Jazz Vespers
A strong and established American jazz musical tradition has taken root at the Westminster Church in Southwest DC. Every Friday for an affordable $5, jazz musicians play on for three hours, with two short breaks. Accompanying the evening’s music is a home-cooked church supper, which serves what Pastor Brian Hamilton calls ”healthy soul” food for only $5.50. Jazz Night, as it is called in this vibrant SW community, is an evening that is as rich in musical ease, as it is low in cost.

Jazz Night is transforming this small church community which lists itself on its web site as “a different kind of church.” It is my impression after an evening’s visit that it is not simply its jazz vespers, now well established, but that Hamilton and his pastorate have created a congregation that has brought to life the precepts associated with faith and Christianity. Hamilton says, “If you want to talk about God you have to be contextual, you have to go where people walk, where they live.” Thus was born Jazz Night.

But first things first. Jazz Night is held every Friday night from 6-9 p.m. Dinner is served concurrently in the church basement hall. Hamilton, who has been rector for eleven years, and first began “jazz vespers” nine years ago, says that Westminster is committed to making the music and its first rate buffet supper dinner “affordable and accessible.”

“It is a way to bring people together” says Rev Hamilton We are celebrating the vital and indigenous art in our community. I believe ‘art’ is a way to God. Art is so important. And jazz is an art form.”

And indeed it is. I sat at the rear of the sanctuary on a chilly October evening, a night of the season’s first sweater, and found a seat among the few available just after 6:00. For three hours I listened to an array of jazz pieces and riffs and old standards: from Sonny Rollins’ “Everybody’s Calypso,” moving easily to”Take Five” and then to “When I am Too Old To Dream” with Bob Montgomery on saxophone leading that night’s booked quintet. These are serious and professional musicians who play till 9:00 and then are off to the clubs where they play into the wee hours. And Westminster’s acoustics are extraordinary.

All 300 seats in the sanctuary were filled: whites and African Americans, the young and the elderly, the full and complex diversity of this Southwest neighborhood. In attendance according to Hamilton, were visitors from other parts of the DC area, all of whom seemed to be pleasantly surprised and immensely pleased at what one person described as “the best kept secret in DC.”

Millie Everett , a self described “jazz lover” has been coming to Jazz Night for eight years and is now “very involved with the musical program including decisions made about who appears.” She counts among her favorite jazz artists both horn player Lester Young and vocalist Sarah Vaughan and says that she first discovered Jazz Night when she “first walked by and saw a sign. At first the numbers were small. But it has grown.”

The night I was at Westminster, the audience knew its music, reacting each time to the first notes played. Earl Wilson, a long time jazz guitarist, says: “I love it here. I’d play every week if I could. I love it here because you can play for an appreciative audience . I’m tired of playing in smoky clubs.” Each week a different ensemble of five or six musicians is selected and scheduled, under the musical direction of Dick Smith, a former Redskin.

Throughout the performances, there was easy but respectful movement back and forth in the church hall without disturbance to the music or that stern inviolate sense of intimidation coming from the stage, with lots of folks visiting with one another in the ante room of the church hall or coming up from dinner or heading downstairs as supper lines eased.

The lower hall held a simply laid-out, but huge, buffet dinner which is advertised as a “fish fry” and which included baked whitefish, the “fish fry” and baked chicken, a penne pasta dish, four side dishes of vegetables, and dessert of brownies, rice pudding, peach and apple cobblers all made from scratch.  

Brian Champ who works the kitchen line was coming to the end of a long day and week working in the kitchen. He told me about Westminster’s catering company, now having modest success in its bookings and about plans afoot for a small café to serve the surrounding community, which suffers from a dearth of restaurants. With great energy and a wave of his hand, Champ added: “This is for the community.”

As Champ and I finished our conversation in the lower hall, I could hear the musicians back from break, with the first easily recognized notes and sounds of Eddie Jefferson’s “Moody’s Mood Of Love.” Heading upstairs, two steps at a time, the music growing stronger in my head, I could hear briefly in that moment on the stairwell, the great scat man of another time in the 40s, King Pleasure, coming in at the end of the soft melodic saxophone sounds of the lead:

“…You give me a smile and then I’m wrapped up in your magic. There’s music all around me, crazy music……….Music that keeps calling me.”

Westminster Church is located at 400 I St SW. www.westministerdc.org , 202 484 7700. Jazz Vespers are every Friday from 6-9 p.m. Parking is available in the church parking lot and on the street. For others there is Blues night on Monday from 6-9 p.m., also $5.

Adieu Chief Justice Warren, Cagey the Bookie and RFK
As September and the baseball season came to an end there were any number of fond and at times self-absorbed remembrances of what is soon to be our former baseball stadium. RFK, built in 1961, and now a baseball white elephant, waited patiently for a baseball team to return to DC for three quarters of its existence and now after three seasons with our newly beloved Nationals, it will soon fall victim to the wrecking ball. 

So add my name to the list of those doing retrospectives. But first I offer my less than humble opinion that RFK was and remains just fine as a ball park and that the new stadium has not necessarily been designed and built for all of the residents of DC (the proof: the unaffordable total cost of a ticket, parking and concessions).  I find it patently unfair and bordering on bribery and a violation of the public trust that we have placed in the members of our City Council, who approved this $611 million dollar boondoggle, that they will be rewarded in ways that the rest of us can only dream of: free tickets in good seats any time that they want. This is money that could have been used for schools, a hospital in Southeast, or for affordable housing.

But I do have my own RFK story to add to the list of retrospectives. It is set on a brutally hot July day in 1970. As happened more than once, a Damon Runyonesque cast of characters gathered at a Hill watering hole and then headed to RFK, led by the legendary Baseball Bill, a Capitol Hill bartender with more than one claim to his fame. One among them was that he once drank 42 beers in a ninety minute competition in what is now the chic wine bar, Sonoma Restaurant. Another, enshrining him forever in the pantheon of local sports celebrities, is that he once poured a beer on the head of Bob Short, the former owner of the Washington Senators who bought the team and then moved it to Texas in 1971.

 With ‘Baseball’,  as he was called, in the lead, we would buy the cheapest tickets and then head for seats directly behind home plate where Baseball, a former stadium usher knew every employee in the park. A sawbuck changed hands and we had the best seats in the house.

Then with a wave Baseball would summon a “beer man” tip him a twenty and strongly suggest that he might want to spend most of his day returning each time from the beverage commissary with the whole of his inventory and straight to us, our bargain  being a quick sale and rapid turnover of his product and an equally strong tip to boot.

Among our company that day was one James “Cagey “Thomas, who earned most of his living at that time as a bookie. He not only booked all the “action” on the “Avenue” from the old Neptune Grill to the Tune Inn and including the notorious Julie’s, he was also on the payroll of the House of Representatives as an electrician and would with a laugh suggest that his duties were to turn on the lights at the Capitol each day and then turn them off. What Cagey really did was book bets for members of Congress, one or two Senators and all the staff on the Hill who were so inclined.

Cagey had a distinctively deep fog horn voice and his conversations were laced, when not laying the line for the day, with stock expressions like: “I’m so poor I can’t pay attention.” But he was all business when booking whatever action was available, his opening gambit: “Who do you like in the Sox Yankees game tonight? They’re 3 to 2 on the under.”

It was the former Chief Justice Earl Warren’s mild misfortune to have purchased seats in the row immediately in front of us on this particular Sunday. He’d been retired for a year from the Supreme Court and was now the former Chief Justice of what was and is still considered the most influential and most liberal court in American history. Warren was accompanied that day by three of his grandchildren. He had spent the last years of his time on the court fighting off and surviving impeachment from a growing number of politically active blocs, chiefly the right wing crazies of the John Birch Society.

There were regrettably too many Americans who were not at all pleased with Brown v. Board of Education, which opened the doors for an equal but not separate education, some of whose ramifications we feel today in our schools. And the Miranda ruling limiting police powers in arrests had further angered more than a few constituencies who felt that criminals were already coddled enough. These were among the Court’s decisions. And Warren’s achievements.

While Cagey was born and reared a good ol’ boy in the hollows of West Virginia, he was not unfamiliar or intimidated with the powerful and famous, privy to at least one of their vices. And even as case after case of beer arrived at Baseball’s bidding, Cagey remained casually and comfortably solicitous of “Judge” Warren, as he repeatedly called him. It was “Judge” this and “Judge” that. “Hey, Judge,” he would ask, his fog horn voice making him sound like one of the hot dog vendors who occasionally hawked our section, “Do the kids want a dog?”

And each time he would reach for the thick wad of bills required of a man in his line of work. “No thank you,” came the reply at first, but Cagey was persistent and gradually,  unlike a huge number of powerful groups in America, wore “Judge” Warren down. Cokes were purchased and passed along through the aisle to the “kids” as Cagey called them. I think a pennant or two. Likely some cotton candy and boxes of cracker jacks. This went on inning after inning . “Enjoyin’ yourself, Judge?” Cagey would inquire.

“Judge”Warren would smile and nod ever so politely. Cagey, a simpler man and throwback to another time, wore a satisfied smile as he occasionally turned to the game. For the day he was Warren’s patron and benefactor, taking good care of the former Chief Justice as he spent his day with the grandkids.

Nine innings and the game ended. Over time my memory has faded and by the ninth I clearly was feeling the effects of the day long consumption of beverages. But I dimly recall that once again the Senators lost. Chief Justice Warren’s grandchildren turned and thanked Cagey. The Chief Justice in turn was profuse in his appreciation if still a bit puzzled.

We in turn,  as did the last day of this season’s crowd at RFK, an era ending,  headed for the exits. The aisles crowded immediately and we could see for a brief moment, steps ahead of us “Judge” Warren with his grandchildren, small hands linked to a man who had and would so change America. Cagey gave one last wave. One child responded.

It was then that I found myself on the concrete steps side by side with Cagey. My own head was clouded with the fading excitement of the day. “Say, Cagey,” I said, “you were quite the friend of our former Chief Justice.” Cagey shook his head with a rueful half smile, responding, “God damned Communist sonofabitch,” took another step and disappeared himself under the stands.