Bebop Babes

It was a late Sunday night in November, when the Southern air is warmer than you think it should be, and I was sitting by myself at a table at The Rusty Nail, drinking a glass of wine and listening to five guys bounce notes back and forth between each other like a nerf ball.

It was Jazz Jam night, a weekly tradition at the Nail, where local musicians (most of them professional musicians, but a few amateur stragglers now and then) come to sit in and play.

“Do you like this stuff?” an older guy in a polo shirt comes over to ask me. He smells like cheap cigars.

“I mean, I think so,” I replied. And that’s the best answer I could give, because the quality of a jazz song is half in the emotion. I was feeling particularly bittersweet right then, because of November. It seemed to work for him. He’s a “jazz person.”

The Rusty Nail has the vibe of a dive bar: low lights, scratched up wood, a healthy dose of neighborhood regulars. The figures behind the instruments on stage become larger than life simply through the power of neon lighting. The backyard is full of various metal and wooden arrangements for sitting, which seems to have been designed with the music in mind. Not everyone will appreciate The Rusty Nail, but those who do, really, really appreciate it.

The same can be said for jazz as a musical genre. Vanessa Lynch (above), a local singer/songwriter, agrees.

Like most of us, Lynch wasn’t born with some innate appreciation of a notoriously unapproachable style. Growing up, she was a self-described child of pop, who listened to mostly radio Top 40 and mainstream rock.

But she was musically inclined – by the end of high school she had taught herself to play both piano and guitar, and had begun writing and performing her own music. It was really a few key teachers at University of North Carolina Wilmington in the music program that opened her up to jazz.

“I had heard Michael Bublé and typical commercial jazz, but I didn’t know who Herbie Hancock was,” she says. “I took the social history of jazz with Joe Chambers, who is a fantastic drummer, and that really explained the social aspect of it, how it was a way for individuals to express themselves, which it still really is to this day. Jazz is about pushing yourself to new limits and expressing yourself through notes, whatever comes out – going with the changes.

“I gravitated to jazz over classical. They taught me how to sing stylistically as a classical musician, because that’s what my teachers were experts in, but I just liked jazz. It was more familiar to me; opera was really foreign. But I could listen to a good groove that the jazz bands were playing, and there were jazz standards I had heard before. Then I started hanging out with all the jazz dudes, and we started our first cover band when I was a freshman.”

So see, jazz is a slippery slope.

It just takes one good drummer, and it’s all over. Soon, like Lynch, you’ll find yourself singing jazz at Christmas concerts or collaborating with well-known jazz trios in town.

Luckily, there are other jazz addicts in town to help you.

(left to right: Beverly J. sings at The Rusty Nail, Bria Skonberg headlines the NC Jazz festival, Benny Hill jams at The Rusty Nail)

For instance, you can contact the Cape Fear Jazz Society for assistance (I think they have a hotline), or you buy tickets now for the thirty-sixth annual North Carolina Jazz Festival, which takes place this month.

For three nights, you can hang out in the Hilton Wilmington Riverside ballroom and listen to some of the most talented musicians from around the globe show off their stuff. The festival also offers a series of Jazz Education master classes for students, giving them an opportunity to talk trombone or bass with professional greats.

Lynch is recording a demo with her band Capricious this year, and she admits, it’s a pop album. “The core of me is a pop artist, but the more and more I listen to jazz, the more I’m becoming that style of an artist. Every time I do it, I wanna do it more,” she says.

And with new venues such as Burnt Mill Creek and The Blind Elephant also embracing the Wilmington jazz world, she’ll have more and more opportunity to do just that.

It turns out, we are “jazz people.”

The Cameron Art Museum and Cape Fear Jazz Society run a concert series September-April, featuring a mix of jazz genres. The Jazz @ The Cam spring series concerts take place 6:30-8 p.m., at the museum, 3201 South 17th Street. Recent performers include Keith Butler Trio and Serena Wiley. Upcoming shows are: Grenoldo Frazier (February 11), David Pankey Trio (March 10), and Mangroove Jazz Quartet (April 7). Tickets are $8 for museum and jazz society
members, $12 for nonmembers, and $5 for students with college ID. Info: cameronartmuseum.org

The thirty-sixth annual North Carolina Jazz Festival returns to Wilmington in February. The event, February 4-6, at the Hilton Wilmington Riverside includes a lineup of concerts, a musical brunch, and workshops. This year’s performers include Bria Skonberg (shown above in middle, contributed photo), Nicki Parrot, Adrian Cunningham, Dion Tucker, and more. Tickets range in price for two- or three-day patron passes and tickets for the individual night concerts. Info: ncjazzfestival.com

To view more of photographer Erik Maasch’s work, go to websta.me/n/emaasch