Like a shofar cry from the furthest end of the room, breath hits brass. Just one note, guttural, and the crowd falls quiet.
It’s an early autumn Saturday night in Center City, and a storm has caught people by surprise. With the outside coming down quick and heavy, the inside of a club just off Sansom hangs in a humid sort of haze. It’s a mixture of wet coats, wet hair and half-full vodka tonics, all condensed and stewing in the heat of close bodies and a thermostat set to spare no expense. Going-out hairdos have been left smeared across foreheads and dripping slick down necks.
And so considering the conditions outside, whether planned or not, everyone who enters Chris’ Jazz Cafe tonight is suddenly very happy to be here.
If just for the fact of the roof or the good–looking hostess, one gets the feeling the club was made for nights like this. Hunkered in with a drink and a date, the beer has never felt crisper and the company never warmer—or, in fact, younger. It seems the jazz club as much as any other, maybe one hosting a DJ and pulsing with 808s, will suffice for a night on the town.
The band begins to play.
On Saturdays nights—or Sunday mornings, depending on how you take a near–midnight start time—the jam is the main attraction. Jazz musicians from around the city turn up weekly and without fail, taking to Chris’ open stage after long days of work, school, or paid evening gigs. Here, the music isn’t concerned with money, the gray matter of sheet notations, or anything else: It’s just fun.
It is this, the music, that has kept Chris’ afloat for 34 years, the longest continuously running jazz club in Philadelphia history. Momentary gods of sounds and form, the musicians arch and twist and bellow out melodies in the way only jazz allows, raw, disconfigured to the brink of dissonant perfection, and with a swing to boot.
Now, the trumpet player reels on a bluesy riff, and then the drummer switches the groove. No one speaks, and no one misses a beat.
Seventy years ago at a club like this, it might have been John Coltrane up there, longtime Northern Philadelphia resident and member of the African American musician’s union, Local 274. This was when the organization was still based at the Clef Club—that is, before it was absorbed by 1960s desegregation efforts into the white union. It could’ve been Nina Simone too, another hallowed Clef Club member, taking to the stage either as piano prodigy or equally impressive crooning the likes of “I Loves You Porgy,” “Sinnerman,” and “To Love Somebody.”
It might also have been Dizzy Gillespie or Louis Jordan, before they moved to New York City. Or some native–born Philadelphian—saxophonist Jimmy Heath, organist Shirley Scott, drummer Butch Ballard, or iconic trumpeter Lee Morgan.
But tonight, there’s no Simone, Ballard, or Morgan. Tonight, the man with the trumpet is a 19–year–old engineering student at Drexel University, Aleko Nicolacakis.
He’s not the only one that doesn’t quite fit the jazz stereotype—perhaps one of a cool old guy, well dressed and lips pursed as if in a perpetual state of saxophone. To Nicolacakis' right, another Drexel student rips guitar. Two saxophonists from Penn wait in the queue just off stage; students who have bussed in from suburban colleges—Villanova, Haverford, Swarthmore—populate the audience. On bass is a junior at a local Philly high school. Interspersed among them are Chris’ regulars, musicians, mostly men, in their late 20s or 30s or 40s. They wear denim dress shirts and Eagles hats, or slacks with Jordans. Nicolacakis has on cargo pants and Timberlands.
Looking around, the audience rides slightly askew the trope as well. These are not jazz connoisseurs, they’re young white–collar professionals. They’re millennials on Tinder dates. They’re fairly racially diverse, and almost all are of comfortable economic means—at least comfortable enough to pay the $15 cover fee and a $100 check for a few rounds of drinks.
Expectations aside, there’s a certain, undeniable reality here. It’s a Saturday night in Philadelphia, and Chris’ Jazz Cafe is full.
Jazz—at Chris’, in Philadelphia, and in cities around America—is changing guards. Rather than simply dwindling out and dying off, as the popular narrative goes, it seems the form is actually just being taken over by a different breed: the young.
Take Nicolacakis, a 3rd–generation Greek kid born and raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles who discovered jazz watching the children’s television shows Little Bill and Sesame Street. At the behest of his mother, he took up classical piano lessons from a woman down the street, and so it was only later, in the hands of a well endowed public school system, that Nicolacakis finally found the trumpet. Playing through his local middle and high school jazz bands (and good ones at that—Agoura High School having sent players to Julliard, The New England Conservatory of Music, and Philadelphia’s own Temple University), he fell in love with the form.
In 2021, he won Outstanding Soloist at one of the premier high school jazz band competitions, Essentially Ellington. They’d never had a Nicolacakis, he laughs: “They butchered my name, [the announcer] couldn’t even get through it.”
Nicolacakis' family caught the bug, too. Now they go see acts back home in downtown L.A. and hit Chris’ on each trip back east. Both younger siblings, Kostaki (15) and Chloe Sky (13), play in their school bands too.
As for the family dog? It’s Dizzy. That is—Dizzy Gillespie Nicolacakis.
During the week, Nicolacakis interns down at the Navy Yard. But for those who make a living out of jazz here, the weeks consist of teaching, gigging restaurants and weddings, session freelancing, and tutoring private lessons—really, it’s anything they can get their hands on. Jazz is not exactly known for its lucrative or steady income; being a musician, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, is not for the faint of heart.
This is particularly true when there are college students and other young non–career musicians who will play gigs for next to nothing. Whether naive to pricing or simply eager to play, they’re driving prices down.
Even so, a unique sense of investment in the youth still reigns supreme among the more established players in the area. Arriving at Chris’ for the first time as a freshman, Nicolacakis remembers nerves being met with only encouragement from the regulars. “I turned around and apologized, and they were just like, ‘What? Why are you apologizing? We’re just having fun here.’”
This youth support manifests within organizations of institutional jazz as well, like in youth programs at the Clef Club, no longer home to the jazz union of Coltrane and Simone, but still a thriving center for jazz education, performance, and preservation of Black American culture in Philadelphia. Taking the Benjamin Franklin Bridge 20 minutes over the Delaware River into New Jersey, Jamal and Nasir Dickerson have been dubbed “Black education gurus” for their leadership at the Unity Community Center. Aimed particularly at young Black people in Camden, the Center provides high quality training in music composition, history, and martial arts. Deservedly so, they boast one of the best jazz band programs in the state. Programs at the Kimmel Cultural Campus and with the Philadelphia Youth Jazz Orchestra serve to bolster jazz education as well.
But for the broader public, those passing knowledge less pedagogically, Nicolacakis still confirms: “It’s super close–knit, really easy to make friends with everyone. Even though it’s small, everyone is super interested in bringing in more people.” He has even recognized fellow Chris’ jammers elsewhere in the city, once stopping at a construction site on his way to class, where he recognized a familiar face and a boombox blaring “Watermelon Man.”
Back at Chris’, someone calls “Nardis.” Uptempo. Even the young players, especially the young players, know the standards like this one. They’re students of the genre who, in place of growing up in its heyday, have studied hard to know the canon, to understand the music as if it were truly their own. Tonight’s players may not have known Lee Morgan or Butch Ballard or that superstar mid–20th–century moment of the Clef Club, but they do know “Nardis,” they know the etiquette of soloing and of keeping rhythm, and, most of all, they know how to play their instruments—and damn well at that. At least, as well as any of the old heads with whom they share the stage tonight.
Nicolacakis is no different. It’s clear how well he knows the piece from how widely his solos deviate from the song’s prescribed verse and chorus. His chest fills and he veers and swerves across the momentary universe of sound, coming up for air only to plunge further into a solo melody completely of his own creation. To truly understand a song in jazz is to know how to interpret it—to not just copy but be in conversation with it, taking in a melody only to spit it back out in a wonderfully rebellious and personal new way.
Perhaps for younger people, part of jazz’s particular allure is this spontaneity, the intrinsic draw to a form so ostentatiously authentic as to be, at times, imperfect, and always momentary, notes sung without hard copy backup, dissolving into cigarette smoke and club goers’ hot breath as soon as they are sounded.
It is also a naturally social endeavor, requiring musical conversation between players and audience members alike. A census conducted by the Jazz Audience Initiative found that a majority of jazz audiences prefer shows in informal settings, like clubs or bars, and that this preference was even stronger in young people. After all these years, jazz has survived as this communal act, this radically pure synthesis of humanity and sound.
Or as Nicolacakis puts it: “Jazz is special because you don’t need a conductor or anything like that. You just need someone who is confident enough to count off. And then you just let it roll.”
The players are sweating, the varied effect of stage lights and musical exhilaration visible on foreheads and brows, furrowed and focused.
The audience is an assorted lot of tapping feet and bobbing heads, the stage’s wailing horn and bass slap a welcome third party to conversations along a sliding scale from friendly to flirty (jazz being a particular romantic asset in the latter).
It’s this scene, the energy and ambience of the music, for which the crowd is really here. As opposed to the players, the audience’s comprehension of the musical technicalities at play seems low or average at best. That much is clear in some of the more offbeat snaps, variant claps, and questions like, How do they all know what to do? and What’s this one called? in reference to a Billie Holiday version of “All of Me.” With the exception of a few aficionados, most in attendance here enjoy jazz without knowing, or needing to know, what’s going on.
Maybe one doesn’t have to be an expert to feel the groove and be moved to dance or laugh or tear up. One doesn’t have to know scales and modes, the chord chart discrepancies between editions of The Real Book or what it means to swing a beat, to enjoy the fruits of all these things. Maybe it’s less about understanding the music than it is about simply enjoying it. Maybe it’s just about coming in to escape the rain, only to realize the brilliance of Chris’ on a Saturday night.
Still, as an appreciation of jazz is shared by more, and particularly the young, the question of its roots becomes once again pertinent. With context, historical knowledge, and technical know–how no longer an implicit requirement for jazz fans, how does this informational base get passed on? In favor of face–value enjoyment, is something else left behind, jazz culture rendered simply the next casualty of gentrification and time?
In the immediate sense, though, it’s an impossible question to answer, a future not visible in the lowlight glow of the club.
There is something to be said about the complete and utter devotion these young players have to the jam tonight, to the purity of the sound and the weekly ritual of it all. These kids aren’t old heads, and they can’t be. But despite it, they’ve all become diehards in their own way, educated, talented, and motivated enough to carry on not just quality jazz, but hopefully also a reverence for the rich history and system of human roots that gave it to them.
So ultimately, if Chris’ crowd and it's players tonight are any indication; if the work of the Camden Center, the Clef Club, and the rest have anything to do with it; if the census stats or the Nicolacakises' dog Dizzy can be taken as any sort of sign, it’s believable that jazz isn’t dying. It’s believable that it is being taken up by a new generation of devotees, of passionate, active participants rather than passive inheritors. There is no mystery here, there is a plain and evident truth: Jazz in Philadelphia is only getting younger.
