Monday Jazz Nights
Hodges Bend
August 28, 2023
I am a jazz simpleton. Everything about a live jazz performance is as astonishing to me as a no-look pass (and I am probably even worse at playing basketball than I am at playing jazz). It’s all a dissonant, musical math I will never fully understand despite sort of knowing how playing music works. Incredible technical feats designed to sound as effortless as possible? Impossible. Decades of rigorous artistic study tucked into the front corner of a bar on a weeknight, patrons flitting in and out the front door within inches of the players? Unthinkable.
But Hodges Bend has been hosting these jazz nights for a decade now, cultivating a very specific East Village vibe on an otherwise dead Monday night in the neighborhood: the nearby restaurants and bars are all closed on Mondays. With a downbeat at exactly 9pm—it is Monday, after all—a rotating group of musicians treats Hodges to jazz crowd-pleasers with half the room intently listening up front and the other half seated far enough away to enjoy the ambience without the potential eye contact. The setup is as much meant to be heard as to be seen, and you can pick your poison via reservation or good luck.
On this particular evening, saxophonist Mike Cameron called Thelonious Monk tunes to a trio rounded out by drummer Chad Henderson and pianist Scott McQuade. McQuade also filled in for an absent bass player on the low end of the piano, and when I say that, I mean he alone sounded like two separate musicians performing together in perfect time.
The whole performance was a cacophony of sax, drums, keys, chatter, cocktail shakers and espresso pulls. Cameron, sans microphone, was light on the crowd talk and masterful on the saxophone (an instrument my ears have traditionally had a fraught relationship with due to its aggressive and often unnecessary insertion into rock ‘n’ roll). As a one-time band student, I appreciate Cameron’s capacity not just for notes but for tone, even in the highest high and lowest low registers of an instrument that when it’s played correctly is profoundly beautiful and when it’s played incorrectly is profoundly unlistenable. I said, aloud, “This is the first time I’ve ever wanted to hear more saxophone.”