Tuesday, September 11th, 2001 was supposed to be a pretty good night for jazz in New York City.
At the Village Vanguard, pianist Tommy Flanagan was scheduled to begin a six-night engagement with his trio.
Uptown at the Iridium, saxophonist Michael Brecker was opening for the week. At the Blue Note, Charles Lloyd was supposed to begin an engagement. And the following night, downtown at Tonic on Norfolk Street, trumpeter Dave Douglas was scheduled to bring in his nine-piece band, Witness.
Of course, none of that happened. By Tuesday morning, airplanes had been grounded. Broadway went dark, restaurants closed, and the stages went dark too.
For jazz musicians, the cancellations extended far beyond the clubs listed in the newspaper. There were hotel lounges, restaurants, bars, and private parties. The hundreds of little jobs that kept working musicians working. Those gigs disappeared too.
And for musicians who made their living touring, there was nowhere to go anyway. New York had stopped. But it didn’t stay stopped for very long.
Within days, some of the jazz clubs began opening their doors again. At the Iridium, Michael Brecker returned to the bandstand and played to a nearly empty room, donating the proceeds from the engagement to the Red Cross.
And in Greenwich Village, the Village Vanguard reopened with the musician who had been scheduled to play there that week: Tommy Flanagan.
It would turn out to be one of his final engagements at the club. Flanagan died just two months later.
Elsewhere, musicians began playing memorial services and benefits, for families who had lost loved ones and for the people working at Ground Zero. And then, less than two weeks after the attacks, more than a hundred jazz and blues musicians gathered at the Apollo Theater.
They called the concert A Great Night in Harlem. It raised roughly $350,000.
And in the weeks that followed, the Jazz Foundation of America started hearing from musicians who needed help with rent money and groceries. Mostly, they needed gigs.
So the Jazz Foundation created some. With an initial grant of $100,000, they began sending musicians into New York City public schools to perform for children. More than 400 musicians went back to work. What began as an emergency response became a program that continues today.
Slowly, New York came back, though not exactly the same. Some rooms never reopened. Others did.
Smalls, the little basement club on West 10th Street that had been one of the centers of the New York jazz scene in the 1990s, went bankrupt in the economic aftermath of September 11th. But eventually, Smalls came back too, stronger than ever.
And then, nineteen years later, New York stopped again. In March of 2020, Broadway went dark, restaurants closed, tourists disappeared, musicians stopped traveling . And once again, the jazz clubs went silent.
This time the silence lasted much longer. And this time, nobody could even gather for a benefit concert.
So clubs became streaming studios. Musicians played to cameras and empty rooms. Organizations raised emergency money. Smalls streamed performances from its basement.
The Village Vanguard temporarily became something more like a television studio, broadcasting musicians playing to an empty room.
Once again, some clubs survived. Some didn’t.
The Jazz Standard, which had opened its East 27th Street location in 2002, as New York was emerging from the aftermath of September 11th, closed permanently during the pandemic. (Recently, The Pocket was opened by former members of the Jazz Standard Team.)
But the Vanguard survived. And Smalls came back.
And Dave Douglas is still here too.
The night after September 11th, 2001, Douglas was supposed to be playing downtown at Tonic. Two years later, he helped start the Festival of New Trumpet Music.
And next week, twenty-five years after that canceled gig, the festival returns to New York, bringing another generation of trumpet players onto stages around the city.
And this weekend, the red sign will be on over Seventh Avenue South. People will walk down the fifteen steps into the Village Vanguard, where Bill Charlap will be at the piano, David Wong on bass and Bill Stewart on drums.
Two sets. Eight and ten o’clock.
A few blocks away, they’ll be walking down another set of stairs, into Smalls. On Friday afternoon, the first musicians arrive for a jam session at two, with additional shows at 6, 9, and the jam session starting at midnight.
They’ll play until four in the morning.
Twenty-five years ago, for a few days, New York stopped. This weekend, the music goes all night.
