There are jazz clubs you visit to hear music, and there are jazz clubs you visit because somehow you feel you ought to have been there at least once in your life.
Birdland is most definitely the latter.
It had already been following me around New York. Weather Report’s Birdland was on the playlist I had put together before the trip, and the club’s name had appeared countless times on albums and in the stories of musicians I had listened to for years.
Then suddenly there I was, Brooklyn beer in hand, surrounded by photographs of the people who had helped create the music in the first place.
There was an immediate familiarity about it. For anyone who spends as much time at Ronnie Scott’s as I do, Birdland feels like a New York relative. Different city, different history, but very much the same spirit. Tables gathered around a small stage, subdued lighting, conversations dropping away as the musicians prepare to play and those wonderful photographs on the walls reminding you that plenty of remarkable people have occupied these rooms before you.
And Birdland certainly has history.
The original club opened in December 1949 and took its name from Charlie “Bird” Parker, who headlined there. Parker was followed through its doors by what now reads like an impossibly glamorous roll call of jazz: Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Stan Getz and Lester Young among them. Count Basie made it his New York headquarters and Coltrane’s quartet would later record Live at Birdland.
The original club eventually closed in 1965, before Birdland was reborn and ultimately established in its present home on West 44th Street. The photographs may look backwards, but Birdland has never really become a museum. It remains a working jazz club.
And on this particular evening it was very much alive.
The reason was Gerry Gibbs and his Dream Band.
Calling this a dream band hardly felt like promotional exaggeration. Gibbs was behind the drums, with Cyrus Chestnut at the piano, Buster Williams on bass, Randy Brecker on trumpet and Gary Bartz on saxophone.
Five musicians, but several lifetimes of jazz history between them.
Gibbs opened proceedings with the sort of warmth and slightly anarchic humour that immediately removed any barrier between stage and audience. There was even an attempt to persuade us to give some of the musicians a completely unexpected standing ovation as they appeared.
“We didn’t rehearse this,” he admitted.
Nobody particularly cared.
The music began with Thelonious Monk, which Gibbs described perfectly as music that makes almost anything feel like going to a party. It was an appropriate starting point. The evening might have contained some formidable musicianship, but it never felt remotely academic.
From Monk they moved into John Coltrane territory and Giant Steps, before Gibbs introduced one of the evening’s more intriguing ideas.
As a high-school student he had become fascinated by Bach and noticed a sequence of chords that, every time he heard them, made him start singing Miles Davis’s All Blues. He had apparently been doing it in the shower for around forty years before finally deciding that perhaps he ought to put it on paper.
So he did.
Bach and Miles Davis meeting somewhere in Manhattan might sound like the beginning of a joke, but in the hands of this band it made complete musical sense.
That was really the pleasure of the whole evening. This wasn’t five musicians carefully reproducing jazz history. They were playing with it.
And what musicians they were.
At the piano, Cyrus Chestnut could move from delicacy to muscular swing almost without warning, while Buster Williams provided the sort of bass playing that makes the whole enterprise appear effortless. Gibbs later described Williams as one of a tiny handful of bassists to emerge from the late 1960s and early ’70s who genuinely changed the instrument.
Watching him from a few feet away, it was difficult to argue.
Then there was Randy Brecker. The Brecker Brothers were responsible for one of the defining horn sounds of the 1970s, Randy alongside his late brother Michael and musicians including David Sanborn. That mixture of jazz, funk and fusion helped redraw the boundaries of the music, and Brecker remains a formidable player as well as a composer whose music has travelled far beyond his own bands.
Beside him stood Gary Bartz, another musician whose CV almost reads like a history lesson. His work with Miles Davis alone places him at the centre of one of jazz’s great periods of reinvention, yet here he was in Birdland, not trading on history but still creating music in the moment.
That distinction mattered. Because something rather wonderful was happening in the room.
Gibbs paused during the set and pointed towards two men in the audience.
Lenny White and Mike Clark. White was one of the rhythmic forces behind Return to Forever. Clark helped create the ferocious funk of Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters. Gibbs talked about being a kid in the 1970s listening to musicians like these and trying to comprehend the fact that decades later they were sitting in Birdland watching him play — and that he could now call them friends.
For a few seconds the boundary between jazz history and the present almost disappeared.
Return to Forever. The Headhunters. The Brecker Brothers. Miles Davis.
And five musicians on the Birdland stage whose careers intersected with so much of it.
It also made those photographs on the walls seem slightly different.
Earlier I had looked at them as history: Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Weather Report and countless others staring back across the years. Now some of the people who had actually made that history were sitting around the room or standing a few feet in front of me.
That is one of the great things about jazz. Its history isn’t locked away behind glass.
Sometimes it’s sitting at the next table.
Gibbs understood the significance of the line-up without ever allowing reverence to overwhelm the evening. He talked, joked, told stories and, importantly, made anyone who might have been brought along by a jazz-loving friend feel included. At one point he addressed those hearing this kind of music for the first time and explained exactly who they were looking at.
Three genuine legends, he told them.
He wasn’t overselling it.
For me there was another circle quietly being completed.
Before leaving England I had made a playlist for the journey through New York, Philadelphia and Washington. Weather Report’s Birdland had been one of those songs — another piece of America assembled in my imagination long before I arrived.
Now Birdland wasn’t simply a track anymore.
It was a room.
A stage.
A Brooklyn beer.
Photographs on a wall.
Gerry Gibbs behind the drums, Randy Brecker raising the trumpet, Gary Bartz with the saxophone, Cyrus Chestnut at the piano and Buster Williams making the bass swing.
Lenny White and Mike Clark were sitting somewhere behind us.
And for seventy-five minutes in New York, several decades of jazz history seemed to occupy the same small room.
I’ve often said there is something special about walking into Ronnie Scott’s. Birdland gave me exactly the same feeling.
Different cities. Different histories.
The same spirit.
Glenn Wright
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