Tasting tradition

The other night I found myself in of my favorite places: Dave Allee’s Jazz Kitchen. When I was a teenager, if you’d asked me to describe the ideal nightclub, there’s a good chance I would have come up with a fair approximation of what Dave has going at the corner of 54th and College. The room has warm light and great shadows — people look good there. The food is delicious. The cocktails are sincere. And the jazz … the jazz is great.

On the night in question, Dave’s dad, the pianist and jazz composer Steve Allee, was celebrating the release of a new album with rhythm masters Frank Smith and Kenny Phelps on bass and drums, and saxophonist Rob Dixon. They swung through a set of new tunes with joyful intensity, confirming the home truth that jazz is best experienced live.

Tradition is a word that gets tossed around a lot when it comes to jazz, especially in Indianapolis. It’s meant to signify the fact that the family tree of this most American of arts has a special branch with our city’s name on it. Jazz history has been made here and exported to the larger world by such names as Hampton, Johnson, Montgomery and Hubbard. Scholars can write books about it.

But it takes more than history to make a tradition. That’s because tradition is a living thing that needs to keep its body limber. Otherwise, it gets stiff and calcified and, before you know it, the only place you’re liable to find it is under glass in a museum.

Tradition is not past tense. It is all about the present, but with that something extra that comes of knowing that what’s happening now is informed and inspired by stories, lives and works that came before. To be in the presence of a living tradition is not to be made to think about the past, necessarily, so much as to be able to taste it. The flavor is rich.

That’s what I get at the Jazz Kitchen. It’s what Messrs. Allee, Smith, Phelps and Dixon were providing on the bandstand. It reminded me that, at a time when there’s no end of speculation about what might happen to the music business, the art of making music is as vital as ever, buttressed by a great heritage that’s being reinvented wherever committed musicians gather.

This is not to say that all’s well for the arts economy. As the critic Walter Benjamin so famously put it, the big story for the arts in the 20th century had to do with their “mechanical reproduction.” The invention, that is, of ways of turning one-of-a-kind experiences into mass-produced items. Once, if you wanted to hear music, you either had to make it yourself or go someplace where other people were performing. Recordings changed that. They made it possible for us to listen to what we wanted, when we wanted, without leaving the house. The same thing was true of reproductions of famous paintings, the broadcast of performing arts on TV and, more recently, the video recording and distribution of movies.

Mechanical reproduction gave birth to a business model based on the sale of these items and made a lot of money for a lot of people. It still works to some degree. But the Internet has made it clear that the 20th century business model is all but finished. What takes its place is hard to say. In a world where anyone can record an album and everyone can download it for free — well, let’s just say mechanical reproduction ain’t what it used to be.

Which brings me back to the Jazz Kitchen, to four seasoned players communicating with one another on the fly, making something in the moment that wasn’t there a moment before. A rich tradition brought to life. The trouble, though, is that the 20th century wasn’t that long ago. For many of us, myself included, the analog habits of the couch, the CD player and the television set — the trinity of home entertainment — remain potent.

But they are also becoming less persuasive. As album sales dwindle, musicians of all sorts are increasingly rediscovering the importance of what can’t be duplicated, building careers on the foundation of live performance. What goes around, comes around. And, for my money, one of the best places to catch it is at the corner of 54th and College.