Though a fairly recent arrival in this city I find myself strangely defensive of it. When I first moved to New York, a vast exodus of my friends started to move the other way. Something I tried not to take personally. They were headed to the usual havens: Austin, Nashville and of course Florida. How many of them have moved to Florida!
Nowadays when we speak or I go and visit I sometimes get that sense you get when a Mormon knocks at your door: the certainty that you are being sold something. As time has gone on some of these ex-New Yorkers have taken on the manner of a street evangelists when we talk. They practically come over to me with real-estate inventories from their new neighborhoods.
Some of their retreats have a lot to be said for them. And like New Yorkers themselves, as Steve Cuozzo said here the other day, everyone can list the negatives about this city. The crime, the drug abuse, the dirt, the homelessness, the taxes, the inefficiency, the infrastructure, the impossibility of getting across town in a car and the joys of taking the subway. Yet plenty of us are still here. Why?
This week I had a couple of evenings that reminded me of exactly why. A friend was in town from Baltimore and we headed out to join another friend for dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Did we want to go on to the Village Vanguard he suggested? Well hell yes, I said. I’d never been, and on Monday nights the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra performs two evening sets. As we packed into the downstairs basement the excitement was terrific. Old fans and new were all packed in, with the waitresses weaving between the tables serving the drinks.
Some of the members of the band have been there pretty much since the beginning, almost 60 years ago. But young members have of course been added to it, and for a good hour and more we had the best uninterrupted big band jazz experience I’ve had in years. As a rule I like people listening to jazz — as at the wonderful Birdland on 44th Street. And while everyone at the Village Vanguard was paying close attention to the band, wow were we all into it. Being British, public displays of enthusiasm don’t come all that easily, but even I found myself hollering some “Come ons” and clapping wildly after each virtuoso soloist got up and did their thing.
Afterwards we poured out onto the street a couple of inches off the pavement, looked for the next places to go to and finding them pretty much straight away. And I hate to say this, but that isn’t the case in every city you go to. Even in London, where I was born, after about 10 pm your chance of finding somewhere for a meal or a drink reduces to practically zero.
It was a cracker of an evening. But the thing that made me even more ecstatic about this place was the evening that followed. Because on Tuesday some friends asked me to come with them to the Kaufman Music Centre on West 67th. The celebrated vocal group Voces8 were performing a mixture of classic choral music and more up to date works at the Merkin Hall. The program included music from the Renaissance right through to the present century, by way of Rachmaninoff, Elgar and some lighter, jazzier numbers. It was all performed, like the night before, to a completely packed auditorium. Though this time the audience listened to everything in awe-struck silence.
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Then in the second half this choir of world-class pros brought out dozens of local New York school kids that they had been doing workshops with in recent days. Voces8 have been doing an artist-in-residency program and so have been working with young New Yorkers. And what a fruitful idea it turned out to be. All these students came out onto the stage in varying degrees of confidence or shyness, but the minute they started performing the music alongside their professional colleagues, all woven in among each other, they completely transported themselves and the audience.
They gave us some sublime music from 19th century Europe and 21st century America. And you could practically see them growing on the stage in front of us all, as they soaked up what the audience was also soaking up — the joy of performing live at the highest possible levels. By the end of the concert every one of us in the packed auditorium was on our feet. I’ve never seen such a unanimous and swift standing ovation.
Of course none of this does away with the challenges in this city. And it isn’t remotely clear that the worst of our challenges are going to be cleared up anytime soon. But in the midst of it all it seems important not to lose sight of the fact that there isn’t another city in the world quite like this one. A city where on any given night of the week you can experience pretty much the best talent from any place in the world, in any style or setting you want. It’s easy to walk past the signs advertising such things. Like it’s easy to walk past the churches in the city which give world-class musical performances every week for free.
But we shouldn’t. There’s just too much good stuff going on in this city to take it for granted.
Putting politics before personal
The news about John Fetterman is first and foremost just sad. Anyone who followed his race for Senate last year could see he wasn’t well. Goodness knows what he was put through — and pushed through — in the Dems’ desire to win the seat. He’s not the only person in public life in America who’s been put in that position, but it’s a reminder that there are things that are more important than politics.
And one of them — for people around those in the public eye — is to make a priority of the people you love as well as the country you love.
