Up until about 15 years ago, I maintained a document whose existence I cherished: a near-complete listing of all the concerts I'd attended during my lifetime up to that point. "Near-complete," because I'm pretty sure it started with Spyro Gyra at the Agora Ballroom in Houston (Nov. 16, 1980) and not my actual first concert: the Osmond Brothers at the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo, at the Astrodome, either in February 1975 or more likely March 1977. Also "near-complete" because for some reason I didn't deem it necessary to include the increasing number of classical music performances I was attending until very, very late in the game.
That was a strange and inexplicable omission. I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that my first opera ever was Peter Grimes and the lead was Jon Vickers (Houston Grand Opera, 1983). But not so long ago I had to ask a friend who had been there what singers had portrayed Donna Anna and Donna Elvira in a 1991 HGO Don Giovanni, in which I'd admired Thomas Allen in the title role. After shaking off his disbelief, my friend reminded me that those roles had been sung by, respectively, Karita Mattila and Renée Fleming.
My attention was prioritized a bit differently back then.
I'm thinking about this now because on Sunday night (Dec. 30, 2018, at 9:30pm, euphemistically speaking), I attended the last regular show presented at Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village. Both the restaurant and the performance space downstairs are slated to close permanently on January 2 after 41 years in business, victims of obscene Manhattan real estate prices and a resultantly exorbitant rent. I turned up to pay my respects during the late set by drummer Tom Rainey's trio with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and guitarist Mary Halvorson. And in thinking about that modest yet much loved space and what it's meant to me over the years, I'd love to have at my disposal a complete tally of all the shows I'd attended there previously.
Alas, I lost my Concert Ledger to a hard-drive meltdown, the last known print copy having been recycled only a few weeks before. It's a loss that still gives me pangs. Try as I might, I can't seem to work up sufficient enthusiasm to begin anew at this point, with shows attendant to 12+ years at Time Out New York, seven at The New York Times, two at the Boston Globe, and two in my current phase at National Sawdust under my belt now.
Many of those shows are documented on this blog, or in those publications. Many more are not.
The basement at Cornelia Street Café never was what you'd think of as a first-class venue, to be perfectly frank. The room was long, narrow, and crowded. If you weren't close to the stage, you probably couldn't see so well. For the longest time, as I recall, the only piano was a tatty upright, until composer, pianist, curator, and writer Jed Distler, whose ComposersCollaborative, Inc. presented "Serial Underground" concerts there frequently, donated a baby grand, or at least caused one to be donated.
I always was inclined to think of the venue as (and I know how Frippish this sounds) an available room for honest work. I heard a lot of honest work done at Cornelia Street over the years. It was the site for what I'm reasonably sure was the second or third New York City show I ever saw – Tim Berne, Michael Formanek, and Jeff Hirshfield playing as Loose Cannon – a few years before I moved to New York from Texas. (New York magazine reveals that one such show took place on May 18, 1991, which is exactly the right time frame.) I even recall that because of some unspecified delay that evening, Joey Baron jumped up to open with a few jokes, and possibly a magic trick.
I'm positive that Cornelia Street Café is the first place I ever got to hear Sheila Jordan perform live, in a band billed under bassist Cameron Brown's name. I believe I heard a performance of music by my friend Frank J. Oteri, composer and musical citizen of the world; I'm positive that I heard several concerts in the series Frank used to curate there, 21st Century Schizoid Music—the notion of which was to allow contemporary composers to present their work in "classical" and "non-classical" varieties. I wonder now if that's where I first heard Corey Dargel? Possibly NOW Ensemble, as well?
I remember a tremendous set by trumpeter-composer Rob Blakeslee with the quartet that made his superb 1999 LP, Waterloo Ice House: saxophonist Rich Halley – with whom I'd been in contact since my college days via mail, telephone, and e-mail, but had never met or heard in person – bassist Clyde Reed, and drummer Dave Storrs. The concert, alas, was poorly attended; one cause, we reasoned, might have been that Nels Cline, who didn't yet live in Brooklyn, was playing the Knitting Factory that night.
Surely I must have seen some band or another led by saxophonist Tony Malaby, who, as expert witness and communications guru-for-hire Matt Merewitz just reminded me, worked up a great many of his best-known projects there. Malaby's association with Cornelia Street wasn't the only lengthy one; the show by Rainey's trio was the last in an almost unbroken 10-year run of December 30 shows by that band in that room, though somehow I'd never seen any of the previous ones.
The truth is, I hadn't been to Cornelia Street Café in a very long time when I lined up outside the door – in fact, directly outside the door of 25 Cornelia Street, where I'd actually lived in 1997-98 – to wait in the cold along with everyone else who'd made reservations, and possibly twice as many who hadn't. The cause for my absence had everything to do with the nature and frequency of my work for The New York Times, which redirected very nearly all of my time and attention away from venues where improvisation holds sway, toward concert halls and alternative spaces and agendas more in keeping with a classical-music mindset. (Yes, classical-music events happened at Cornelia Street, too—but because the venue never was especially adept at publicity, often I'd learn about bookings at the last minute, or after they'd happened already.)
It's not that I loved my previous rounds any less; I simply didn't have time for them anymore. (Here's a clear indicator: Right now I'm trying to decide whether I can catch any of this year's Winter JazzFest—an event I have never previously attended.)
Once inside, I sat at a table just close enough to the stage, by chance sharing it with Giovanni Russonello, the excellent current jazz critic for The New York Times, and his very nice friend. I scribbled into a reporter's notebook throughout the set, thinking that I'd write something like an actual review, and took the photos that accompany this post.
The trio played four longish tunes like the organic creature it's had the opportunity to become over the past decade, thanks in part to Cornelia Street Café and other similarly available rooms for honest work. I have always loved watching Tom Rainey play: his beats and accents all akimbo even as his groove cuts deep, his physical core rod-straight, limbs circling a pillar like a wild maypole dance. I can't think of another drummer who could have held a position with Tim Berne's free-improv outfit Paraphrase and Fred Hersch's elegant piano trio simultaneously. (What a time that was.)
Mary Halvorson maintains a cool presence, while wringing from her big guitar and signature pedals punctilious lines and feathery flurries and tape-unspooling slippage and, occasionally, big, fuzzy chord crunch. Ingrid Laubrock listens and listens, and comes up with consistently interesting things to say with her tenor, whether brash or pensive; her soprano is contemplative, airy, and lovely. The trio works so sympathetically that – as in Paul Motian's sublime group with Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell – you never miss the presence of a bassist, because everyone's collaborating to effect a shared gravitational pull.
There also are surprises. After the set, Steve Dalachinsky, a poet and scene fixture who almost certainly was present at any and every great improvisation-oriented show you ever saw, came over where Gio and I were sitting, and enthused mightily about a certain trio passage that Mary had accompanied with a stinging tremelo figure. Steve sounded off at length about how the music seemed to evoke finality and continuity at once.
"That's really lovely," I said, and meant it. "And here I was just going to say that bit reminded me of this old Butthole Surfers song I love." (The song is "Cherub" on the album Psychic… Powerless… Another Man's Sac, an old favorite that I'd pulled out for a spin stream the day before.)
All things considered, though, I'm not sure a review is what's needed. What I'm thinking about now is the role Cornelia Street Café – and the Internet Café, and the Bowery Poetry Club, and alt.coffee, and their ilk – played in the development of countless musicians, and how those rooms are gone now. I'm not really thinking about the landmark joints with genuine personalities, like the original Knitting Factory or Tonic or the Stone or the three incarnations of Issue Project Room that preceded the current one. I'm thinking about the dozens of available rooms for honest work that no longer are available, in Manhattan at least. I'm wondering what possibly could replace them, at this stage.
I'm wondering where that honest work will take place, when the last available room turns off the lights. And I'm thinking about memories I no longer can access, and spaces I no longer can revisit.
And on we go.
