Society Invites

Tips for an NYC Arts and Culture Summer Vacation

Renee Rosnes (piano), Jimmy Greene (sax), and Payton Crossley (drums) at the Blue Note. Carter is a three-time Grammy winner and the most recorded bassist in jazz. He played with Miles, Evans, Shorter, Hawkins, Hancock, Silver, and Baker, and is not slowing down at 86 as he carries his standup bass to the gig, an instrument he singularly brought into the spotlight.

As expected, the music elevated the house with Carter’s smooth, strong, and subtle note expressions, trading solos while giving nods to Greene and Crossley, and a smile to Rosnes for her triple adagio fluidity. The hour-and-a-half set sans intermission dedicated to Miles included “5-9-5,” “Seven Steps to Heaven,” “Mr. Bow Tie,” “Flamenco Sketches,” and “My Funny Valentine.” Carter graciously thanked the guests for supporting jazz, his band, and the club, saying, “We are faced with things in the world which we bring here with our personal lives, and when the stars align between us as a band, this great music happens, and we share it with you.” The encore was a 1934 Broadway single turned jazz standard, “You and the Night and the Music,” after which Ron held up his handkerchief that read, “Warning: Genius at Work.” For a view of that genius, check the PBS film Finding the Right Notes (2022), documenting his historic life. Follow the club on Instagram for its schedule. There is a $20 minimum per person spend. Society toasts Louis D’Adamio, Sr. Publicity Director of Sacks & Co., for the press tickets.

Next, it was uptown to the Birdland Jazz Club, whose walls are lined with black and white photos of the jazz legends who played there. Along with its storied history, the

by Joanne A Calitri

Society News is bringing you insider tips of the New York City arts and culture scene firsthand after spending five days there! A city brimming with things to do, here are some top go-to’s:

Connoisseurs of jazz will find A-listers playing at the Blue Note on West 3rd Street in the Village and the historic 1949 Birdland Jazz Club at 315 West 44th Street next door to where the Record Plant was once located.

I went to the gig by bass extraordinaire, Ron Carter with his Foursight Quartet of

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The blue-sky beatitude that is “Wichita Lineman” summons both a whispering prairie vastness, and love’s incandescent power to find us where it will. Weird and gorgeous (a potent combination), the song has been described as “existential.” In 2020, “Wichita Lineman” was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress, and though it has been covered by everyone and your uncle, this classic song will forever be associated with Glen Campbell, who passed from Alzheimer’s in 2017. So, yeah. In the Grammy category “aspirational 14-year-old boys on bended knee in the middle of nowhere,” Jimmy Webb is something of a standout.

“We loved chord structure, melody, and songwriters; both of us,” Webb says of Campbell. “Glen just loved songwriters. He recorded Bob Dylan’s ‘Universal Soldier,’ you know. Glen and Dylan weren’t aligned politically but Glen thought it was a great song and he cut it.” Jimmy Webb’s very name invokes that late ‘sixties epoch when songs, as art objects worthy of discussion and critical analysis, began incrementally to eclipse bands. He takes the 10,000-foot view of his career. It should come as no surprise that a beloved and respected songwriter, whose greatness has long since been chiseled into our cultural granite, might occasionally imagine having had his own hit records with his own compositions. Over the years the man has released 14 solo albums, after all. There is a mild bittersweetness about Webb when he opens up, likely a species of that inarticulate melancholy we all feel when looking back; possibly trebled by Jimmy’s having aspired to art from a precocious early age.

“I’m resigned to the idea that there’s a catalog out there that I’m going to have to live with, and it stands pretty well,” he says, almost talking to himself, it seems. “I do feel that sometimes songwriters are the surrogates for people who may have difficulty expressing their emotions. ‘All I Know,’ the song that I wrote for Artie Garfunkel, right? So many people have come up to me and said, ‘I was having trouble with my girlfriend and we thought we were going to break up in college. And I went over, and I taped this record to her dorm room door and she played it… and we ended up getting married, and here are our kids.’” I could hear the master songwriter speaking through a grin. “And I look at them and I think, okay – I guess in some way I’m responsible for that,” and Jimmy Webb barked out a fugitive laugh that seems to surprise him. For so many people, countless people, Webb’s songs are glowing signposts marking their most memorable chapters.

“I’ll never forget the couple that came to me and said, ‘You know, we played ‘MacArthur Park’ at our wedding,’ and for a second – I mean, I really almost laughed out loud. I had to bite my lip because of (starts singing)… ‘after all the loves of my life, you’ll still be the one…’ (laughs heartily). When you start thinking about the lyrics, ‘MacArthur Park’ is something you do not want to hear at a wedding. It’s disastrous!” Webb laughs long and loud, then grows quiet. “I love these people and I love them dearly. There’s not an ounce of phoniness about them. Because of my songs, they come to see me as family,” he says, and sighs. “They are dear to me beyond anything you can imagine. They’ve been touched by the same things I’ve been touched by.”