From my up-coming book "Derby City Jazz."

From the up-coming book "Derby City Jazz."

It's about 9 p.m. on Wednesday night in the backroom of the Rudyard Kipling Restaurant, 416 West Oak Street. A large piano sits on a makeshift stage in the center of the room. A set of drums sit idly by.

The room is otherwise deserted.
But not for long.

Soon, several musicians, one of them carrying a large acoustic bass, begin to gather on the previous desolate stage. Smiles are on their faces and expectation is in the air.

Other musicians join in and for the next few hours the room reverberates with the sound of a music some people claim is rather hard to find in Louisville these days, jazz.

It's 9:30 p.m. on a Saturday night and the back room of the Twice Told Coffee House, 1604 Bardstown Road, is jammed with college-aged youth, plus occasional older patrons who look as if their youth, if not their spirits, evaporated sometime during the last two decades.

Seconds later, three fresh faced musicians, who look as though they could be the children or the grandchildren of the Rudyard Kipling musicians, come on stage.

The leader, a boyish, bespectacled youth, cozies up to the electronic keyboard, which sounds just like a Hammond B3 organ, and launches into the opening chords of Miles Davis' "Seven Steps to Heaven."

Yes, Virginia, there is jazz in Derby City. All you have to do is look for it.

The Wednesday night jam session at the Rudyard Kipling, where local musicians are invited to come and "sit in" with the band, is the latest attempt to solve the dearth of jazz in Louisville.

Organized by veteran jazz singer Sandy Neuman, the jam session provide local jazz musicians with an outlet to perform their art.

Harold Maier, co-owner of the Twice Told Coffee House, has been featuring jazz since his business opened last fall.

Pianist Todd Hildrith's trio, known as the Java Men, guitarist Jimmy Raney and pianist Steve Crews are just a few of the musicians who appear at the Twice Told on a regular basis.

Maier, who originated the annual Jazz at the Water Tower Festival in the early 1990s, believes that jazz is a vital art that still contains an element of anarchy and protest. And he is happy that younger audiences are responding to it. But he said many of the older jazz fans in the city are staying away.

"You never see people from the Louisville Jazz Society here. It's like we don't exist," Maier said.

No doubt about it, there are three faces of jazz in Louisville, the old, the young and the black.

Anyone who has attended the excellent "Midnight Ramble" series at the Kentucky Center for the Arts will attest to the fact that audiences for this event remain predominantly black despite the fact the series has featured some of the finest jazz performers in the business.

Can the jazz community in Louisville afford the schism? I think not. Jazz, "America's "classical music," has nothing to do with skin color or age. It is a music of the spirit that should bring us all together.

Danny O'Bryan
LEO magazine
June 9, 1993