possibility until the spring, when logistics deferred the project to another summer. The idea for the bash grew out of a groundswell jazz movement in Bermuda which has resulted in a daily festival, already in full swing, from one end of the Island to the other. Bermuda's night people, who once danced themselves giddy to the thudding beat of disco, now take their pick from an impressive range of jazz venues. In the following pages, ROGER CROMBIE and LORIN SMITH take a long, cool look at the local jazz scene: the players, promoters, fans, and music plus there's a beginner's listening guide to jazz CDs and, for the first time, a complete set of local jazz listings.

So, let's hit it.

A-one, a-two...

A-one, two, three, four....

Jazz is back in Bermuda in a big, big way. The popular musical style which held sway on the rock in the Forties and Fifties has taken over anew. Much has changed in the meantime. Modern minstrelsy has taken a long look over its shoulder. The heady days of experimentation which marked jazz during the past30 years have given way to a local rebirth of the cool. Straight-ahead jazz is once again the order of the day - or night, in this case. Melody reigns; recognisable, accessible music is what today's casual listener demands. To the horror of purists and historians, the collective jazz memory barely extends prior to the mid-1960s. That's akin to knowing all there is to know about the Second World War without ever having heard of the first World War.

As generations age, their tastes change. The youthful firebrand becomes a corporation man. Drug experimentation legalises itself as a booze habit. And in Bermuda, the repetitive rhythms of rock and roll have given way to the very old-fashioned jazz impatiently pushed to one side in the 1950s. Gone are the trials and errors which have marked jazz since its disappearance from the spotlight. "It is very hard,'' says Legacy bass player John Lee, "to introduce people to the changes jazz has experienced. Overwhelmingly, they are most comfortable with music they know.'' Henry Bradley agrees: "The key here is comfort. Is the music comfortable? Is my comfort enhanced by listening to it?'' So comfortable is jazz here that it has taken on a nostalgic quality for today's younger listener and musician. It is, however, nostalgia for a time never experienced. The French must have a term for that particular condition: la recherche du temps imagine, perhaps.

The Bermudian term is Dollars. What the Island's jazz consumer wants is known as market forces, a local divinity. The result has been huge growth in the number of entertainment facility owners and managers willing to build jazz into their schedules. "This may be the first season that a good jazz band with a following can work five or six nights a week,'' says one musician, envious of (and grateful for) Legacy's ability to do just that. "Of course, once one band leads the way, others can follow.'' Legacy are currently the best the Island has to offer, but bigger fish swim in Bermuda's jazz waters, visiting quietly to enhance their offshore bank accountsat private affairs conducted in the corporate entertainment suites.

The conventions which increasingly prop up tourist arrival figures are often serenaded by world-class jazz names, but the shows are off-limits to locals.

Somehow jazz and corporate bigwigs seem unlikely bedfellows, although no one ever begrudged real wages, at last, to musicians who often sweated their talents to a pitch at the lower end of the economic order.

In the public arena, the days of the The ABC Lounge and the Ecarte are long gone, and much mourned. The Sparrow's Nest now only offers a juke box. In their wake, a sprig of new venues has budded, gingerly purveying, often one night a week, the mellower side of jazz where the heavy beat of disco once ruled the night air.

The shape of the space in which the music is heard has been altered by a new generation of musicians and entrepreneurs who have recreated a late night scene they know mostly from movies and frequent trips to jazz haunts on the East Coast of the United States.

Club 21, the only true jazz club in Bermuda, sells nothing but. It's a long walk back through local history since the Island boasted that kind of listening opportunity. The Club's hopes rest on tourists as Bermudians continue to ignore Dockyard, far and away the most thriving and vibrant region of the Island. Co-owners Wayne Ball and Raymond Knight deserve to succeed for their courage, and with honours for designing a space which so well matches the intimate needs of the music.

"We knew what we wanted,'' says Ball. His outwardly more cautious partner Knight explains the combination: "Good music, local and international artists in the right space: the spirit of jazz.'' That spirit is alive and well on Court Street. Hubie's Bar is the gem in the jazz tiara at Bermuda's central location for highly professional music as good as it comes in any city in America. Ask Erskine Phillips: he's played all of them.

Jazz is on the radio and late-night TV, in the streets and - the economic acid test - has started working its way into the major hotels, and a surprisingly large percentage of the minors, at some time during the week to be appreciated by a brand new crowd. As one hotel entertainment manager, who requested anonymity, puts it, "Notice how no one is old these days. Our tourists used to be old people, and they knew and accepted that. Now, no one is old. They all arrive wearing sneakers, and want to do things with their limited spare time.'' Just like Bermudians, really.

The jazz fans of the Swing era are now abed before the clubs open, sipping cocoa at the time they would once don their glad rags and start sucking down rum. A new, younger crowd has taken charge of jazz on the rock. They are 25 to 40 plus, and looking for a veneer of sophistication with their syncopation.

The rock and roll generation in Bermuda has come of age. They have turned to jazz from rock music, using the common thread of the blues as a stepping stone. At Oscar's, they defy the age, and their age, with a soundtrack they once considered square. "Now that you mention it,'' says latenight club-hopper Edward Wall, sipping Perrier water, "I used to hate jazz. It was my parents' music.'' Today's health-conscious early middle-agers have destroyed forever the cliche of a smoky, ill-lit jazz club. Hard drinking and easy sex are the only survivors from the fabled seamier side of the jazz world.

Back at the nest, the driven white-collar party animal recovers from a hangover with something a little more restrained. "When I get home from a hard day at work,'' says afficionado David Turner, 42, "I want to hear music which relaxes, rather than enervates.'' Phillips sees an even younger generation checking into jazz: "Folks are tiring of the rhyming couplets of rap,'' he says, "they want a return to grass roots.'' Those roots have been trimmed. The shape of mainstream jazz is that easy-going sound heard on TV commercials and movie soundtracks. Not exactly Alexander's Ragtime Band, nor, quite, Evelyn Glennie playing flowerpots, as seen at this year's Bermuda Festival, but somewhere in between. The music has always been defined by its instrumentation: piano, horn, optional guitar, bass and drums.

Saxophone, trumpet and female vocals remain in the local spotlight. But the piano, crucial at every phase of the development of jazz, is lacking right now, particularly since Lance Hayward's death. Bermuda's stellar contribution to theworld scene, Alan Silva, has run a jazz school in Paris for three decades; Ghandi Burgess recently received a well-earned share of the national attention; Shine Hayward visits the Island now and then; Danny Garcia plays at conventions almost full-time; Darrell Fubler makes magic with a synthesizer; and Andrew Morrison turns off the electronics on his state-of-the-art player piano to produce the real tinkling of ivories.

This being the 90s, Darrell Simmons of Legacy plays a piano strapped around his neck in the shape of a guitar, thanks to the wonders of modern technology.

The fingering problems can only be monumental.

A jazz scene with a grand piano as disjectum membrum is possible, and perhaps profitable, but it's four-fingered music in a five-fingered world. A jazz room without a piano, or where the 88s are used as a table-top, are both Bermudian realities.

They stand, those desecrated halls, as a perfect metaphor for the jazz scene today: revisionary, forgetful, but musically creative none the less. No true jazz fan could view the mutation and rebirth of local jazz with anything less than wonder, but as always in human affairs, there are grounds for improvement.

Regular RG contributor Roger Crombie is a reporter with the Mid-Ocean News.

His father, Walter, was for many years pianist and composer George Shearing's partner and reed man.

Photographs by Antoine Hunt.

"It is very hard to introduce people to the changes jazz has experienced.'' -- John Lee, bass player, Legacy. Hubie's Bar, on Angle Stree, plays jazz on Friday nights in a more initimate setting.

RG MAGAZINE JUNE 1993