Jazz on Long Island is alive and swinging: 'There is a scene now'

In the mid-1990s, a jazz combo called Al Cardillo and Friends began playing at Papa Razzi, an Italian restaurant on Jericho Turnpike in Westbury. At the time, the idea met with more than a little skepticism according to the band’s namesake leader and bassist.

“People told me it’s impossible to have jazz on Long Island, people won’t come,” Cardillo recalls. Leaning on his connections with musicians in New York City, however, he was able to put together numerous ensembles with top-notch players, he says, and over the coming years, “people came down in droves.”

“I kind of proved them wrong,” Cardillo, 67, adds. “There is a scene now.”

If you’re hoping to hear jazz on a summer’s day — or just about any day — you won’t have to travel far on Long Island. The first-ever Tilles Jazz Fest launches July 20 at LIU Post's Tilles Center for the Performing Arts with headlining act the Branford Marsalis Quartet and other artists. It’s Nassau County’s answer to the Hamptons JazzFest — itself a newly-minted festival that launched in 2021 — which this year began July 1 and runs through Sept. 14 at venues across the East End. Even beyond those two events, there are numerous venues — from nightclubs to local eateries — where jazz musicians regularly play to enthusiastic crowds.

“They’re very committed,” Tom Manuel, founder of the Jazz Loft in Stony Brook, says of his audiences. “It’s a niche music,” he acknowledges. “But I’ve discovered that when it’s presented to ears that haven’t heard it before, they want to come back.”

LI's JAZZ ROOTS

Though jazz was born in New Orleans, the music’s epicenter has long been New York City — and Long Island has benefited from the reverberations.

As the region’s farmland became suburbs after World War II, by 1957 there was enough of a local jazz audience to support the Great South Bay Jazz Festival featuring Coleman Hawkins, the Fletcher Henderson Reunion Orchestra, the Horace Silver Quintet and others. A Newsday review of the event, which took place at the Timber Grove Club, called it “an indication of the many followers of this original American music we have on Long Island.”

Meanwhile, numerous jazz musicians moved eastward from New York for the same reasons other working people did: greener pastures, affordable housing and more elbow room.

“You moved out here because you wanted to live out of the city and in the fresh air,” Marian McPartland, the acclaimed pianist and composer, told Newsday in 2002. She and her husband, cornetist Jimmy McPartland, moved in the 1950s to Merrick, where they installed a piano in their living room — something that would have been difficult in a Manhattan apartment. The McPartlands relocated in the 1960s to Port Washington, where Jimmy died in 1991 and Marian died in 2013.

They had plenty of company. Mose Allison, the great Mississippi blues pianist, moved to Smithtown in 1963 and raised four children there. Big-band trumpeter Jimmy Maxwell lived in Glen Cove, as did Clark Terry, the swing-band trumpeter and fluegelhorn pioneer. Further east, Jimmy Heath, the indefatigable saxophonist, lived in Montauk, and Teo Macero, the sax player who produced two of jazz’ greatest albums — Dave Brubeck’s “Time Out” and Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” — lived in Quogue. (Macero died in Riverhead in 2008).

JOHN COLTRANE LIVED HERE

Of course the most iconic jazz musician to live on Long Island was saxophonist John Coltrane, who in 1964 composed a poem called “A Love Supreme” at the Dix Hills home he shared with his wife, Alice, and their four children. That poem would later inspire his 1965 album of the same name, widely considered a masterpiece of the jazz genre. Though slated for destruction in 2004, the John and Alice Coltrane home, as it’s known, is listed on the National Historic Register and recently received a $1 million grant to help fund restoration efforts.

During the 1960s, you might have heard Coltrane as well as the McPartlands playing at the Cork & Bib, a hot spot in Westbury. From the 1970s through the 1990s, you might have visited Sonny’s Place, a 68-seat club in Seaford where Billy Eckstine, Count Basie and Sarah Vaughn reportedly held jam sessions.

Sonny’s “was the place to play on Long Island,” says David Lalama, a Professor Emeritus of Music at Hofstra who lives in Valley Stream. “All the local musicians always showed up,” he said, adding that saxophonist Billy Mitchell — who played with the Count Basie Band in the 1950s — often held court there. (The venue closed in 1998.)

TWO LI JAZZ FESTIVALS

Jazz “was our American popular music for the latter part of the 20th century,” says Tom Dunn, Executive and Artistic Director of the Tilles Center. Dunn started his job two years ago — following stints with the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Southampton Arts Center — and says he’s been working with Jazz at Lincoln Center to mount the Tilles festival.

“It’s definitely for the jazz aficionado, and also for those that are eager to learn more,” Dunn says of the family-friendly event, which features shows on four indoor and four outdoor stages, along with food trucks and an “instrument petting zoo.”

Claes Brondal, executive director of the Hamptons Jazz Fest, stresses that his and Dunn’s summer events are not in competition. “II think it’s a complement and a testament to the relevance of jazz,” Brondal says. “If people attend, that means there’s value in what we do.”

WHERE TO HEAR JAZZ

During the non-summer months, there’s at least a handful of places that host live jazz, according to the musicians’ schedules posted at the Long Island Jazz Society, a Facebook group founded by Cardillo. Grasso’s Restaurant, the Italian eatery in Cold Spring Harbor, remains a jazz mainstay on Long Island, but there are others, including Gusto Divino Trattoria in Seaford, the Oulala Café and Lounge in Lynbrook and Charlotte’s Speakeasy in Farmingdale.

When the Speakeasy opened seven years ago as a “secret” nightclub beneath an innocent-looking ice-cream parlor, co-owner Nick DeVito says he wanted to book jazz bands that would fit the venue’s back-in-time atmosphere. “I couldn’t find anybody,” he says, but adds: “Everybody told me, once you have live music, they’re going to find you.”

Today, DeVito has about 20 acts that regularly play the Speakeasy, from small jazz combos to large Latin bands. “I get a call just about every week from somebody who wants to play,” he says, and audiences are equally enthusiastic. “We take reservations,” DeVito says, “and the place fills up about a week before every performance.”

SWINGING AT THE JAZZ LOFT

At the highly busy Jazz Loft, founded as a not-for-profit by Tom Manuel in 2016, you can catch several shows in a week, perhaps even in a day. Wednesday nights are devoted to a 7 p.m. jam session “where musicians can hang and connect with each other,” says Manuel, himself a cornet player and artist in residence at Stony Brook University’s jazz program. (The Jazz Loft is also a museum that contains memorabilia from Charlie Parker, Louis Jordan and others.)

One point of pride for Manuel: paying his fellow musicians well. “We can do that because of the donors and sponsors,” Manuel says — and because of the Loft’s dollar-per-year lease. “When we compare ourselves to other clubs in Manhattan, we pay better than them.”

Still, it isn’t easy to make a living as a jazz musician. Rahsaan Cruse, Jr., a 20-year-old singer from Long Beach, says he’s lucky to make $100 for a gig; he makes ends meet as a fast-food worker. Some local clubs pay as little as $75, while others “don’t even have enough money to pay us adequately,” says Cruse. But at this fledgling stage in his career, he says, “I play some of the gigs for the exposure.”

JAZZ AT BUFFALO WILD WINGS? YES!

For one of the least likely jazz experiences on Long Island, head to the Buffalo Wild Wings on Merrick Avenue in Westbury. There, on alternate Wednesday nights, you can watch the Long Island Sound Big Band, a 17-piece jazz orchestra co-led by bassist Cardillo, who lives in Mineola. Over a plate of chicken tenders, you might hear the group run through pieces by Count Basie, Maynard Ferguson, Stan Kenton or Duke Ellington.

There’s no cover charge to hear the band, which is a not-for-profit entity. Asked if the musicians are advocating for a particular cause, Cardillos responds: “Yeah — keeping jazz alive.”

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com@raferguzman