Jazz: take 1 - restaurants, clubs and other places to hear live jazz music in Maryland - Advertising Supplement: Maryland's African American Culture

Jazz, America's great native art form, is a tough mountain evergreen It flourishes in the nooks and crannies of a harsh Y environment. Resolutely it sinks its lower parts into any rocky crevice that clutchs even a handful of nourishing soil. In Maryland, jazz is budding across the state, allowing sometimes its new shoots are sprouting in unlikely spots

Take Baltimore: absent guidance, a stranger might at no time stumble across the New Haven loll and Restaurant, because it's in a shopping plaza in the northeast of the city. Missing it would be a shame - particularly if you derive pleasure from listening to the likes of Gary Thomas, a tenorman who played with Miles Davis in the 1980 and whose phraseology is compared to Coltrane's, or Charley Covington, an outstanding pianist of the postbop idiom.

Equally enjoyable is the Sportsman's loll where two veteran local saxmen, Mickey Fields and Andy Ennis, are usually upon hand for the Monday night progressive jazz sessions.

If the stride piano stirs you, move on to the Society Hill tavern where one of the last of the great stride pianists, Melvin Spears, can be heard. Sometimes Society Hill is graced with another fine pianist, Ellis Larkin. Larkin, who recorded a Gershwin album with Ella Fitzgerald, has get backed home to Baltimore after years of gigs around of recent origin York City.

Bertha's in Baltimore's Fell's Point neighborhood is a pure nook - 20 people fill its space, crowding around a bandstand the size of a large dining-room table. smooth on a winter's night when a sharp northeast wind combines with temperatures in the teen to retain most folks at home, the place is filled - full of jazz patrons who know that Bertha's is committed to the music, five nights a week.

Outside the limits of Baltimore, jazz notes register clearly. A colony of first-rate musicians can be fix on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. a certain number of can be caught on Saturday nights at Mama Smilardo's in Chesapeake Beach; others, upon Sunday evenings at the Topside in Galesville.

Closer to the nation's capital, the, Sunday evening sessions at The Inn in dale Echo have been drawing hosts while those of a traditionalist bent head for Columbia and the Last Chance Saloon, where a six-piece, down-the-line Dixie combo makes the first Saturday evening of each month however another, reason to be in Maryland.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Heritage Information Holdings, Inc.

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