Musings on Edinburgh’s Jazz Bar

Written by Meenakshi Nirmalan

Author's Note: This piece was written following The Jazz Bar's closure in April 2024. The venue reopened in July 2024, under new management.

I never thought I’d get so into jazz. The genre is often talked about in one of two ways: either as pretentious, overly-intellectualised, and inaccessible, or as essentially elevator music without real expression or meaning. Jazz takes the musical language and fashions a new syntax, a new musical order; yet both of these rhetorical approaches dismiss it as simply a random assortment of notes, slapped together to form meaningless noise. 

Despite this, I’ve always been fascinated by the culture surrounding jazz. I first visited Edinburgh in April 2022. I strolled around aimlessly, trying to get a feel for the city and decide if I wanted to move there later in the year. During my visit, The Jazz Bar on Chambers Street caught my eye. Though I didn’t visit it then, I made a mental note to come back. Months later, a week before starting university, I watched The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). Although the primary focus of the film isn’t jazz, the scenes that I remember most vividly are jazz related. In a sequence near the film’s beginning,  Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is surrounded by jazz records, listening to them while blindfolded. Ripley tries to guess the artist, playing into the idea that jazz must be studied intently to be truly understood. Then, I remember the Italian jazz bar scene. I loved the aesthetic, the neon lights, the shine of the brass instruments against the darkness of the underground bar. Moreover, this scene depicted the community found in jazz, which rings true.

I remember the first time I went inside Edinburgh’s jazz bar. Like The Talented Mr Ripley, the interior of Edinburgh’s jazz bar captivated me; I loved the brickwork, the black and white portraits on the wall, the intimate stage space, the stairs descending, illuminated by a red neon sign. It became one of the few constants during my first two years in Edinburgh. I became a regular, both listening and playing at jams. I wanted to experience a variety of artists, to experience different subgenres of jazz, absorbing it all. Until I started playing jazz, I didn’t view the genre the way I do now. And there’s so much about jazz that will continue to elude me. After all, I only have a drummer’s perspective. Had I been a saxophonist, a bassist or even a non-musician, I’m sure my lens into jazz would be vastly different.

I’ve played drums for a number of years, but only played rock when I started. I briefly dabbled in jazz during my last year of school, but  didn’t take it seriously - I felt it was more effort than it was worth. Switching to jazz drums is humbling. You have to take everything you know about the instrument and completely disregard it: forget what you know about beats one and three, the kick and snare being the driving forces of a song. Rock’s not going to help you play jazz. The ride cymbal and hi-hat are now your main focus, the emphasis is on beats two and four instead. At university, I decided to take jazz more seriously. I bought a copy of John Riley’s ‘The Art of Bop Drumming’ and Ted Reed’s ‘Syncopation for the Modern Drummer,’ the latter of which I’m still working through. I developed my limb independence and four-way coordination. I learned how to feather the bass drum, particularly when playing Big Band charts; I learned to comp with my left hand on the snare, then comping with the bass drum in addition. Acquiring the fundamental vocabulary of jazz mirrors the genre’s fundamental process: knowing all the rules to music, to then be allowed to disregard them. Some consider this the genre’s most pretentious slogan, implying a pseudo-intellectual, even condescending self-conception among jazz musicians. I would say otherwise. Learning to play jazz-adjacent genres such as Bossa Nova, jazz-funk fusion and Afro-Cuban drum beats opens the horizons of music as a whole, pushing it until it breaks into something entirely new. Jazz is about dialogue. When I joined Edinburgh University’s Big Band, I wasn’t as good as I’d like to have been on day one, nor am I currently the drummer I want to be, but that doesn’t bother me. Like the left hand and right foot, playing separately and reciprocally, you learn on the job from the musicians around you. 

Jazz drumming requires a softness, yet a certain intensity, a degree of precision, and stamina. It’s hard to get that balance right. I certainly struggled at first, as I hadn’t developed my muscle memory. You have to go slow to go fast. Painstakingly slow. That’s not just a fact of drumming, but everything else in life. Reduce the tempo, isolate specific limbs, before you bring everything together. When I was younger, I found it dull to practise rudiments. I didn’t enjoy warm-up exercises and hated the sound of metronomes. However, I find both meditative now.  Jazz education is often portrayed as inaccessibly elite. Take Whiplash (2014) for example: studying jazz is portrayed as emotionally and physically taxing. Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) destroys himself, in the pursuit of jazz drumming. There’s certainly merit in studying jazz formally. The rigour and discipline undoubtedly accelerates your progress, especially if you aspire to perform at a professional level. However, that’s a relatively modern way to study jazz. Not only has the art form only been around for a century, but it hasn’t always been studied in conservatoires - most of it was initially played by ear. In Billie Holiday’s autobiography, Lady Sings The Blues, she outlines how she picked up jazz by hanging around jazz bars, listening to the sound, taking it all in. The drummer, Tony Williams stayed in, practising hours a day. He would head straight to the kit, without bothering to get dressed, and just play. Jazz education can look vastly different, depending on what your end goals are. 

Practise your single stroke rolls and double stroke rolls: the fundamentals of the drum kit. If you can’t play these consistently at a fast tempo, forget about improvising, forget about soloing, forget about trading fours. Once you have this down, tackle six stroke rolls: a key facet of jazz drumming. R L L R R L. Keep it swinging. Try accenting the first and last notes of the phrase. Then play around with the phrase, accenting different notes. Keep it on the snare, whilst keeping your feet going. Then throw it around the toms, the cymbals, utilising the full kit. And just like that, you’ve unlocked a myriad of soloing possibilities; jazz drumming doesn’t seem so intimidating anymore. However, listening to jazz albums and playing along is a must. Some of the most formative albums for me were Miles Davis’ Seven Steps to Heaven, Clifford Brown’s Study in Brown, Chet Baker’s Chet Baker Sings, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Bill Evans’ Nardis, in addition to jazz-adjacent artists, such as Herbie Hancock, João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim. I listened to all of the above meticulously, albeit only over the last two years. Still, it feels like a lifetime ago and evokes nostalgia.

The Jazz Bar shut down around a month ago, which prompted me to write this essay. That space played a crucial role in the life of the city. I went to the final jazz jam of the semester earlier this week. It feels like the end of an era in many ways; I’m also leaving Edinburgh next week and will not be back for over a year. The closure of The Jazz Bar is undeniably significant but with enough time, I’m sure the city will find alternative methods of showcasing the genre. The city is filled with potential and I look forward to seeing what happens next. People will adapt and work their way around this, which is, in essence, the philosophy of improvisation. In Just Kids, Patti Smith recalls a conversation with the playwright Sam Shepard, where he told her: “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another”. If one way of looking at jazz is intellectual and expansive, the other is the laid-back, smooth stream of sound, particularly associated with West Coast jazz. It’s pretty hard to play jazz when you’re not relaxed; it’s hard to do anything, when you’re not relaxed. I say, just improvise during periods of change and uncertainty. Float through life, with a vast, rich palette to work with. Create whatever you want. Bounce ideas off the people around you, and vice versa. Use structure to guide you, but deviate from this, should you wish to. However, you always have a home to return to; you’re grounded by the head of the tune, that innate familiar melody. You’ll find your way back, one way or another.