Вестминстерская пресвитерианская церковь в Вашингтоне сохраняет традицию джазовых вечеров уже более 20 лет

It was to the Southwest Waterfront that I moved when I arrived in D.C. in 2001; I lived there for my first four and a half years here. There was no Wharf (or at least no The Wharf™), just a few homely brick restaurants lining the river. No commercial strip along 4th Street SW, just the ’70s relic Waterside Mall, whose few remaining inhabitants included a CVS, a Pizza Hut, a video store, and a genuine escalator to nowhere. In the time since, the neighborhood has been completely revamped, rebuilt, and reallocated to a gentrified population. But one constant has remained, serving as a beacon for the Southwest community and as a microcosm for the community itself. I speak of Westminster Presbyterian Church—or as it’s more popularly known, the Jazz Church, for the jazz concerts that have taken place in the sanctuary every Friday night since 1999. “When we first started, we always talked, and still to this day keep talking, about core values,” says Brian Hamilton, Westminster’s pastor since 1996. “The number one thing that we were after when we first started was building community.” It was in that spirit that he and Dick Smith, a singer and former NFL player, founded the series. It booked straight-ahead, easily accessible jazz (the kind that Southwest’s elder residents, at the time a large part of its population, grew up hearing on the radio) by local talents at affordable prices. (Ridiculous, even: Westminster charged $5 a head all the way up to 2020; post-COVID realities have forced them to up admission to $10.) It was music for the people, and it became a gathering place for the people, too. A Friday night at Westminster was a de facto community meeting, with spectators of all ages, races, and socioeconomic statuses. Its constancy and accessibility helped to create genuine worry when it became clear that both Hamilton and Smith would not be continuing in their stewardship of the program after 2026. Hamilton, who in recent years has been confined to a wheelchair, is retiring in September after 30 years at the church’s helm. (He was co-pastor with his wife, Ruth, until 2022, when she retired.) Smith doesn’t hold a formal office at Westminster from which to step down, but he is now in his 80s. “I got a lot of physical challenges that I’m up against,” he explains. “I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone.” (Indeed, Smith, who often takes the stage to announce artists at Westminster and sometimes to sing a number with them, now has to use a walker to do so.) Which is to say that even to the most optimistic and devoted regulars at Westminster, it was obvious that things could not go on as they were. Yet a cloud of uncertainty hung over the future of the beloved program. It did so right up until Aug. 17, when the details were finalized. Paul Carr—the tenor saxophonist who also runs the Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival, the Jazz Academy of Music, and the jazz program at Howard University, in addition to performing regularly throughout the area—will, along with his wife, Karmen, take over stewardship of Jazz Night at Westminster. “I’m honored to be a part of it,” Carr says. “Jazz in Southwest is an institution. It’s been around for 27 years. What Pastor Brian and Dick created, I don’t think it exists anywhere else in the country. It’s very unique, what it does for the community and the musicians as well. We’ve got try to keep their vision alive.” While Presbyterian polity means that the reverend will entirely withdraw from church affairs (so that his successor need not operate in his shadow), Smith, let us acknowledge, is not fully exiting the picture. “He’s gonna move into sort of an emeritus role,” says Hamilton. “He’ll be in the loop for as long as he’s able, and fortunately he’s able to do that right now, so that’s good.” Smith, however, seems to acknowledge that, for practical purposes, he’ll be on the sidelines. “I’m glad they said that I’ll be doing something,” he says. “But that will really just be trying to make sure it keeps going on, and knowing when to step out, because we need to pass it over to the next generation.” The next generation here includes both the musicians and the audience as well as those organizing them. Many of the longest-tenured members of both camps, the ones who turned the church’s community-building experiment into a civic institution, have passed on, especially in the past few years. “I came through with a lot of guys, and we buried a lot of guys,” says Smith. “But somebody’s got to carry it on, even though the music is constantly changing. But that’s what jazz does anyways, and we’ve got to give it a chance. To promote the different improvisations that you can do, which is a good thing.” “We’re experiencing sort of a generational shift in jazz culture,” adds Hamilton. “So many people who started coming here 27 years ago were people who were raised with jazz in the home, and so they were—as the kids say about technology—they were jazz natives, as opposed to people today, who are jazz immigrants. And the challenge for us is to figure out how to cultivate that next generation of jazz lovers, jazz players, and patrons.” It’s hard to imagine a person in a better position to do that than Carr. Not only is he an educator and a festival impresario—jobs that require him to develop both new musicians and new audiences—but he’s a regular and popular performer at Westminster in multiple bands. (Most recently, CarrKeys, the band he co-leads with alto saxophonist Marshall Keys, performed on Aug. 14.) “We know that once you make jazz accessible to people, regardless of what age, what background, they like it,” says Carr. “I’ve been doing it for years with young kids. They like it, and some of them are obsessed with it, as we can see because some of them are now playing out on the scene. And I think that the old school, ‘native’ characteristics need to be in the mix. I deal with younger people all the time, and I do have some of those old-school qualities. I know those secrets. I have my pulse on the modern musician and student, and on the listener as well.” The real question, though, is whether Carr has the bandwidth for the program, given all the other things on his already substantial plate. “It’s crazy,” he agrees with a chuckle. “But the Jazz Academy has been doing the same thing for a long time, and the festival, it’s gonna be the 18th year coming up. So what I’m saying is that these other things I’m doing, I have a pretty good handle on them. And Howard, after a really good first year, seems to be manageable—knock on wood. I just need to not go sideways, and Howard will be fine.” Carr’s bookings will begin appearing on Westminster’s schedule in October. As important as the who and what he books, though, is the simple fact that he is booking. That matters for the music, for the community, and for Southwest D.C. overall. “I believe that Southwest has forever been living in the shadow of [1950s-’60s] urban renewal,” says Hamilton. “Old Southwest was blighted, it was poor, and the infrastructure was nonexistent. But it was culturally very, very rich. There were clubs, there were bars, there were theaters, there was all kinds of stuff down here. When urban renewal came along, they wiped all that clean, and they rebuilt the physical infrastructure, but they never did anything about the cultural infrastructure. “And I always thought that was the greatest achievement Jazz Night offered to this community was to contribute, along with Arena Stage and a few others, to a vibrant cultural and artistic life in Southwest.” According to Smith, the next generation deserves their chance to take the reins. But, he adds, “they also need to know that they stand on the shoulders of guys who came before them, and respect the genre of the music, the contributors … And then be able to promote it, because this is a jazz town.” In that sense, he says the Carrs, who he describes as wonderful people, are the perfect stewards. “They work with the community and the town, and they try to keep the music pumping. It couldn’t be a better fit.”