It was dinner time at Mahoney’s Irish Pub. While the house band counted off the popular jazz standard “Night and Day,” Charlie Koons ’29 decided between a burger and the pot pie. Gabi, at first a stranger who was new to the area and to this jam session, joined our little table near the front, and said good things about the pulled pork mac and cheese. She then struck up a conversation with Evan Sweitzer ’26, a recent Vassar College graduate. For a moment, our conversation stopped in admiration of the pianist’s crunchy left-hand chord voicings, as the drummer, from across the bandstand, met his bandmate’s statement with a grin.
This was the opening set at the Poughkeepsie Jazz Project, a weekly jam session occurring every Tuesday evening at Mahoney’s. Ben Basile, a local musician and educator, is the event’s chief organizer and house bassist. He plays big shows like an upcoming concert on Sept. 26 at Kaal Rock Park and also teaches music at Dutchess Community College. Still, Basile always has time for this jazz jam. As of today, the project has hosted over 500 sessions, a statistic that Basile keeps track of.
The typical jam consists of musicians who swap in and out, calling different tunes for them to arrange and play on the spot. Many musicians regard jams as an integral social and educational aspect of the culture—an opportunity to meet other musicians, trade musical sounds and deploy what they have practiced. Some of the greatest innovations in jazz occurred at late-night jams. In the ’40s, for example, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk and Dizzy Gellespie—among others—pioneered the sound of Bebop at Minton’s Playhouse, a club in Harlem, New York City.
Basile wanted to create a space where musicians could gain experience, as well as one that could stick around long-term. “The only way that the jam session would last was if it had been accessible, so that beginners could always come,” explained Basile. According to this bassist, accessibility became the titular design of the Poughkeepsie Jazz Project.
On the night I attended the jam, after the house concluded their set, Basile consulted a sign-up sheet, calling me and Sweitzer to the bandstand. The sheet is a tool which serves that goal of accessibility. For one, it keeps things fair, tracking attendance so that everybody gets to play at least two tunes. “Part of my jam session,” Basile told me, “is that everyone gets treated equally.”
Basile continued, “People look comfortable when you call them and you know their name.” Indeed, Basile seemed to know a lot of names around the venue. While Sweitzer and I were on the bandstand, ripping through “Well You Needn’t,” he floated between tables and the bar, chatting with those ready to play and those ready for dinner. He made it back to the microphone stand to shout out the jam’s current configuration of musicians.
Of course, a jam’s learning curve remained, full of expectations and etiquette. But Basile did what he could to relax it, as well as that parallel social aspect. After all, I have heard only one rule stated aloud: “Don’t trip on the double bass.” “Ben’s One Rule,” Basile and I agreed, would also make for a pretty good song title.
Koons went up next, borrowing that upright bass himself. The first tune they played was “Corcovado,” a bossa nova piece written by Antônio Carlos Jobim. The lyrics and the harmony are a little somber, but mostly sweet: “Quiet nights of quiet stars / Quiet chords from my guitar / Floating on the silence that surrounds us.” On the balcony above me, a group of elementary school-aged kids, out with friends and family, danced along.
As is customary for bass solos, the band quieted down for Koons as he began improvising over the chord progression. In these ensembles, interaction happens in all kinds of ways, from call and response between different instruments to the group in unison intensifying the texture unto a musical climax. Here, as Koons climbed the fingerboard, one of those seemingly telepathic moments occurred, where the drummer synced exactly with Koons’ melodic rhythm.
Wynton Marselis, the artistic director of Jazz at the Lincoln Center, renders such interactions as forms of civic engagement. The push, pull and compromise between you and others, he argues, gives this kind of jazz a democratic character.
Koons, though, was much more nonchalant about the whole thing. After he came back, I complimented his playing, but he only admitted this: “I was staring at my food the whole time.” Koons, for his credit, understood the intended vibe of Mahoney’s, where the complicated is performed casually.
Compared to Marist University and Dutchess Community College, Vassar seemed the least represented. Even though I find Mahoney’s to be pretty well-known across campus, this session seems to have floated under our radar. As Basile explained, “There are great bands and musicians everywhere, but you just have to look for it. If you don’t look for it, you’re just not going to find it.” I would say that Basile does not give himself enough credit in this statement. According to him, there was no public jazz jam in the Hudson Valley before 2012. In establishing and continuing the Poughkeepsie Jazz Project, Basile and his cadre of local musicians played an active role in creating that, which I can now go and look for.
To Basile, running the session is a form of community service. He studied music at Dutchess Community College and then SUNY New Paltz. As a working musician, he is often traveling, and has played on every continent—except, I think, Antarctica. With an average of 130 shows per year, and with an estimated 100 days of travel, he is still, somehow, always at Mahoney’s on Tuesday, ready to call people by their name. He has seen students, even some that attended the same colleges as him, come to the jam every week, study jazz and go off to play in their own bands. “I have experienced their journey,” he told me. “That’s probably one of the most rewarding things about it.”,
Right before we headed back to campus, Koons sat in on one more tune: “Just Friends,” lyrics about heartbreak swung at an upbeat tempo. In a place like this, those words left me pleasantly confused. Entwined in the act of music making and listening, distilled into dinner time at an Irish pub, people there were certainly involved in something greater than friendship. At the same time, it was quite straightforward. Basile’s opinion is simply that live jazz is the most fun that us college students can have in Poughkeepsie on a Tuesday night. Though community certainly goes further than fun, it remained casually amazing, nonetheless.