Morris concert will celebrate Jersey Jazz Society's 50 years as 'Holy Grail' of local jams

New Jersey has always been an underrated hotbed of jazz music, with bred-in-the-Garden State legends including Count Basie, Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan and Les Paul.

And for five decades, savvy fans have known some of the best jazz in the U.S. can be found in the Morris County area.

"Morris County was and is the best of both worlds," said Cydney Halpin, president of the Jersey Jazz Society, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary Sunday with a concert at Saint Elizabeth University in Morris Township.

Headlining the show will be two "living legends," Halpin said: bassist Bill Crow and tenor saxophonist Houston Person. "Liveability and hot jazz. That was our founding mentality."

Top players in the early decades of jazz, of course, found steady gigs and fame in New York and Newark. But they also found more affordable living conditions farther west from the Hudson, Halpin said.

During the early 1970s, New Jersey jazz fans would gather at the Chester Inn to hear Chuck Slate’s Traditional Jazz Band or at the Hillside Lounge, also in Chester, to see fabled players like cornetist "Wild Bill" Davison, alto saxophonist Rudy Powell or guitarist Al Casey.

In October 1972, Jack Stine, a Pluckemin liquor store owner and passionate jazz fan, organized these informal gatherings into regular concerts and the New Jersey Jazz Society was formed.

"The guys who were the impetus of this were all top-drawer New York musicians who would hang out at the Chester Inn," Halpin said. "They didn't live in Manhattan. They all lived out here."

The jams attracted a regular audience thanks to Stine, "who was such a jazz fan and had all the connections from the city," Halpin explained. "He would bring the cats out from the city to come and play here. A lot of them lived here because it was a bedroom community. Everybody could commute to the city, but lived out here. And the Chester Inn became the go-to place."

The jams were also "quite the boozefests," Halpin said. "When you listen to the old recordings, all you hear is the tinkling of ice cubes in glasses. It was quite a club affair."

Years later, Stine produced a series of popular jazz concerts at Waterloo Village in Stanhope. "People tell stories about the concerts at Waterloo and their eyes glaze over. It was like the Holy Grail of jazz."

Jazz Society's new home in Madison

The Jersey Jazz Society later found a regular home for their events at the Shanghai Jazz restaurant and nightclub in downtown Madison. Now, they have taken up a residence of sorts nearby at the Madison Community Arts Center, part of a mixed-use redevelopment complex in Madison that opened in 2018.

"We are now holding what we call our Jersey jazz Live concerts, which are usually Sunday affairs," she said. "It's a jewel of a space."

Programming at the Madison Arts Center was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but Director John Pietrowski said they have hosted two well-attended Jersey Jazz society concerts and look forward to more. Recent renovations there include the installation of LED theatrical lighting.

"We are looking for a whole variation of programming here and having jazz here is a perfect fit for us," said Pietrowski, long the artistic director for the former Playwrights Theatre in Madison.

Playwright's Theatre's longtime home at the shuttered Green Village Elementary School was razed in 2016 to make way for the Madison Place complex, which includes residential units atop first-floor retail shops.

The versatile community center space can be configured for intimate, "black box" style theater presentations or larger performances including dance companies and the Madison-based Baroque Orchestra of New Jersey. Table seating can accommodate 70 people. A standard theatrical configuration can fit up to 150 and 100 more on days when the glass wall of doors can be opened to the patio.

"It's a great fit," Halpin said. "We sold out."

Halpin said the MCAC space also will allow the society to stage future multidisciplinary presentations.

"We can more easily do an actual lecture, jazz and dance, jazz and art," she said. "We've also started a new initiative which is giving us the opportunity to showcase young performers. New Jersey is incredibly strong with young jazz music programs."

For its 50th-anniversary event, the society went back to Saint Elizabeth, where the nonprofit has staged larger concerts in the past at the 500-seat Dolan Performance Hall.

Crow and Houston will be joined by two co-musical directors, saxophonist-flutist Don Braden of Boonton and Princeton pianist Larry Fuller. The lineup also includes cornetist Warren Vaché Jr., drummer Jason Tieman, vocalist Lucy Wijnands, keyboardist Leonieke Scheuble, trumpeter Liam Sutcliffe, vocalist-composer Jimmy Waltman, bassist Sam AuBuchon and guitarist-composer Derick Campos.

Tickets for Sunday's anniversary concert, which runs form 2 to 5 p.m., are $35 for adults ($40 at the door) and $15 for students ($20 at the door). Ticket and other information can be found on the society's website, www.njjs.org.

William Westhoven is a local reporter for DailyRecord.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from your local community, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: wwesthoven@dailyrecord.com

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This article originally appeared on Morristown Daily Record: Jersey Jazz Society marks 50th with Saint Elizabeth concert