Emmet Cohen’s Jazz Forges Connection
In early 2020, the brain trusts of music’s Big Three triopoly of Universal Music Group, Sony, and Warner Brothers were dealing with yet another disruption. And while their business had a history of challenges—arguably dating back to James Caesar Petrillo’s recording ban of 1942—long gone were the industry’s salad days, before file sharing, illegal downloads, streaming, and now COVID-19 brought about what some insiders have described as a tsunami of change. Whether you were a recording or a performing musician that year, the pandemic presented a unique existential challenge in terms of connecting with an audience, performing music, and, perhaps most importantly, making a living.
For Emmet Cohen, the thirty-three-year-old Miami-born pianist and organist who was returning to his Harlem apartment following a gig in Winnipeg, Canada in March of that year, it was a time of great uncertainty. “We all came home, and everything was cancelled,” recalls Cohen from a Miami-area hotel room where he is taking solace following a busy two-weeks aboard a jazz cruise. “The world was hurting in a dire way,” he says. Having watched a Facebook Live concert streamed from the home of Grammy-award winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant and her pianist partner Sullivan Fortner during the first week of the pandemic, Cohen, along with his long-time friend and bassist Russell Hall, got talking about the current musical crisis. “Russell turned to me and said, ‘let’s just do what we do best.’”
Photo by Gabriela Gabrielaa
What they do best, of course, is perform extraordinarily high-level jazz music that both imbues a youthful buoyancy and continued relevance to this century-old American artform, while exhibiting more than a reverential nod to yesterday’s masters of the genre. “It is old music played with modern sensibilities,” states composer, bassist, and prolific YouTube creator Adam Neely. Buoyed by his conversation with Hall and re-energized to continue concertizing—pandemic be damned—Cohen cobbled together a rudimentary camera setup and, turning his Harlem living room into a makeshift broadcast studio, he, along with Hall and drummer Kyle Poole, streamed “Live from Emmet’s Place Volume I,” on YouTube on March 30, 2020. “That first episode was seen by more than forty-thousand people,” Cohen says. Affirmed by the early success, the Cohen trio did it again the following Monday night, solidifying what has since become an important weekly New York tradition.
“Over time the technological quality improved,” Cohen says, noting that the team has expanded to include a sound person and a videographer. Soon, the show ballooned both in ambition (expanding the trio to include guest soloists representing a who’s who of New York’s jazz greats) as well as reach: Cohen’s YouTube channel now boasts nearly 170k subscribers with weekly streams garnering fifty thousand plus views.
I am certainly not the first to point out the historical, musical, and geographic connection—of “Live from Emmet’s Place” to the 1920s Harlem Renaissance “rent parties”—right down to the Edgecombe Avenue Washington Heights neighborhood where Cohen currently lives. Originally held during a time of prohibition, economic downturn, and the end of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic that ravaged the United States, rent parties were Harlem neighborhood events that featured music, bootleg alcohol (perhaps most famously in the form of bathtub gin), and a celebratory atmosphere designed to uplift and galvanize a weary public, while raising money for the party’s host to pay their exorbitant rent.
Photo by Gabriela Gabrielaa
In more recent times, with political uncertainty and inflation, not to mention a worldwide pandemic contributing to a sense of existential dread, the commonalities between both twenties (of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) have come into even tighter focus. Amazingly, jazz music is once again providing a soothing elixir for these troubled times.
“Here we are, 100 years later,” says Cohen, “playing in some cases the same repertoire during a time of lockdown in roughly the same location where Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and others lived and worked.” Then, just as now, it was the parlor room piano that took center stage when it came to finding, fostering, and uplifting communities. Whether it was James P. Johnson, Willie “the Lion” Smith, “Fats” Waller, or, today, Cohen, sitting masterfully at the helm, the living room jazz piano became a site of hopeful change and possibility during two historically difficult times separated by a century.
Connecting Cohen and his current contributions to historical precedents underscores the deep reverence the young pianist has for the established masters of this music. Like most aspiring jazz players, Cohen had listened to, and learned from, older musicians—such as pianist Shelly Berg, whom Cohen cites as an influence and with whom he studied at Miami’s Frost School of Music. But, he explained to me, it was as a twenty-two-year-old, sitting on the bus from New York to Washington D.C. next to tenor saxophone great Jimmy Heath that things crystallized. “I got the call to play piano for a New Year’s gig with the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni Big Band,” remembers Cohen, “and that bus ride was the moment for me when I knew I wanted to be in the presence of those who had played with Billie Holiday, John Coltrane and other jazz masters as much as possible. Hanging out with these musicians, talking with them, playing, and going out to clubs like Smalls and jamming until 4 a.m. felt like the purest thing that I could be doing at that time.”
Shortly after this experience, Cohen embarked upon an ongoing project to combine video conversation with recorded CDs to bring together different generations in jazz for opportunities of musical mentorship, interaction, and swing. Now into its fifth volume of a set of CD releases, Cohen’s “Master’s Legacy Series” on Cellar Live and Bandstand Records features George Coleman, Ron Carter, Benny Golson, Houston Person, and the drummer Jimmy Cobb, among others, playing in unbridled loose recording sessions with musicians sometimes six or seven decades their junior. Performing repertoire that spans both decades and the various musical styles that are contained under the “big tent” that is jazz, this ongoing recording project is does double duty in being both musically satisfying and historically important. “Each time,” elaborates Cohen on the importance of bridging the generational divide and learning from such established players, “I get a little piece of them.” Further, “the exchange can work both ways,” he says. “The mentorship and lessons are passed down to us, to which we in turn offer vitality and affirmation.”
Interestingly, when discussing this multi-generational project, Cohen uses the word “sacred” to describe the profundity that the initiative holds for him. And although he uses the term to mean reverential, rather than overtly referencing its religious connotation, it does provide an opening for Cohen to expand upon how his Jewish faith and culture play an ongoing and meaningful role in his musical life. “The Jewish idea of tikkun olam is to repair the world,” saysCohen, who describes his connection to Judaism as more cultural and tradition-based than religious. “And as my journey in jazz has taken me all around the world, I’ve noticed big parallels between jazz and Judaism, as both are about uplifting those within, and adjacent to, the community.” Referring to jazz and Judaism as his “two religions,” Cohen undoubtedly will be back behind his piano this coming Monday night, uplifting people as he, his trio, and their fine guests know how to do so well.
