Between Past And Present In Ditmas Park, Roy Nathanson Comes Home
The first place saxophonist and Ditmas Park native Roy Nathanson heard the song “Nearness of You” was at the house on East 19th Street his father bought in 1957 for $5,000.
“Nearness of You,” written by Hoagy Carmichael in 1938, became a jazz standard, recorded by artists including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Norah Jones and even the Rolling Stones.
The song would also become the template for a week of performances by Nathanson at downtown jazz venue The Stone. “Nearness and You,” the album made from Nathanson’s June 2015 residency at The Stone, will be celebrated with an album release concert at Park Slope’s Littlefield on Sunday, April 17 at 8 PM.
“’The Nearness of You’ was one of the songs my father would play,” Nathanson recalled. “My mom was a classical piano player, and my father played in big bands but he had a construction business. He would come home and he would play all these old tunes on tenor, play them by himself after work. ‘The Nearness of You’ was one of those.”
“It wasn’t the one he played the most but it was one of them,” Nathan said of his father. “He played ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ and ‘Embraceable You.’ When he got Alzheimer’s, he jumbled those together.”
Memories of Ditmas Park
The song was just one of the memories that tied Nathanson to Ditmas Park after the first time he moved away.
When Nathanson was growing up here,
Ditmas Park “was the same sort of class where there were teachers and cops and firemen and the occasional doctor, not upper middle class like Beverly Road, but real middle class and working class. It was really all Irish, Italian and Jewish, and it was one of the first integrated neighborhoods in New York.
And also it was not the easiest integration, for no fault at all of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans who started moving in, but people got nervous — same old shit. We didn’t move out because of that, we moved out because my father lost the house. He had a little construction business and borrowed on the house, so we left and moved for a year to Manhattan, and then to Florida…
I always had really crazy, bad stuff happening in my family after that, so I always thought of this neighborhood: playing ball in the park and my mom was a music teacher, she was a substitute choral teacher at Midwood and she taught piano in the house. And I always remembered this as kind of Shangri-La.”
As Nathanson developed as an artist, the neighborhood left its mark on his work. “Spirits of Flatbush,” which he later recorded with the Jazz Passengers, “was one of the earliest pieces I wrote,” Nathanson said, “in like 1981. That piece of music was really about my Mom and her brother. I remember it and have memories of Flatbush. And when I wrote that, I didn’t know I was coming back.”
Even as Nathanson grew to be associated with the post-punk downtown music scene in Manhattan, he was building new memories of Ditmas Park.
“My brother died really young,” Nathanson said. “I was going to Columbia, or I had just dropped out of Columbia. I was 21 or 22; he was a couple of years older. I used to come down and say Kaddish at the synagogue on Church Avenue because that rabbi was the rabbi that bar mitvah’d me on Ocean Avenue, Rabbi Kohner, who was kind of a real character.”
“Only back then it was before the whole Jewish revival, it was like 1975. Somebody like me would never go into a synagogue. A lot of people moved out later, all the white people moved out. But in the early 70s it was still mixed, and no people, like East Village kind of people, were thinking of buying a house out in Ditmas Park. It wasn’t even called Ditmas Park. In my mind it was still Flatbush.”
Even with that rich history, Nathanson’s return to the neighborhood was hardly by design. “We lived in the East Village for a long, long time and I was caught up in that whole East Village thing, the Lounge Lizards and all of that for many years,” he said.
Return To Ditmas Park
“I met my wife and she owned an apartment on East 9th Street and we sold that. We were going to move to Park Slope like every other yuppie, but we couldn’t afford anything like that,” Nathanson remembered. “We saw the house and fell in love with it… I remember the neighborhood, coming back here, feeling like the actual architecture was my relatives.”
“When I come to the [Flatbush] avenue, everything is through that lens. I remember the Ebinger Bake Shop…the deli on the corner of the Plaza,” he described. “I remember everything about that. So all these places have these really, really deep emotional relationships.”
More than 15 years after his return to Ditmas Park, Nathanson is happy with the neighborhood he came home to. “What’s really cool about the neighborhood, and I think we all feel this way, is that it has the possibility of being a place that’s not just overrun, that’s impossible for poor people and working people to live. It can have a class mix, because if you have a middle class base, people can put their money in it.”
Nathanson finds the neighborhood at a tipping point that could go either way. “It’s incredible that Newkirk Plaza feels like a home for immigrant people, and poor and working class people. And Cortelyou Road is more of a home for “us” — you know, yuppie, whatever, artsy people who have moved around and are not uneducated.”
“But we’ve got to do it right, that’s the problem, it can grow out of control, Cortelyou Road could definitely go out of control. So far it hasn’t done that, to my mind,” he said. “We don’t want to lose this, a place where people can work and can afford to live.”
Common Memory
Balanced between his own past and present in Ditmas Park, Nathanson began preparing last year for a week’s residency at the Stone. Each night he played a series of duets with musicians he’d worked with regularly over four decades, welcoming a different guest for each performance.
“I was rehearsing with Arturo O’Farrill, and he was talking about how his parents, they would have all those people…[like] Charlie Parker,” Nathanson described, “drinking and staying up late at night and they would do ‘The Nearness of You’ at like 4 o’clock in the morning.”
Struck by the common memory, Nathanson decided to make the song the template for his week of performances at the Stone. “That was the only thing that we planned, everything else was free, except ‘The Nearness of You’ in every set.”
Collected on an album, the experience of hearing all the different versions in the context of extensive free improvisation is quite profound. The first recording of “The Nearness of You” is a duet with Nathanson on alto sax and vocals, and O’Farrill on piano. Unlike an original tune, where the artist’s inspiration is the genesis of the piece, the performance of a standard challenges musicians to deal with an emotional tone set by the existing melody and lyric.
“I think both for me and Arturo, since our parents are musicians,” Nathanson explained, “We’re jumping off not only from the melody, but from our emotional relationship to the melody, to the people who played that melody.”
“And so there’s so many different levels to the melody that it becomes — it just colors it, it colors a free improvisation. We are using our own emotional relationships to those songs in thinking about what the sound is,” he said. “Of course it’s adding material, harmonic and melodic material from the song. But more than that, it’s adding emotional juice.”
Producer Hugo Dwyer painstakingly drew a single record from the week of material that balances the repeated standard with some really adventurous free improvisation. Nathanson’s performances include musicians Curtis Fowlkes, Anthony Coleman and Lucy Hollier. The first improvised piece on the album features guitarist Marc Ribot.
For me, the emotional climax of the album is the final version of “The Nearness of You,” with Nathanson on alto sax and vocals, and Myra Melford on piano. It opens with the melody both bright and wistful, and moves to an improvisatory section that almost gives way to entropy and dissipation. The closing vocal sounds unmistakably like someone mournfully recalling the nearness of a now-distant lover, rather than living in the experience of that nearness.
“It’s definitely about loss more than anything, thinking about that, memory,” Nathanson said.
Nathanson is not only bringing the memories home to Brooklyn at the Littlefield show on Sunday; he’s scheduling a May 13 performance at Qathra here in Ditmas Park. The saxophonist said that he’s looking to do “some storytelling.”
“If it works out, I’ll try to keep a little bit of a Ditmas Park thing, because that would be a nice thing to do. It’s just crazy not to be playing here,” he added.
