On a recent late-summer night in Central Park, just after the rain stopped and the evening sky moved from wet to dry, there was an undeniable feeling of marking time.
SummerStage is celebrating its 40th season. Verve Records is celebrating its 70th birthday. And onstage, musicians in their twenties were revisiting records made more than sixty years ago for a multi generational crowd that seemed to hear them not as history, but as living music.
Verve was founded in 1956 by the legendary impresario Norman Granz, initially to create what the label describes as a “fair and just” home for Ella Fitzgerald.
Granz had spent years fighting segregation in the music business and insisting that the artists he presented be treated fairly. He believed that presenting jazz also meant standing up for the people who made it.
So Verve began with an idea about what a record company could represent — and with one person determined to make that idea real.
Over the next seven decades, its roster would include some of the most important artists in American music: Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Sarah Vaughan and Nina Simone. And, of course, Stan Getz.
Central Park, guitarist and songwriter Mei Semones — whose own music mixes jazz, bossa nova and indie rock — led a tribute to Getz/Gilberto, the landmark 1964 Verve album by Stan Getz and João Gilberto.
She was joined by fellow emerging Verve artists aron!, Liana Flores and John Roseboro. The music of Getz/Gilberto still resonates loudly today.
Before the performance, Stan Getz's son Nick told the crowd that the album's success also owed something to a person whose name doesn't appear on the cover: his mother, Monica Getz. When the label resisted releasing the music, Monica Getz started quietly getting it into the hands of radio people herself.
Nick told the crowd, “My mother was the person who really went to all the DJs and the pickers... She went behind the label people's backs and did this. One by one — St. Louis, San Francisco, Cleveland — it went to number one.”
It's a small story inside a much larger history. Getz/Gilberto went on to become the first jazz record to win the Grammy for Album of the Year.
And more than sixty years later, Nick Getz stood in Central Park listening to a new generation discover it for themselves.
Getz said, “One of the wonderful things about music is that it doesn't belong to just one generation. It keeps finding new voices.”
And there were plenty of new voices there that night.
Rumsey Playfield was packed elbow to elbow, like any big pop show. But this crowd was ready to applaud a good solo, recognize an old melody, and listen closely to songs recorded decades before many of them were born.
If the first half of the night suggested one way that a musical tradition gets passed down, the second offered another. Christian McBride and Samara Joy are separated by a generation, but both are deeply rooted in the jazz tradition.
Together, they represented two of Verve's great historical strengths: great singers and great swingers.
For four decades, SummerStage has operated on its own simple idea about access: bringing music from around the world into New York City's public parks, much of it for free.
