The Art of Resilience: How a musician and his band kept their sound despite months of lockdown
By: Rj Pisani
Tags: Covid Diaries, Art, Music, Hope, Jazz

The Art of Resilience: How a musician and his band kept their sound despite months of lockdown RJ Pisani Jan 21·7 min read

Why that means a post-COVID world shouldn’t scare you so much

If you were to ask Wayne Tucker how the past year has been for him, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell that you were talking to someone who had an international tour cut short. You wouldn’t know about the nine months of shows that got canceled. You definitely wouldn’t be able to tell he had the momentum of a very successful 2019 — a year that saw halted national tours with the sensational collective Brass Against and weeklong residencies at New York’s iconic Birdland Jazz Club with his own band, Wayne Tucker and the Bad Motha’s. Instead, you’d likely get the sense that you were talking to a creatively charged artist who’s been having a lot of fun and if you asked how he’s managed to find that in a year so full of loss, he’d probably rock back with laughter and then launch into a story about his keyboardist.

Live entertainment has always been entwined in the culture of New York living. For the thousands of performers that make up the cultural heart of the city, those performances are also a lifeline. Few genres are as dependent on the relationship between live audience and player as jazz.

For many of the musicians, nearly a year without live opportunities has been career-altering. For trumpet player Wayne Tucker, a working musician who has toured with the likes of Grammy-caliber acts, such as Taylor Swift, Elvis Costello, and Cyrill Aimée, you’d expect the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown to be no different.

However, despite the seemingly endless list of setbacks brought on by the virus, Wayne and his band still found a way to get their sound out. In the grips of some of the bleakest days of the pandemic, they took up residency at the entrance of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, touching off months of performances that gave the community a welcomed sense of normalcy and provided the band with some creatively formative experiences.

It all came together one day while Wayne was home working on the trumpet. He got a call from his drummer Diego Ramirez asking if he wanted to go set up and play in Prospect Park. “He just wanted to go outside and play, and I was down.” For the band, it was a welcomed escape amidst the dark throes of late spring in NY.

“The first time we played, we were just kind of chilling, like we played, but we also just chilled a lot.” In between songs, they couldn’t help noticing how receptive people were, and by the time they wrapped up, they had made more money via donations than they would typically make playing a club.

After seeing the response, they quickly decided to set up shop at the entrance of the park in Grand Army Plaza. They gathered all the gear they would need, created a schedule and a list of subs that could fill in if any of them couldn’t make a particular day, and with that, the five-piece consisting of Wayne’s brother Miles Tucker on saxophone, David Linard on keyboard, Diego Joaquin Ramirez on drums, Tamir Shmerling on bass, and Wayne on trumpet were back to work.

On any given night walking into Prospect Park, you could find a socially distanced crowd held captive by Wayne and his band. Most people dance in place to the steady mix of Jazz standards and originals being supplied with the occasional breakdancer or variety type street performer jumping in, feeding off the energy of their performance.

For months, they played three to four nights a week. Updating their fans via Instagram, they started to build a following with consistent performances and absurdly long, nonstop sets –at times more than three hours long — offering people in the community a rare respite from the various social and emotional rollercoasters of the pandemic. Eventually, even the New York Times took notice, providing a couple of shoutouts and a front-page cover photo of Tucker and the band playing.

Their biggest performance came on November 7th when crowds converged on Grand Army to celebrate the Presidential election results. Joined that day by a dancing Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, Wayne and his band were there offering their music to a much-relieved audience.

For musicians that have each performed on some of the biggest stages in the world, you would be excused for assuming street entertainment was not their most formative experience. However, as Wayne recounted some of the moments over the summer, I could see him filling with the same energy he found on many of those nights. The more he talked, the more his enthusiasm for music revealed of himself within his craft.

Now 34, he said, “I feel like I found my sound around age 27. I’m always refining it every day, but I feel I can just be me, and I know how I want my sound to be presented. I feel like in this period, I found that as an artist,” a sentiment that he seems to continuously strives to deepen.

“Lately, I’ve been going through classical music. I’ve been reading through some of the most difficult things to play. When they tell you every note, rhythm, volume, articulation, feeling, or whatever. When they give you all these parameters, and you can adhere to them but still find a way to be yourself, I think that’s the highest level of artistry.”

This speaks to the passion he has for the trumpet and his music, but it also captures what Wayne and many others have been able to do throughout the pandemic: Find a way to make it work within the confines of some pretty disruptive parameters.

Throughout the pandemic, much has been made of the fate of New York City. Countless doomsday analyses have been written highlighting the end of everything once loved about the place. This type of panic is no stranger to the Jazz world, which has seen a different justification for why the genre is definitely dead with every new generation of music.

When I asked Wayne for his take on this, he shrugged it off, acknowledging it was something he’s heard a lot about but never found relevant. “In some sense, to me, Jazz is a genre, and in some sense, it’s a mindset, and I think I have the mindset more than the genre. The mindset being you’re open to things happening. You’re open to improvising in music, and I don’t think that’s ever going to be dead.”

The devastation the pandemic has caused in the city and everywhere else is nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. While there are many unanswered questions about how things will settle in a post-COVID world, it is apparent to everyone that things are going to be different.

One of the more refreshing parts of talking with Wayne was his grounded sense of optimism. Instead of the standard self-help jargon on mindfulness or the power of always staying positive that we’ve all grown accustomed to hearing, he was quite clear about the challenges facing everyone, artist or not, but rather than trying to will them into something else, he seems to have comfortably stepped into himself. Through his music, he found trust in his ability to handle any change, good or bad, in a way that will sustain him.

How to find what Wayne has been able to find through music is a more relevant question than if any urban sprawl will survive, and it’s a question that artists of every medium have been answering for a long time. The diminished opportunities and high cost of living will deter many, but this is not a new phenomenon. Nowhere in this country is it easy to be an artist, but even still, they find a way.

So, if there is one prevailing message to take from Wayne’s story and the thousands of other artists like him who have endured through all of this despite some truly impossible circumstances, it is to relax. Though much remains unknown about the future, no matter what happens, artists will create, people will listen, and the rest of us will find a way to make it work, regardless. As Wayne said, “I’m gonna be right here playing.”

if you like to know more about Wayne and his band, you can follow them here Wayne Tuckers Instagram and be sure to keep an eye out for his new album coming out soon.