Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss

Palo Alto’s Million JRU March Towards a Jazz State: Or, Reap This Roseman Riff

There was this dude sitting a few tables away one relatively quiet late morning at Palo Alto’s Printers Inc café, where I had been a regular for more than a decade, at the time – this was about five years ago. At a certain point I interrupted his reading of the news and somewhat humbly asked him where I knew him from. “I’m Josh Roseman,” he replied. I reintroduced myself and explained how we knew each other; for one, I had booked him, as the first show, into a jazz series in a club in San Jose, a few years before. We overlapped in another significant way I won’t describe here. Generally, as an artist manager and concert promoter I was a functionary in the jazz world or scene in which he was or is  pretty significant player. He plays trombone, leads a band,composes, teaches and has a studio.

Seeing this photo, in Palo Alto, is one miliJRU.

A couple years later I wrote a preview for the concert he performed for the Stanford Jazz Workshop, in November, 2011, almost exactly two years ago. We exchanged emails more than did a phone interview per se, but I also talked to others about his work, and riffed alot about his show, and was pretty stoked, or livelied up, as it were. Some of those riffs were clams — the music word for mis-fired notes, I admit.

I’m thinking of this in the context of having spent a fair amount of time in recent weeks researching a type of history of the Palo Alto jazz scene. I have an ad hoc position as a “junior historian” at the Palo Alto History Association archive – I have a card, it is Steve Staiger’s card with the designation handwritten on the back by he, the chief archivist and historian. Starting with the association’s clip file and then tapping the search-engines, I have been writing a work-in-progress that is part memoir and part research per se, although so far I have done virtually no primary source interviews – I haven’t wanted to bother the people whose stories are the flesh to my bare-bones telling of the events.

I thought of Josh Roseman in terms of two aspects of my story-telling and historiography. One, the role of artists per se in this story. Two, the idea that a timeline can be divided into segments, and how or why to do so, to qualify if you can’t actually quantify –it’s subjective. And so I’m adding this Josh Roseman riff to the whole farrago as a bit of a rhetoric device. I am claiming, or fixing to say, that in the timeline of Palo Alto’s Jazz History, there is a history, which I say, subjectively but not without reason, that starts in 1968 – I therefore define everything before that apropos of jazz as “pre-history”. Likewise but perhaps more controversially – but not being snarky or argumentative or disrespectful – with some method to it – I am claiming that somewhere along the line in recent times we are less jazzy, and now exist in a “post-history” of Palo Alto jazz, along the lines of Latin being a dead language in Italy, or Hebrew once being a dead language before Israelis modernized and revitalized it for their modern state. And here, to claim we are in a jazz twilight or worse, it does challenge, respectively, the roles of appreciation societies like Palo Alto Jazz Alliance, who are having an event next month, or the Stanford Jazz Workshop, who I am certain are already hard at work for an impressive slate of classes, camps and performances next summer. I am claiming that jazz here passed out of our orbit on a particular Tuesday in August, 2011; basically, I am linking my timelines and delineation to the lack of an ongoing venue here.

In terms of my storytelling I am also cataloging elements that comprise the story, independent of the conclusions and implications. The catalog lists artists, venues, professional and amateur administrators and functionaries (like myself!), labels and educational entities, and events and trends. The artists’ list contains local individuals and groups – for example Stanley Jordan, who grew up here and moved on to greater fame, nationally and internationally, a second category, of artists born here (like Fred Ho and Connie Crothers) but who moved away well before achieving recognition for their work in jazz. I also have a list of artists who impacted the scene here but are not generally thought of as from here, for example, chiefly by playing here, or by teaching. For example, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, who all played shows at Stanford, in their prime. And certainly, although it is hard to be encyclopedic about it, I would rate as valuable to the story and not insignificant the performances and work of local and regional acts, and those that also hold down day jobs – jazz is not their primary occupation. Not necessarily every instrument of every section of every one of our mostly excellent high school bands, but yeah, a lot of those people still play and can really shred.

But as I recall my chance meeting with Josh Roseman, who most people would think of as a New York- or Brooklyn-based musician, I do think of him as being in the pantheon of Palo Alto jazz, as being partly-Palo Altan. And when I ran into him I recall getting a kick out of seeing him, being “jazzed” even. Whether he explained this to me that day or I just knew it from the grapevine, there was a time when beyond his touring schedule or teaching a clinic, he would visit here for personal reasons. Ok, his girlfriend lived here. He was in a bi-coastal relationship. (For all I know, he still is; although when I wrote about his show, in 2011, and mentioned running into him I said he had “an ongoing project here”). So I am saying that in the context of assessing what does or doesn’t go on here that makes up “jazz”, a musician merely sitting in a café, reading the newspaper, minding his own business or saying hi to fans (or functionaries) like myself, or not, registers or has value: it jazzed me up, in the case I am describing. I am therefore proposing a way of qualifying that, a value, in the context of this new project of writing about and interpreting the local history of jazz. I am saying that the effect of a jazz fan running into a Josh Roseman, or a Dave Douglas here in Palo Alto, contributes to the jazz culture. Not that Josh that day was humming “Bemsha Swing” under his breath while he sipped his coffee, or that he fixated on the sound of the cup hitting the saucer, or can do more with that that I can (and I bet he could, make music in a sense out of mere clatter – I know Leon Parker could), but that merely being someone who has achieved a level or distinction, an aura, a skillset (think of  Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours towards mastery), it can add something to our local community fabric. I’m also influenced by a comment made by Steven Bernstein (who plays slide-trumpet to and sometimes with Roseman’s trombone) about how any day in which he ran into Don Cherry (1930-1988) was a special day, he told me. So apropos of this larger task of describing 43 or 100 years of jazz history in Palo Alto, the ups and downs, ebbs and flows, I am defining a unit of measure, a Josh Roseman Unit or JRU as the measure that my running into Josh that day in 2008 or 2009 constitutes, one JRU, that is a feeling, on a scale. Like the Richter scale, or Joules of energy, or what-not.

So if running into a musician like Josh Roseman in Palo Alto, for our purposes, is one Josh Roseman Unit (JRU), then his concert, a couple years later, in November, 2011, was 1,000 JRUs (it was in Campbell Recital Hall, for Stanford Lively Arts). Meanwhile, merely listening to a Josh Roseman cd or download is something less than actually meeting a musician, maybe a thousandth of a unit, or a microJRU – as in, a thousand listens to a song, or a thousand people each listening to a song cumulatively, is one JRU.

A larger concert, say, Herbie Hancock at Bing in 2013 let’s set that for reference at 5,000 JRUs – five times more contributing to the jazz culture of Palo Alto as the Josh Roseman concert, five thousand times more significant than my meeting Josh at Printer’s Ink.

I am saying getting towards my point referenced above that if Palo Alto has had a jazzy period and maybe currently does not, but can get back there, that might take a cumulative city-wide or community-wide effort measured or described roughly as a JRU of one million (1,000,000 JRUs) – equivalent to a thousand Josh Roseman at Campbell Recital Hall concerts per year(1,000 x 1,000), or 200 Herbie Hancock concerts at Bing per year or Josh sitting around all day somewhere slightly more central than Printers and greeting a million fans. Obviously if there are 50,000 or so of us Palo Altans, (and numerous other Palo Alto jazz pantheon artists and potential artists) I do not mean to say it comes down to Josh along, just that he inspired this relative value system and unit of measure and gave me this way of thinking about all this.

We can work out later the various JRU values of other utterances, actions and events. (I guess the historic Thelonious Monk concert, at Paly High, produced by 16-year-old Danny Scher, would measure in the tens of thousands (10,000+ JRUs) and would grow in stature over time, somehow. For rough estimate let’s say the Stanford Jazz Workshop puts out about 300,000 to 500,000 JRUs – and I am influenced by something I just read by Ted Gioia about Jim Nadel’s concept of having the entire camp, from beginners to pros, gather to play Bird’s “Now is The Time”. I’m saying that the Workshop and PAJA and various other dinner jazz gigs have resonance and meaning but fall somewhat short, even with the ambient jazz buzz here, of a jazz scene or potential jazz scene, and I am suggesting a way to measure it, thanks to Josh, or thanks to meeting him again that morning at Printers. Like maybe, by my math and way of figuring, in JRUs, Josh Roseman Units, despite the fine work of Stanford Jazz Workshop, Palo Alto Jazz Alliance, our education programs, dinner jazz and the occassional soft ticket event (like at Stanford Shopping Center), the lack of a venue here and other factors have us averaging something short of a Million JRU threshold of having a jazz scene here, and short of what we once had, unless I am being nostalgic, or revisionist. I do admit I am having a hard time telling a story, as a historian, without also having a bias, as an activist and functionary — we could do more to get a venue here.

And I would hope that Josh Roseman would be more amused and flattered to be the inspiration for this way of thinking than upset that I am compromsing his privacy or calling attention to him. Palo Alto needs more Josh Roseman and more Josh Roseman-types, and places to play and not just sip our coffees and kibbitz.

I took a photo with my cell that I will dredge up from my cloud and hopefully helpfully post here.

You can also work your way through the bulk of my arguments on the history of Palo Alto jazz here. I am only happy to amend or as Shakespeare said, spit in the hole and tune again.

(I wrote this in November, 2013 during my stint as a junior historian at Palo Alto History Association archives.  I am meaning to check in with Josh to see if he is cool with how I depicted his Palo-centrism of the time.  Also, it would be great if he could send me a selfie in lieu of clicking thru all my archived photos to find the one from that day: point your cell phone at yourself and shoot photo; then either email back here at earwopa@yahoo.com or text message to 650.305.0701 — THANKS!)