Flattened everything that stands

Composer Julia Werntz offers a frank and depressing look at Boston's frankly depressing jazz scene.

Twenty years ago, the Boston area was still a stopping point with a number of venue options for musicians on tour. Here is a sample of what my husband, jazz pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, and I collectively remember hearing in the mid-to-late 1980s: Abbey Lincoln, Lester Bowie, David Murray, and Don Cherry with Ed Blackwell at Charlie's Tap in Central Square, Cambridge; Cecil Taylor, Randy Weston, Steve Lacy, and Sun Ra at the Nightstage on the opposite end of Central Square; Mal Waldron, and Geri Allen with Joseph Jarman and Reggie Workman at the Willow Jazz Club in Ball Square, Somerville; Archie Shepp, Jacki Byard, and Henry Threadgill with Andrew Cyrille and Fred Hopkins at the 1369 Jazz Club in Inman Square, Cambridge. (Notice that none of these places, oddly, were actually in Boston itself.) These same venues, of course, were also the places one regularly heard local talent—older and "emerging"—such as the Fringe, the Joe Maneri Quartet, Jimmy Giuffre, Ran Blake, Joe Morris, and too many others to mention.

It's stunning to think about what we've lost. All of the above venues are gone today (at least one was a drug front, another was evicted...), and no other jazz clubs have opened to replace them. Today musicians and their audiences here struggle desperately to find places to meet.

Julia goes on to talk to Boston's Charlie Kohlhase, Chicago's Ken Vandenmark, and NY's Matthew Shipp about the playing opportunities (or lack thereof) in The Hub.