Parker, is one of the denizens of this city with few attachments to the jazzy mythos that places like Fiction and Ornithology, another relatively new jazz club in Bushwick, risk trafficking in.
“These boys just seem like they’re having a good time.”
Which is about as deep a read that’s needed for something like this. The music was serious, the hang was heavy, but the whole night, in its bones, was fundamentally fun. It was better than sitting bellied up to a bar and shouting over classic rock tunes or EDM track.
Something about the live music, neither a show nor background dinner jam, brings environments like this together. A pulsing energy involved everybody — conversations could still be had, one needed not patiently watch and wait to talk during the set break, but the music added to the buzz and the buzz fed the music.
Evan Main’s keys jabbed and joked between meditative moments. Skylar Floe’s trumpet bounced between bark and croon. It was a type of night out we often forget is available, even myself as an avid fan of this music.
The clubs in Manhattan are expensive. The institutionalization of this music by way of organizations like Lincoln Center and Universities makes this sort of evening seem less about leisure and more about the seriousness of preservation — often feels like a museum hazed up with cocktails.
Whatever my reservations regarding the potential of parody, pastiche, or inauthentic cultural enterprises, Fiction Bar and the fellas on the bandstand have proven, and hopefully will continue to prove, that this need not be an exercise in nostalgia, we need not play a part we learned from the movies. Music is music. A vibe is a vibe. A good time is a good time.
