On a recent frigid Saturday night, snow still sticking to the ground, I approach Sharp 9 Gallery. A velvet curtain swings open to reveal an intimate space—rows of candlelit tables and chairs, a petite bar in the back—that serves as a love letter to New York City’s Village Vanguard.
For the past decade-plus, Sharp 9, founded in 2012, has been a locus of the Durham jazz scene. It’s a robust scene, one bolstered by NC Central University’s jazz program and the greats that have come out of it, but one that can often fly under the radar—especially to people who are new to the city or younger residents, like me, who don’t know where to start.
At Sharp 9, I sip a generous glass of Pinot Grigio and munch on chips as the room fills with a gregarious crowd that has the camaraderie of a high school homecoming game. Up first: a performance by the Joseph Foglia Quintet. Foglia, an Enloe High School graduate now working in New York, leads the band with Triangle native Luca Colonna on piano and Killian Winn on bass. Local powerhouses Al Strong on trumpet and Devin Fuller on drums complete the group.
The lively two-set performance mixes Foglia’s compositions with jazz standards.
“Al got all the music the day before,” Foglia tells me. “I went over to [Devin]’s house and we practiced a little bit …. We were supposed to have a rehearsal but because of the snow, we didn’t. It was our first time playing all of it.”
That surprises me, not just because of the quality of the music but because of the musicians’ familiarity—onstage, they literally stepped back from the spotlight to cheer one another on. Foglia returns to the Triangle for this kind of collaboration, he says.
“It’s healing for me to come back here and play because of all that positivity that exists within the music,” he says. Fittingly, the finale is “Where I Come From,” a piece Foglia composed for Raleigh.
The following week, on Tuesday, I’m at Kingfisher for an evening of live music, grateful for a reserved table as the bar grows cramped. The Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Trio kicks things off with free jazz that fills the low-ceilinged lounge. It is an incredible wall of sound. Clemons, on drums, leads Tinashe Blu on saxophone and Kevin Beardsley on bass.
Clemons’s residency at Kingfisher began in 2019 shortly after the downtown bar opened. The gig was initially pioneered by the late NCCU professor and jazz great Brian Horton, who died in 2023.
“When [Horton] transitioned I spoke with the owners and I told them I would like to keep this residency going in honor of something that he started,” Clemons shares.
Despite leading the weekly jam session for years, Clemons hesitates to call himself a jazz musician.
“I’ve said ‘jazz’ more times in this interview than I’ve said in the last 10 years,” he says. “Because I don’t really say jazz. It’s music. I say ‘straight-ahead’ more than anything.”
“Straight-ahead,” Clemons explains, is his mind-set that encourages improvisation and blends genres: his first gigs were with a blues band, he’s toured with an electronic DJ, and he’s currently the drummer for the reggae band Burning Spear and jazz-soul-groove band Soul Understated, a collaboration with Mavis “Swan” Poole.
His leadership guides the trio into a tantalizing sound that draws young musicians, including Foglia, who have brought their instruments tonight, eager to join the jam session that Clemons calls fellowship.
“It’s not about me or about the trio playing all night,” Clemons says. “Come to play. Come to learn from each other. That’s really what it’s about.”
My final Bull City jazz stop was intended to be the Eagle’s Nest Jam at Missy Lane’s Assembly Room, an NCCU-led event. But with the semester just beginning, the event was canceled as students were still preparing. I reached out to Thomas Taylor, the organizer of the almost-year-old event, and was treated to a sneak peek: Central’s Jazz Combo rehearsal.
Taylor’s reputation as a rousing educator precedes him (Clemons describes Taylor as having “really made me grow as who I was”), but it was another thing entirely to be there. In a rare sequence for North Carolina, it had snowed again and Central had just reopened from suspended operations three hours earlier. The basement of Edwards Music Hall, though, was energized.
It’s their first rehearsal of the semester, and the students work on Michael Mayo’s cover of Miles Davis’s “Four.” Taylor intentionally chooses modern arrangements of jazz standards like this to engage students.
“Do you like it?” he asks the room after playing the track. The students respond with a resounding yes.
”It’s something new that they get really attracted to,” he says about the song choice. “And it helps them understand the history, right?”
An award-winning performer, Taylor has played and taught worldwide. In his own words, though, he’s humble—“[I’m] just a guy from Elizabeth City. I try to play drums as good as I can. I try to help others play good music.”
Missy Lane’s, an elegant, Georgian-style building on Main Street, opened just over a year ago with the mission statement “To expand the audience for jazz and improvised music.” So far, it’s lived up to that goal. Each week is packed with events from concerts and wine tastings to films with live instrumentalists, all with jazz front and center.
The Eagle’s Nest Jam, held every Thursday at Missy Lane’s, is more than a social event for college-age performers—it’s a community-building engagement between students, alumni, and supporters. It’s fitting for NCCU, which Taylor calls “the nucleus” of Durham’s jazz scene. This bears out, even just in the piece: Horton founded the Kingfisher residency, Fuller from Foglia’s Quintet is a Central grad, as is Clemons, and Strong is on faculty.
“Our jazz combo is the reigning, two-time winner of the Monterey Jazz Festival HBCU Challenge, and Monterey is the oldest, longest-running jazz festival in the world. As well as our jazz ensemble, [they’re] the reigning national champion of this collegiate competition called the Jack Rudin,” Taylor notes, adding that NCCU is the only historically black college to be invited.
After all, these were just a sample of the jazz events regularly happening in Durham, not to mention the Triangle itself. And jazz, as Taylor puts it, is a genre that invites discovery—beckoning you down staircases and into classrooms, seeking out new notes, histories, and figures.
“The thing I’ve learned over the years when it comes to jazz,” Taylor emphasizes, “[is] if people really want to know, they’ll find out.”
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