On Saturday, four months and 10 days after his last public performance, Grammy-winning jazz pianist Bill Charlap came out to play.
It was the steamy start of a July heat wave, and while he knew that the club he was headed to in the Delaware Water Gap village in Pennsylvania would not have air conditioning as a precaution against viral transmission, he packed up a dark blue Zegna suit in the back seat of your Nissan Rogue.
“The people he always admired dressed well,” he said. Acting is a time of honor. It is a worthy thing. We dignify each other. “
But in these times, acting will require substantial adaptations, which keep the audience dispersed and distant and possibly alter that alchemical connection between the artist and the listener that creates the best shows.
The 53-year-old Charlap is the son of two professional musicians, theater and film composer Moose Charlap and standards singer Sandy Stewart, and has been playing professionally since he was a student at the High School of the Performing Arts in Manhattan. For more than 20 years, he has led one of the best jazz trios, and has collaborated with people like Diana Krall and Tony Bennett (in their 2018 duet recording “Our Love is Here to Stay”). Like many artists, Charlap had no idea when he played the last notes on March 8 at a jazz festival in Laramie, Wyo., Who was about to endure the indignity of forced and prolonged idleness.
The parenthesis, he said, has been “definitely the longest I can remember.” I am less a central part of my life. “
Not to mention their livelihood. He was still able to teach remotely until the end of the spring semester at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ, where he is director of jazz studies. But weeks of lucrative bookings at top clubs like Birdland, and many concerts, were erased from his schedule. “I had a very solid summer of work,” said Charlap, “traveling around the world and the country, playing at big festivals, my own festival,” he said. (He serves as Artistic Director for the Jazz series in July at 92nd Street Y.) “Of course, all of these things are now postponed or canceled. I have lost a lot financially. It is a great, great loss. But everyone is fighting deeply. “
In late June, the pianist received a job offer from Bob Mancuso, one of the owners of the Deer Head Inn, a mid-19th-century country hotel with sloping ceilings, perched on a hill overlooking Main Street in the Delaware Water Gap. , which is within walking distance of a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. The inn’s first-floor bar and restaurant has featured jazz since 1950, prompting owners to call Deer Head “the longest running jazz club in the United States.” (Other clubs across the country make the same claim.)
On June 19, large parts of Pennsylvania moved into the “green phase” of the reopening, allowing for indoor dining, bar service, and live music. The owners of the inn “began to argue, sometimes to argue, over how we might reopen,” said Denny Carrig, who bought the inn 15 years ago with his sister, Mary, and Mr. Mancuso.
“We decided to wait,” Carrig said. “We needed some money to come in. But if someone thought it was safe enough to come out it was something that concerned us.”
Members developed an opening protocol, which includes mandatory masks while moving around the club, widely separated tables, temperature controls at the entrance, and only natural ventilation, provided by open windows and fans. The changes would reduce capacity by 75 percent, to a maximum of two dozen, but it was a start. Mr. Mancuso started calling musicians. Seven out of the first 10 he reached said no thanks, including Mr. Charlap.
“I don’t think it’s safe,” recalled the pianist saying. “I don’t feel good about it. I don’t want to endanger anyone else. “But he agreed to think more, because he had had a long and special relationship with the improbable jazz enclave.
“I started playing Deer Head in the early ’90s,” said Charlap. “I took a bus from Manhattan to play with Steve Gilmore,” bassist. That first night, Mr. Gilmore’s colleague, jazz jazz saxophonist Phil Woods, traveled downhill from his nearby home and sat down. “I think I was auditioning,” recalled Mr. Charlap. In a few weeks, he joined the Phil Woods Quintet, one of the best jazz groups of his time, and spent 15 years touring the world and making eight albums, helping to consolidate his status at the highest levels of jazz.
“There is nothing like the Deer Head,” added Charlap. “It has been a place for pure music for so long. The feeling that there is a good feeling, warm, honest and a personal connection, which is what I like most about playing anyway. And that is what we have been deprived of at this time. “He reserved the date.
“I guess it is a risk for everyone,” he said. “It may be early, but it’s time for me.”
At exactly 6 p.m. Saturday, Charlap went up to the Deer Head music kiosk and stood, handsome in his suit and tie, at the keyboard of a shiny Yamaha grand piano that Phil Woods left the club in his will. Although he hadn’t been asked to wear it, he straightened the black cloth mask that covered his mouth and nose (and the recent beard of quarantine). He looked at his listeners, the closest one was more than six feet away and said: “There is no substitute for humanity and connection. I wish I could be closer physically. But I will do everything I can to be as close to the music as possible in any other way. ”
Modest and discreet outside the bandstand, on the piano it is fickle and intense. Over the next hour, the pianist moved through a scholarly selection of jazz and American songbook standards, composers ranging from Bix Beiderbecke to Bill Evans, with masterful technique and a stylistic range spanning stride piano, virtuosity. bebop and harmoniously opulent modernism.
Mr. Charlap winked at his audience with “After You Have Gone,” a bittersweet love song from 1918, another time of pandemic. Then he put his glasses back on, the mask and the moisture had clouded them, and went out onto the porch of the inn. He went to an upstairs room to put on a dry shirt and waited only for the next set.
The second set was full again, with more customers sitting outside on the inn’s large wrap-around porch. When the night ended with a melancholic and poignant performance of “We Shall Overcome,” the pianist came out to a standing ovation, went back up the stairs, took off his drenched suit, and headed home to West Orange, NJ. On Sunday, thinking back to the night before, she said, “I remembered exactly what we are missing right now. I left Deer Head feeling how special it is to act. Acting these days becomes a diamond.”
Mr. Charlap’s next scheduled performance is a live stream from Village Vanguard on September 11th. There will be no audience.
