The Saugerties Sunday Jazz Session
By Peter Aaron

“Shoop-ba-deeeeeeee! Doo-bop. Bah-dee-bop. Dee-bah. Deebah. Bah-deeeeeeeeeeeahhheeeeahhh! Bada-boo—doop! Bahdee- dah. Dee-dah. Dee-dahhhhhhhhh!”

It’s a Sunday night at the Pig Bar & Grill in Saugerties and all is right in the world—well, at least in the world of Hudson Valley music. Irrepressible vocalist Pamela Pentony is once again on stage at 110 Partition St., scatting away like a joy-filled nightingale as she leads the area’s only weekly jazz jam session, just as she has since the fall of 2003. When the song is through it’s time to change up the players.

“How about someone new on bass?” Pentony announces. “Is Alan Murphy here? Let’s get him up here!” Lew Scott steps down and turns the instrument over to Murphy, and one tall, rock-solid bassist takes the place of another. “‘Monk’s Dream.’ Whaddya think, how about that one?” says Pentony. She snaps her fingers, counting off the tricky, angular classic. As the evening flows on, new musicians drop in and trade places with those on stage roughly every two or three tunes. Even Pentony succumbs to the night’s kinetic spirit, giving up the mic to a visiting singer.

Like jazz itself, the shifting lineup is constantly surprising and totally different every time. It regularly features the region’s topmost professional musicians, and gives up-and-coming players the chance to work with seasoned greats in a friendly, supportive atmosphere. In the time before jazz was something you could study in school or pick up from instructional videos, musicians learned their craft chiefly on the bandstand. These days, however, the number of venues offering a similar chance to witness what has been called America’s only indigenous art form being reshaped and reinvented in such a consistent setting is at an all-time low. So in addition to being a local institution and featuring great music, the free session is a member of an all too endangered species. To see it thriving like this is enough to make a jazz lover do the Lindy Hop in the middle of Main Street.

But until just recently the session’s future was bleak and very uncertain. The Pig’s former incarnation, the Chow Hound, which had been the session’s home since day one, closed last summer when mammoth rent and operating increases forced the owners out of business and put the music out in the cold. “I tried to find somewhere else to do it, tried some nights at a few other places,” says Pentony, who also teaches music at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson and has an extensive background in New York and London theater. “But nothing was the right fit. The vibe is all-important, and those other places just didn’t have it.” It looked like the Sunday sessions were through.

Enter former Manhattan restaurateur Ed Novak, who took over the empty eatery in the fall and reopened it under its new name in late June. Since Pentony also lives in town, it wasn’t long before she stopped back in to the remodeled space and approached Novak about resurrecting the session. “We didn’t really have any steady music going on, so I decided to give it a try,” says Novak. “I’d never really been a jazz fan myself, but it turned out that I really like the stuff Pamela and the other musicians play. Lots of great, older standards— it’s really good music.”

So in a case of true and very welcome irony, as of June 28 the once dispossessed session is now safely back in its Partition Street crucible, which is open from noon to midnight every day and offers a wide range of beer, wine, and other beverages, as well as an eclectic and very affordable menu (most selections are under $10) of pub style food. And judging by the healthy turnouts on that and subsequent Sunday nights, patrons who had been starving for good eats and good music are happy for the return.

When it comes to the music in particular, no wonder. As stated earlier, these are some tough times for live music all over. But the scene in the Catskills has recently taken some serious hits. Among other venue losses in the last year, we count that of Woodstock’s Joyous Lake (once again), and West Saugerties’s long-reliable New World Home Cooking, which has put its regular music schedule on indefinite hold. Jazz spots in particular? Even harsher. The Red Onion, in Saugerties, has stopped its Sunday-night jazz sets; Backstage Studio Productions in Kingston ended its weekly jazz jam after only a few months; and Kingston’s long-running New Vanguard Series shut down due to lack of funding. While non-jam session jazz nights are still on the cards at a handful of other local establishments, the choices are far slimmer than
before.

Guitarist Steve Raleigh, a regular participant in the Saugerties sessions, knows firsthand about the difficult economics and logistics of running a regular jam. For five months, he oversaw a weekly session in his hometown of Newburgh until it, too, went under. “Keeping a session going is tough,” says Raleigh. “Jazz fans usually aren’t really the biggest drinkers, like rock or blues fans can be. So for it all to work it really helps if the bar owner believes in the music, too. And it definitely feels like that’s the case at the Pig.”

“And Pamela runs such a cool scene,” Raleigh continues. “She always calls great tunes, not the same old ones you hear all the time, and she’s a terrific host. Besides being an incredible singer, she has a really good rapport with the audience and she keeps the music fresh, from getting boring [sic]. She understands the musicians’ side as well as the audience’s side.”

It’s this kind of atmosphere that keeps not only musicians from the immediate area constantly coming back to jam, but also draws players from as far north as Albany and as far south as Westchester County (and even farther south; one recent guest was New York saxophone star and award winner Rob Scheps). The night sometimes even finds several of Pentony’s more serious Bard students sitting in to learn from such experienced masters as bassists Don Miller and Rich Syracuse, pianists Mike Kull and Francesca Tanksley, drummers Pete O’Brien and Jeff “Siege” Siegel, tenor saxophonist Howie Brown, and a long list of others. You never know who’s going to show up, but you can always count on that all-important good vibe.

“You can really feel the love in that room every Sunday night. But it’s not just me or the musicians that make the session so great,” Pentony says. “Or the audience, or the room itself. It’s the whole thing together. It’s really its own life force.”

And once you’ve been a part of that force—be it on or in front of the stage—you’ll wonder how anyone could ever let it slip away. The jazz jam session takes place at the Pig Bar & Grill, at 110 Partition St. in Saugerties Sundays from 7:30 to 10:30pm.