One of the thrills of living in NYC as a working musician is the artistic history that precedes you. I performed at Cafe Wha? last week, where, among many, an undiscovered Jimi Hendrix once held a residency. It is a similar feeling to going for a glass of wine at an old cafe where your favorite poet used to sit and write – a feeling that, for a moment, you share the fabric of their page, the thread of their song, the tread of the stage. (I did not intend that to rhyme, but I’m leaving it in.)
A couple years ago I lived a block from the Dakota, the building where John Lennon lived and passed. My apartment was next door to what used to be an old Italian “red-sauce” joint, as they call them, where he would hang out and write. The restaurant has been replaced by a ritzy Upper West Side hair salon; however, I still found inspiration in the fact that had his footsteps been marked and left for the last 50 years, they’d have been all about that block.
While venues come and go, remodel and rot, the very human history of this town lives in the bricks on buildings and in the empty streets at night and in the crowds as the setting sun casts its fire on them in one final exhale each day. From Edgar Allen Poe to George Gershwin to Marc Chagall to Ella Fitzgerald to Joni Mitchell, the artistic momentum of every seeker and thinker who came through New York, echoes throughout the intersections and backs of bars and theaters, whispers through the old trees in the parks.
I am grateful to my night at Cafe Wha? for reminding me where I am.