Jazz in Yerevan
On gentrification and the value of global languages
It was one of those really good nights that you don’t forget. A jam session at Ulikhanyan, different musicians coming and going all evening through. A young woman took the stage and sang everyone away, her presence unassuming but in that way where you suspected as she took the mic that she was about to deliver perfection or would have never got up there in the first place.
A boy - a kid barely ten - he sat there at our table with us and his aunt, drinking a mojito without the rum, from a glass the size of his head, bashing impatiently with his straw at the mint leaves as if they were the years between him and the stage and he wanted them to disappear. His aunt said he already played piano, some trumpet, other instruments I forget. We told him to get up, to play. He declined stubbornly and we asked why. His aunt translated his answer: “Because I’m still small.”
All the musicians played, switching in and out as we made our own self-involved exchanges, less virtuoso, from cocktails to cognac, for which the Armenian renown is deserved. I’m sorry to labour such enjoyment, I knew of the grim deadlock, still ongoing, between Armenia and Azerbaijan at that time, but when history has been so pained in its action and poisoned in its recording, it’s good to lay on thick such a joy as that one, in the present and between us all.
Just as jazz is based on defying conventions, the musicians unlike so much around them only wanted to live their own time. There was one man, a percussionist, who stuck with us after he finished his stint on the drum kit, like there was a loneliness in him that he was trying to get away from. He had trainers covered in glitter, “Because I like the sparkles,” he explained.
A Los Angeles Armenian, Sasha talked about his ex and their kid, over in the US. “It’s ok,” he reassured us as he explained that the separation was amicable, that he would be back to his child in California before too long. Perhaps unusually for a US-Armenian, but typically enough for a musician, he refused the idea of animosity between himself and any of the people of this world, Turkish heritage included. Sasha was bigger than that, he smiled, smiled all the time, but with a sort of sadness, like life threw out enough obstacles for him to waste time creating new ones.
At the table we talked everything, we didn’t stop. We were Armenian, Turkish, Czech, Iranian and a Lebanese-Australian. I remember the Iranian woman talking, bemoaning, of how her country was downgrading the importance of English language in the school curriculum, elevating Russian and Mandarin instead. I laughed at it, one of those moments when conversations in a bar in an out-of-the-way capital city shows you the direction the world is going more clearly than any Western newspaper intended to leave your thinking as near as possible to its owner's. History is a current that some countries always adapt to better than others, but the West, steeped in the idea of its own superiority, feels that it need not bother at all, and as a result is yet to accept either the coming change itself, or the possibility of developing even a healthy curiosity about it. The ability to maintain this delusion about an emerging new world will be gone within a decade, and we can only hope that Western states, led by the US, relinquish it without causing excessive violence outside of their own borders.
Perhaps it was funny to have such thoughts as jazz played from the stage and as we went from one negroni to the next. Which of the world’s spheres, beyond the Italians, could claim negroni on a summer night, I do not know. Gentrification is a funny business, a shitty one too, it has pushed me out, or at least out of comfort, in certainly a couple of cities. Nonetheless, all the negronis and the coffees and jazz at least provide a language, as global as any, that helps in its own way to escape the destiny of territory.
Is a jazz bar gentrified? Is jazz Western? A good question, maybe. In both its aesthetic and origin the answer, unquestionably, is Yes. Jazz is a music out of the United States. But, maybe more importantly, in its substance, jazz is no such thing, and those who forget it have maybe missed its meaning.
Jazz was a language perfected in the United States, but spoken clearest of all by Black America, from inside the Empire, but saying it had no stake in that Empire. Jazz is most often the language of an empowerment that rose up in response to its disempowerment. Jazz is music in response to the evils of the Western world, most often by men who had been - literally - hit by US segregation, conscripted into the military on behalf of a country that only abused them, incarcerated inside the brutality of the prison system. If jazz is Western it is only so with the unswerving commitment also to the idea that the West as a place was wrong, was damn wrong, but that it could be better, it could be beautiful like anywhere.
I listen to jazz on a summer night in Yerevan, but for a moment think of Geoff Dyer describing Charles Mingus, riding a bicycle in New York,
“America was a gale blowing in his face. By America he meant White America and by White America he meant anything he didn’t like. The wind hit him harder than it did small men; they thought America was a breeze but he heard it rage, even when branches were still and the American flag hung down the side of buildings like a star-spangled scarf, even then he could hear it rage. His response was to rant back, to rush at it with all the intensity that he felt it rushing at him, two juggernauts hurtling towards each other on a road the size of a continent.”