On an unseasonably cold evening this past April, Caffé Lena was vibrant and warm, with every table filled, as trumpeter Wallace Roney, Jr. and the Chuck Lamb Trio kept the audience enthralled. Lamb, at the piano, acted as emcee, bantering with his special guest and charming the crowd. Lamb is often on the road with the Brubeck Brothers Quartet, but on the second Tuesday of every month, for the past eight years, his JAZZ at Caffé Lena show, which he founded with music producer and Caffé Lena TV techie Joel Moss, is his heart and home. (JAZZ at Caffé Lena is funded in part by a contribution made by Saratoga Living Chairman Anthony Ianniello.)
Six years earlier, in April 2019, Roney’s father, fellow trumpeter Wallace Roney, Sr., also took the stage at Caffé Lena. A graduate of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Roney Sr. was the Grammy-winning protégé of Miles Davis. Roney played at Saratoga Jazz Fest four times, including with Davis in 1985 and Patti LaBelle in 2009.
Roney Sr., who passed away in 2020, was a guest artist with the Skidmore Jazz Institute, created by then-Skidmore Dean of Special Programs Don McCormack, who just so happened to be sitting with his family in the front row at Caffé Lena on that April night, watching Roney Jr. wow the crowd.
In Saratoga Springs, the past is always present. Saratoga is fertile ground for the arts, for history, and for education. We’re always looking backward to see where we came from, and forward to lead those who’ll come after us.
Founded by McCormack in 1988, the Skidmore Jazz Institute is a two-week summer program that welcomes some 65 aspiring young musicians to learn from top jazz artists in Saratoga Springs.
“Attending the Skidmore Jazz Institute truly impacted my life,” says seven-time Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste. “I had such a special time of discovery and growth there.” Batiste’s wife, best-selling author and Emmy-winning journalist Suleika Jaouad, whom Batiste originally met as a teenager at band camp, also has Skidmore ties. “Jon was enrolled in our Institute in 2004,” says McCormack. “Hédi Jaouad, Suleika’s father—Jon’s father-in-law—taught French at Skidmore.”
Last year, SPAC’s new jazz series, which aims to introduce new and younger audiences to jazz, was named in McCormack’s honor. Eight-time Grammy winner Christian McBride and Ursa Major kicked off the inaugural season of the Don McCormack Jazz Series on October 24, and Veronica Swift closed it out on May 1.
“Jazz has enriched my life and nourished my soul,” says McCormack, SPAC’s longest serving board member. “From the time I started listening to Bird and Diz in grammar school to the many, many years at SPAC’s summer jazz festival, I’ve been hooked. Knowing that this uniquely American art form will now be here year-round in the Spa Little Theater—one of my favorite Saratoga venues—is so exciting.”
Veronica Swift, the daughter of jazz artists, will return to the Saratoga Spa State Park on June 28 for the first day of the Saratoga Jazz Festival, with her “transgenre” music that explores opera, classical, blues, funk, and vaudeville. Also coming to Jazz Fest this year, on June 29: Trombone Shorty, another Skidmore Jazz Institute grad who won a Grammy for work on fellow New Orleans native Batiste’s album We Are.
Founded by Newport Jazz Festival creator George Wein and originally called the Newport Jazz Festival at Saratoga, Saratoga’s jazz fest has been a mainstay of the city’s summer calendar since 1978. Since then, jazz has permeated the entire city: You can catch jazz performances not only at SPAC, the Spa Little Theater, and Caffé Lena (which, in addition to Jazz at Caffé Lena, hosts the monthly Peak Jazz Series), but also at Universal Preservation Hall, which recently launched a jazz series of its own; Skidmore’s Arthur Zankel Music Center, where several Jazz Institute–related performances will be held this July; 9 Maple, a 40-seat downtown jazz club that hosts live jazz every Friday and Saturday; and several restaurants around town.
But even back in 1978, jazz in the Spa City was nothing new. To fully understand Saratoga’s jazzy roots, we have to go back—way back—to the earliest days of the genre.
It’s fitting that GE Vernova, a spin-off company of General Electric, is the new sponsor of the Saratoga Jazz Festival after Freihofer’s 26-year reign, given GE founder Thomas Edison’s connections to Saratoga—and jazz music.
In 1879, Edison wowed the crowd in the courtyard of Saratoga’s Grand Union Hotel, the largest hotel in the world, when he demonstrated his incandescent light bulb for the second time ever. The inventor, who was financially backed by Saratoga philanthropist Spencer Trask, would go on to hold 1,093 patents, including one for the phonograph, which in the early 1900s helped popularize a particular nascent music genre. In fact, according to jazz historian Lewis Porter, on December 1, 1916, “That Funny Jas Band from Dixieland,” the first record to use an early form of the word “jazz” in its title and lyrics, was recorded for Edison’s company.
In the early 1920s, GE engineers went on to pioneer one of the earliest radio stations in the country: WGY. As radio grew in popularity, broadcasts direct from the Cotton Club in Harlem helped jazz musicians including Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Louis Armstrong reach audiences across the country. But if you were lucky enough to live in Saratoga, you could catch some of jazz’s founding fathers live.
Bing Crosby, band leaders Paul Whiteman and Xavier Cugat, Desi Arnaz, and Al Jolson (star of the 1927 film
The Jazz Singer, the first talkie), all performed at the Arrowhead Inn, a lake house that operated on Saratoga Lake from 1899 until the late 1940s. Other lake houses drew top-notch performers as well. (When New York City’s Cotton Club closed for the summer, some musicians would come up to perform in Saratoga.) Crosby and his contemporaries often ended up at clubs on Congress Street, such as Jack’s Harlem Club, to unwind, grab a bite, and catch the jazz and cabaret shows.
You could also see Duke Ellington’s Orchestra perform “Take the A Train,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” and other hits—and watch Cab Calloway, the first Black performer to sell a million copies of a 78 record, sing “Minnie the Moocher”—at the Black Elks Ball at the Canfield Casino, an annual event memorialized in a 1999 interview with Saratogian Anita Turner as part of Saratoga’s volunteer-led West Side Oral Narrative Project.
“Every August, that’s what everybody would look forward to—that dance,” Turner, who was 13 when she saw Duke Ellington’s Orchestra perform at the Ball in 1950, tells interviewer Courtney Reid. “People would come from everywhere—they’d have the Grand Elks March, and they’d have Elks from all over the world dressed in their finery. That place would be packed.”
Guests would dance the Charleston and Lindy Hop until the wee hours of the morning and then head to Hattie’s for breakfast. “That was a ritual for sure,” Turner says. “Good ole Miss Hattie’s Chicken Shack on Federal Street.”
Turner, though still a teenager at the time, was no stranger to late nights in Saratoga. Her grandmother ran a boarding house on Congress Street, across from the old Grand Union Hotel and between two nightlife hotspots: Jimmy’s Bar and Grill and The Blind Pig. Right up the street was Jack’s Harlem Club, which hosted dancer “Peg Leg Bates,” female impersonator Phil Black, and other entertainers. The Tally-Ho down the street also had live entertainment.
“In the summertime, everything was just 24-hour nonstop,” Turner remembers. “You wondered, ‘When do these people go to bed? Or did they ever go to bed?’ It was actually like a little Harlem. There was just so much going on.”
While the Elks Ball is gone, the Elks are not; Frederick Allen Lodge #609, which was founded in 1925 at a time when Blacks were not allowed to join most white fraternal organizations, is still in operation and hosts regular community events on Beekman Street, including a recent Cocktails & Jazz fundraiser. And while Duke Ellington is also gone, his influence lives on in music venues across Saratoga and the world.
I had never heard of “Saratoga Swing,” Ellington’s lively 1929 jazz composition, until I went into a vintage record store with my grandson, who now collects albums instead of video games. There, we found Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club featuring “Saratoga Swing” as well as Dave Brubeck’s Greatest Hits, featuring “Take Five,” his signature composition, and “The Duke,” a tribute to Ellington, whom he idolized in college.
Like Ellington, Brubeck has serious ties to the Spa City. Born in California in 1920, the jazz pianist toured with the Wolf Pack Band, the first racially integrated band in a segregated military, in World War II. Brubeck formed trios and quartets with musicians of all colors and creeds, and he refused to perform in segregated venues in the South and South Africa.
In 1959, The Dave Brubeck Quartet released Time Out, the album on which “Take Five” is featured and the first jazz album to sell more than a million copies. In 2009, in honor of the Time Out’s 50th anniversary, Brubeck returned to the Freihofer’s Saratoga Jazz Festival for the 13th time. (His record number of Jazz Fest appearances still stands today.) Except for a surprise visit to perform with his son Chris’ band, Triple Play, in 2011, that was Brubeck’s final SPAC show. He passed away on December 5, 2012—a day before his 92nd birthday.
Today, Brubeck’s sons Dan and Chris regularly perform with Chuck Lamb and guitarist Mike DeMicco as part of the Brubeck Brothers Quartet. Becoming good friends with his bandmates’ legendary father, Lamb says, “was a true joy in my life. His creativity still inspires me to this day. It is an honor to keep Dave’s music thriving all over the world.”
Six months after Brubeck’s death, he was honored with a star on the Walk of Honor at SPAC, joining his friend and Saratoga Jazz Fest founder George Wein, who was enshrined on the Walk in 2011. As family and fans gathered for the dedication, SPAC’s then-President, Marcia White, read a quote by Brubeck on why he believed in jazz: “The oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It’s the same any place in the world, that heartbeat. It’s the first thing you hear when you’re born—or before you’re born—and it’s the last thing you hear as you leave this world.”
That evening, Tony Bennett—who had performed with Brubeck in Washington, DC in 1962 and three years later with Duke Ellington in a duet that was broadcast on The Ed Sullivan Show—took the SPAC stage with blues great Buddy Guy.
Not long after his last performance with Lady Gaga at Madison Square Garden, Bennett too passed away, just shy of 97. Buddy Guy, still going strong at 88, has extended his farewell tour, and is playing some dates with the Tedeschi Trucks Band, which returns to Saratoga this September 5.
From Ellington to Gaga and beyond, good music never dies. In Saratoga, the show must go on.
On Jazz
The biggest names in Saratoga’s music scene have much to say about jazz in the Spa City.
“This is a big moment for jazz. It’s growing among young audiences in New York City, and it’s growing here in Saratoga. There are lots of exciting young bands coming up, looking for new audiences and great clubs to play in. Together, we can make Saratoga a must-play city for exciting jazz artists.”
—Sarah Craig, Executive Director, Caffé Lena
“Now in our eighth year, it feels like we have built a loyal community of jazz and music lovers who look forward to gathering each month and seeing both the concert and each other. And, we are always happy to see new faces in the crowd.”
—Chuck Lamb, Cofounder and headliner, JAZZ at Caffé Lena
“Saratoga has long been a hub for world-class music, and today’s jazz scene is no exception. With an incredible mix of local talent and internationally renowned artists gracing our stages, there’s never been a more exciting time for jazz lovers in the region.”
—Teddy Foster, Director, Universal Preservation Hall
“We are so lucky to live in a town where we have such a range of live music. You can think of jazz and folk as music that comes from the roots of a place. It’s great to have all kinds of creative music.”
—Jeff Olson, Saratoga Jazz Festival fan
“We were regulars at Birdland and Dizzy’s. Leaving those clubs behind was one of the things that made us sad to leave the city. But the jazz scene in Saratoga hasn’t disappointed… One night soon after we moved up here from the city, we walked into Hamlet & Ghost for dinner and Jonathan Greene and the Saratoga Hot Club were playing in the bar. Between the food and the music, we felt like we’d hit the jackpot.”
—Pam Abrams, culinary programming consultant
“Saratoga has a rich history of presenting jazz, from incubating raw talent through the Skidmore Jazz Institute, to the incredible live music scene downtown, to our prestigious Saratoga Jazz Festival, which brings the best jazz musicians in the world to our city. Artists like Jon Batiste and Trombone Shorty both got their start at Skidmore Jazz Institute and now headline our festival as international superstars.
—Elizabeth Sobol, President and CEO, SPAC
Mark Your Calendar
Get ready, Saratoga: Jazz is coming to town.
MAY 27
Peak Jazz Series: The Levin Brothers
Caffé Lena
Brothers Tony and Pete Levin and their quartet perform cool jazz, soulful originals, and reimagined covers in Caffé Lena’s other monthly jazz series.
JUNE 8
Belle-Skinner and the Easy-Speaks
Universal Preservation Hall
Part of the Sunday Jazz at UPH series, singer-songwriter Belle-Skinner will take the stage with pianist/trombonist Tyler Giroux and bassist/composer Jason Emmond.
JUNE 28 & 29
Saratoga Jazz Festival
SPAC
This annual two-day, two-stage jazz bonanza will feature 22 artists including Gary Clark, Jr., Veronica Swift, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, Cory Wong, and Artemis.
JULY 1
Artemis
Arthur Zankel Music Center
Skidmore Jazz Institute guest ensemble Artemis, an all-women quintet founded by pianist and composer Renee Rosnes, will perform a free concert.
JULY 8
Ben Wendell Group
Arthur Zankel Music Center
Grammy-nominated saxophonist/composer Ben Wendell leads a quartet at this free Skidmore Jazz Institute concert.
JULY 15
Chuck Lamb With Special Guest Randy Brecker
Caffé Lena
Trumpet player Randy Brecker, who was part of Blood, Sweat and Tears’ horn section, will join Lamb in Caffé Lena’s monthly series.
AUGUST 9
Laufey
SPAC
Social media superstar and LA-based Icelandic-Chinese artist Laufey will bring her blend of jazz and traditional pop to the SPAC stage with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
AUGUST 12
Ria Curley Band; Chuck Lamb and Jorge Gomez
Putnam Place
Curley’s band will sing originals from her new EP; Lamb and Gomez’s Cuban fusion jazz collab will follow.
TBA
Chuck Lamb and Jorge Gomez
Putnam Place
The second of two JAZZ at Caffé Lena concerts at Putnam Place will be announced in the fall.
