First Decade: Jazz at Lowlands

If the era-defining gig for me prior to the pandemic was the Blue Note China Jazz Orchestra, than the corresponding post-pandemic gig would obviously be Jazz at Lowlands, formerly known as the "greatest bar in the world" according to a previous iteration of their website (that moniker seems to have disappeared in a recent rebranding exercise).

According to my records, I've played at Lowlands over 150 times (the majority of which took place in late 2021 through late 2024), and it's unlikely that I'll play more frequently anywhere else in the coming years. The current runner up appears to be Bar Bayeux, where I've played over 75 times (most of those were the happy hour sets with Peter Watrous, so depends who you ask).

For the hundreds of hours of bandstand experience (and easily upward of a thousand of hours clocked at 543 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn), I have the bar's owner, John Niccoli, to thank. John graciously wrote the liner notes to The Fate of the Tenor, which was recorded live at the bar in June 2022, and I've released two more titles that were recorded live there (lofi at lowlands, the first and second volumes of which are out now).

But before I met John, it was through Walter Stinson that I realized that this place existed in the first place. Walter began bartending there within the first few years that I moved to the city, and I just started hanging out there more as one does. The first time I broached the idea of playing at the bar with Walter, it seemed like a long shot: "A jazz band, here?" But we made it happen in November 2017, and that was a trio with Walter and his old SUNY Purchase roommate, David Frazier Jr., on drums. We were so successful that we were invited back to play the Lowlands holiday party a month later. 

In 2018, the gigs basically stopped; I did two one-off gigs, a trio in January 2018 and a quartet in March 2018. But in April 2019, I started something else: the Happy Trio, a monthly gig that was an excuse for me to play with great rhythm section players from around the city. I called it "Happy Trio" because we played during happy hour and because I only called people who I thought would make for a joyous occasion. My one restriction for myself was to never repeat rhythm sections, and to date there have been 30-plus Happy Trios from 2019 through 2025, with over 30 different bassists and 30 drummers featured.

We kept doing Happy Trio monthly up until March 2020, when something weird happened (the gig was scheduled for March 16, 2020, but we called it off just a few days before). Then a little less than a year and a half later, Happy Trio returned in July 2021 as outdoor dining and to-go cocktails were all the rage in the city. In August 2021, I brought my quartet there, and then John asked me to keep the music going each week because it was a better vibe to have live music in the bar than to not have it, and that's how my weekly gig there got started.

I stopped carrying the drums over from my apartment to the bar and left them in the basement next to the shelves of liquor, and I bought a Mark bass amp from my friend Simon Willson that's still being used just about every week there. I brought over 5 green Manhasset music stands that I had bought for $5 each during the lockdown (closeout sale) and a bunch of cheap stand lights, and then suddenly we had a backline. 

The gigs were originally posted on a Tumblr account, which I have since lost access to, but now John posts them directly to the calendar on the Lowlands website (along with all the other programming there, which includes karaoke on Wednesdays, various DJ nights, and a pretty diverse mix of live music spanning jazz, improvised music, rock, and electronic music). 

Tim Berne, whose music made a deep impact on me in my first few years in New York, also lives nearby and started playing there a few years after I began my weekly gig. The lede of his 70th birthday profile in The New York Times opens with a shout-out to Lowlands, and the bar features prominently in the article without any mention of John or the work that preceded Tim's playing there, hence this blog post. 

I've wanted to organize my archive of the recorded gigs I've done at Lowlands, which basically dominate my YouTube channel, but that'll likely be a piecemeal effort for a later date.