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Saxophonist Javon Jackson and bassist Danton Boller at Louis Armstrong Center’s Jazz Room on March 1.
(Photo: Jazz Is Here Productions)Tonight, April 8, tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson will bring to the Village Vanguard a tribute to his late performing partner, poet Nikki Giovanni. For the Vanguard, it will recall a bygone era when the club, and many other spots throughout Greenwich Village, regularly served as venues where poets and jazz musicians mixed.
These days, such mingling is often outsourced to the outer boroughs, in places like the Louis Armstrong Center’s Jazz Room, in Queens. A modest performance space carved out of the two-year-old Louis Armstrong House Museum, it is where the Jackson-Giovanni performing partnership had its New York debut — and its farewell.
When the stars align, the Jazz Room can conjure a classic Village vibe. That owes in no small measure to the intimate feel, the brilliant acoustics and, most particularly, the odd angles its architect bestowed on it — angles reminiscent of those for which basement clubs like the Vanguard are known.
Giovanni and Jackson were working all the angles when, last Nov. 9, they hit the Jazz Room stage together. Giovanni, sporting a T-shirt with “I write banned books” on the front and a smile that radiated despite her being seriously ill, read her poems with energy and humor. And Jackson’s quartet was with her every step of the way, laying a soft sonic bed beneath the words she would utter for the last time in a public performance. Exactly one month later, she died, at age 81.
But Jackson — and the Jazz Room programmers — were determined to keep her spirit alive. So on March 1, he returned to the room with a moving tribute to Giovanni in both song and spoken word — the saxophonist gamely reciting one of her poems — and he did just that.
In keeping Giovanni’s spirit alive, Jackson allowed himself to draw, if sparingly, on tunes not directly associated with her but that she, as a fan and friend of jazz dating to her time amid the cross-disciplinary Village swirl in the 1960s, might appreciate. He opened with one such tune: Cedar Walton’s “Firm Roots.”
Accompanied by Jeremy Manasia on piano, Danton Boller on bass and Willie Jones III on drums, Jackson — tall and lean, with a no-nonsense air about him — emerged from the green room and, without a word, kick-started the set with a soaring yet solidly grounded rendition. Jackson, having played the piece countless times since he was a member of Walton’s group, flew through the changes with the greatest of ease, rarely stepping out of lane. His bandmates followed suit, collectively acclimating themselves to the elevated altitude at which they were operating.
By the second tune, Jackson’s “Theme For Nikki,” they had settled in. A loping minor blues, the tune appears on Javon & Nikki Go To The Movies, a collection of originals and themes from films that were near and dear to Giovanni. The album was nominated for an NAACP Image Award this year. And while the nominations came nearly a month after she died and did not yield a win, Jackson’s “Theme,” a kind of tribute within the larger Jazz Room tribute, inspired some notable blowing.
With Jackson towering over him as if to manage the narrative, Manasia traversed the keyboard with a remarkable combination of expressivity and self-possession, at one point laying down a sweeping series of block chords that, for all their extravagant density, never lost the melodic thread. Jones, a timekeeper given to radical subtlety, never buried the pulse. But it was Boller, the band member least familiar with the Jackson songbook, who seemed to drive the plot. Seizing the moment, he worked the fingerboard with a display as dexterous as it was musical — earning from the bandleader a rare moment of confirmation.
“Yeah,” he said, in barely audible tones.
That brief effusion doubled as a kind of prelude to a self-deprecating comment Jackson delivered as he prepared the audience for the set’s most direct invocation of Giovanni’s voice: his reading of her “A Very Simple Wish.”
“Brace yourselves,” Jackson said, permitting a small smile to cross his face.
Before launching into his reading, he worked through multiple choruses of what would be the poem’s backing tune, “Wade In The Water.” The tune was plucked from the first album Jackson and Giovanni released, The Gospel According To Nikki Giovanni, a selection of spirituals and hymns. Feeling, perhaps, the swell of religious belief he and Giovanni shared, Jackson rendered the piece with an unmistakable urgency.
With each chorus, he seemed to grow more immersed in the spiritual’s story — one, at its most literal, of enslaved persons’ escaping search dogs by following the dictate of the title — and, by the time he was spent, he was more than knee-deep in it. He seemed, in fact, almost relieved to yield the solo floor to Manasia, who, in turn, coolly built out from spare lines to cascading flourishes to flagrantly percussive block chords before taking it way down and laying the foundation for Jackson’s reading.
“I want to write an image like a log-cabin quilt pattern,” he read, “and stretch it across all the lonely people who just don’t fit in.” He continued reading, falling into Giovanni’s cadences naturally before ending the poem with an upbeat intonation that was not indicated in her text, which lacks punctuation. “I have a mind to build a new world. Want to play?”
The reading was hardly worthy of an Oscar. But it was clearly heartfelt. And, in conjunction with the masterful music, it made the point: Jazz and poetry can elevate each other, enhancing the overall power of the artistic experience. That helped push Jackson in the first place to collaborate with Giovanni on the albums after inviting her in 2020 for a Q&A at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School, where he is director of the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz. That is what ultimately brought him to the Jazz Room for his two performances.
And that is what will bring him to the Vanguard on April 8. In an irony that should not be lost, the Jazz Room — the new kid on the block — will, through its Jackson-Giovanni initiative, be showing that vaunted Village venue a way back to its past.
And the future? The Armstrong Center will always be there. DB
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