Fantastic jazz concert at the German Embassy Washington - Jean P. Froehly, the new Minister, Head of Economic and Finance Department, played with 3 Washington-based musicians, including Victor Dvoskin on double bass, the "Ukrainian Renaissance Suite", which Jean composed in 2023 while he was stationed in Ukraine.
I vividly remember Victor from the days when Annette Schiller and I were regulars at the legendary Jazz Club "One Step Down", just next to the International Monetary Fund where I worked; one concert, I remember, we attended together with Tantely Andrianarivo, then Prime Minister of Madagascar, and his wife Nicole.
Another favorite of us was the original Twins Lounge in "Brightwood, a
small space where “everyone smoked,” the piano was often out of tune,
and musicians took breaks in the kitchen." (See below).
Invitation
Dear Friends,
I would like to invite you to a jazz concert I am organizing at the German Embassy on November 22 (6.30 pm) and during which I will play a composition of mine titled “Ukrainian Renaissance Suite.” The suite, created in 2023, draws on musical themes that arose during my past postings in Ukraine and processes them in relation to the country’s current struggle for survival, which is also a struggle for our freedom.
A recording of the suite can be found here:
https://youtu.be/85fGJKD9jSo?
I am pleased to be joined by excellent Washington-based musicians for the evening. The lineup will be as follows:
Jean P. Froehly: Guitar, Composer
Robert Redd: Piano
Victor Dvoskin: Double Bass
Dominic Smith: Drums
The approx. 45 min. concert will be followed by a reception. RSVP wi-al-S1@wash.diplo.de
We would be glad to welcome you and your interested partners and friends!
Best regards,
Jean P. Froehly
Arriving
Concert
Reception
Bye-bye
Long before D.C. got its reputation as the city for go-go music, the nation’s capital was the jazz capital. Beginning in the 1920s, the legendary pianist and composer Duke Ellington and his band called U Street home. The neighborhood was eventually named Black Broadway with Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, and Louis Armstrong performing at its iconic venues.
More than a century later, a handful of venues across the city are keeping the spirit of D.C’s Black Broadway alive and well. Georgetown’s Blues Alley opened in 1965 and remains the longest running jazz supper club in the country.
Part of the club’s appeal is that it leans into nostalgia, Blues Alley’s owner and executive director Harry Schnipper told WAMU’s Chris Remington on a recent evening at the club. With it’s dim lighting and wooden cocktail tables stacked by the dozen on every inch of floor space, Schnipper says it’s an ode to the 1920s speakeasy.
Over the venue’s six-decade history, it’s welcomed some of the most iconic jazz performers of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Dizzy Gillespie to Sarah Vaughn, Wynton Marsellus, and so many more.
For the past year, D.C. jazz musicians have traded the warm environs of local performance spaces for the isolation of their living rooms, forced to channel the energy of an improvised solo through a WiFi signal. And while they and other community members wait for COVID-19 restrictions to lift, they’re grappling with the stark reality that some of these sacred stages won’t be there when the wait is over.
The city’s jazz clubs, many of which had closed pre-pandemic, grew even more scarce in the past 12 months, with the closures of Sotto, Twins, and Alice’s Jazz and Cultural Society, among others. In folding, they seem to accelerate a steady stream of closures over the past decade — including storied venues like Bohemian Caverns, HR-57 and Utopia – and leave Blues Alley, which is currently looking for a new home, the sole full-time jazz club in the city.
What the city is losing in their absence is profound: interactions with the people who ran them, the experiences they provided, and the vitality of the music itself....
Another casualty in the past year is Twins, a major U Street venue known, in part, for the kindness and tenacity of its proprietors, twin sisters Kelly and Maze Tesfaye. After shepherding it for more than 30 years, the Tesfayes announced the club’s closure in August. Bar manager Wendy Whittington says she was hired “on the spot” in 2002 and never left, naming “loyalty” as her reason for staying.
“I love the twins; they are really fabulous ladies,” she says. “They’re like my family.”
For many local performers, clubs like Twins offered a formative performance experience. D.C.-based vocalist Sharón Clark, who has performed on stages from New York’s Iridium to the Moscow International House of Music, found her footing as a jazz artist at D.C. clubs in the 1980s. She recalls gigs at the original Twins location in Brightwood, a small space where “everyone smoked,” the piano was often out of tune, and musicians took breaks in the kitchen.
“It was a training ground,” Clark says. “Those days at Twins — I think they really shaped my life in a lot of ways.”
Several venues that don’t derive all their income from ticket sales or own their real estate have managed to hang on. Mr. Henry’s is a Capitol Hill restaurant that offered Roberta Flack a residency in the late 1960s – her debut album cover image was taken there – and regularly hosted the Capitol Hill Jazz Jam in pre-COVID times. The pub has kept the music going with virtual concerts, and plans to resume the in-person variety as soon as restrictions lift. General manager Cathy Nagy says she’s been asked whether Mr. Henry’s might stand to gain from the closure of other clubs.
“I really do believe that a rising tide raises all ships,” Nagy says. “I hope that either these jazz clubs that have had to close can reopen or recreate themselves, and we can all share with each other.”
Howard from Alice’s Jazz and Cultural Society, for one, suggests that the venue could return down the road, and he remains confident that new venues eventually will emerge from the shells of old ones. “New places will open up, but it’s the people who will run the club,” he predicts. “What made this club successful [is] it was built and it was run by a jazz musician.”
For the musicians that regularly inhabit these spaces, the dwindling number of venues sparks unease about the long-term impact on the city’s rich jazz culture. Nasar Abadey, a percussionist, composer and jazz lecturer at the Peabody Institute, recalls the jazz scene of the late 1970s, when he moved to the District.
In those days, Abadey listened to WPFW all day and ventured out to clubs such as Top O’Foolery, Harold’s Rogue and Jar, and D.C. Space at night.
“Many times, you had to let some music go because you couldn’t catch all of it,” Abadey says.
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