By Katherine Jones
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
To Derrick Michaels, listening to jazz is a physical experience that goes beyond the ear. It’s a chance for live audiences to feel the rhythm of the music and get caught up in the emotions and real-time musical innovations of the artists on stage.
“There’s this magic in the air that you can feel in your body,” said Michaels, a Baltimore-based saxophonist. “If you sit and you close your eyes, there is a physical sensation of surrendering into an experience.”
But all of that was lost this past year.
As the coronavirus pandemic forced live music venues to shut down for nearly a year, musicians and venue owners fear for the future of the once thriving Baltimore jazz scene.
No one expects the local jazz community to disappear, and jazz club owners have been pretty innovative themselves in using live streams to bring music to audiences. But many in the industry say nothing is like experiencing music live – and they wonder how the community will be shaped once the pandemic ends.
“The essence of jazz is about shared cycles of creativity,” said Todd Barkan, a National Endowment for the Arts jazz master and owner of the nationally-known Keystone Korner jazz club on Lancaster Street. “The music comes from a divine inspiration and artists are continuative to that divine inspiration. And then they share the music with the audience and the audience in turn recycles that creative energy back to the artist.”
Jim McFalls, the co-director of Towson University’s Jazz Orchestra, said the live jazz scene in Baltimore was booming prior to the pandemic. National acts stopped at small Baltimore venues like An Die Musik and Bertha’s Mussels.
“COVID shut all that down,” McFalls said. “In addition to physically the clubs closing, the community of musicians that were part of that were left with nothing.”
That was certainly the case with Michaels, who typically played at least 100 gigs a year but played nearly none in the last year.
Michaels expected to be back on stage by this time of the new year. At first, he said, he did not want to live stream from a venue, but he recently booked a virtual gig at An Die Musik, a small venue located on North Charles Street in Baltimore that doubles as a record shop. He will be performing in a live virtual concert in early March.
While Michaels is excited for the concert, he is also interested in seeing how the shared energy Barkan mentioned will play out through a two-dimensional screen.
An Die Musik owner, Henry Wong, said virtual concerts like this are bringing in more sales than ever for his business. Listeners can buy a ticket and have access to the concert for a week, Wong said.
According to Wong, since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, An Die Musik has hosted over 190 virtual concerts and their sales have been the highest they’ve been in four years.
“We do this for two things,” Wong said. “We want to support the musicians every which way we can by giving them an opportunity to perform, and so they can be in touch with their fans and audiences.”
Keystone Korner is taking the same approach with concert broadcasts. Barkan said viewers can purchase a ticket for $10 and stream the broadcast concerts for three days.
Barkan recently set up a GoFundMe page for Keystone Korner to help with expenses during the pandemic. He said other jazz clubs, like Birdland in New York City, have used this tactic to save their stages and raise a significant amount of money.
“It’s been debilitating to everyone,” Barkan said. “I’ve been in the industry for 57 years and this is 10 times harder than any challenge I ever had in my whole professional career.”
As a revival of his historic San Francisco jazz club of the same name, Barkan opened Keystone Korner in April 2019 in collaboration with chef Robert Wiedmaier.
Barkan believes once restrictions are lifted across the nation and more people get the vaccine for COVID-19, it will take at least nine months to a full year for the live music industry to come back in full swing.
“It depends on the efficacy of these vaccines and people’s psyches,” Barkan said.
Both Barkan and Wong said they would follow whatever guidelines they have to follow to re-open their venues to full operation and make their customers feel safe.
Michaels said without venues like An Die Musik and Keystone Korner adapting to these times and using these “survival moves,” some musicians may not have any opportunities to play again.
“Moving forward, we’re either creating opportunities for new things to happen or we don’t have any relevance anymore,” Michaels said.