The Quantum Blues Quartet Comes Home to Philadelphia at SOUTH

Sunday night, September 13, and I already know what the room at SOUTH is going to feel like before a single note gets played. Every table in the Jazz Club sits at a slight angle toward the stage, which is not an accident. Somebody at the bar is going to order a bourbon they cannot quite pronounce yet. And then four men who have played with Ornette Coleman, David Letterman, Living Colour and Pharoah Sanders, in four completely different corners of the same musical century, are going to sit down together on Broad Street and make something that has never existed before. When the last set ends, it will never exist again either. I have booked a lot of nights in this room. I do not think I have ever typed a lineup quite like this one. Paul Shaffer, Tisziji Munoz, Jamaaladeen Tacuma and Will Calhoun are coming to Philadelphia as the Quantum Blues Quartet, and I am, by any honest measure, geeked out about it.

Four Musical Universes, One Room in New York

The Quantum Blues Quartet did not start as a band. It started as an afternoon. In 2024, Paul Shaffer called his old friend and, by his own account, longtime mentor Tisziji Munoz and asked him to put a session together in New York. Munoz had never played with drummer Will Calhoun or bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma before that day. There were no charts. There was no rehearsal. After some cordial introductions, Shaffer has said, the four of them simply sat down and played all day, with no preparation and nothing written out. What came out of that room became Quantum Blues, released through the Ropeadope label in April 2025. Munoz has spent his career arguing that the blues is not a chord progression, it is a feeling, and in a conversation about the record he and Shaffer describe the whole day as something closer to intuition than arrangement, four people reading each other too quickly to explain how. I would just call it four musicians who trusted each other enough to show up with nothing prepared and leave with an album.

The Piano Player Everyone Thinks They Already Know

Say the name Paul Shaffer and most people picture one image, the piano, the sunglasses, the grin, thirty three years spent leading the band behind David Letterman, first as the World’s Most Dangerous Band on NBC starting in 1982 and later as the CBS Orchestra once the show moved networks in 1993, running all the way to 2015. Before any of that, Shaffer was part of the original Saturday Night Live house band from 1975 to 1980, and in 1982 he picked up a songwriting credit alongside Paul Jabara on It’s Raining Men, a song that still fills dance floors decades later. All of that is true and none of it is the whole story. Shaffer was born in Toronto in 1949, and while he was studying at the University of Toronto he started playing with a guitarist named Tisziji Munoz, years before either of them had any idea where their careers were headed. Shaffer has written about Munoz as a mentor and a formative influence on his musical life ever since. The television years came later. The friendship, and the education, came first.

The Guitarist Who Taught Him How to Listen

Tisziji Munoz was born in Brooklyn in 1946, and a childhood wrist injury left him playing everything as a single unbroken line, a style that became his signature, less like a guitarist showing off and more like someone thinking out loud in real time. He served in an Army band before his discharge in 1969, then spent much of the 1970s working in Canada, which is exactly where a young Paul Shaffer found him. Munoz went on to play in Pharoah Sanders’ band and later recorded with him directly, building a career mostly outside the major label system, releasing most of his catalog through his own imprint. Talking about Quantum Blues, Munoz describes the blues as an emotional experience rather than a musical form, something you feel your way into rather than a structure you follow. He talks about silence the way other musicians talk about tone, as the source the sound comes out of rather than an absence of it. He is, by every account I can find, still playing exactly the way he wants to play, on his own terms, more than five decades in.

Philadelphia’s Own Bass Monster

Jamaaladeen Tacuma was born Rudy McDaniel in 1956 and raised right here in Philadelphia, which is the detail that makes this whole night personal for a lot of people in this city, not just me. He was still a teenager when he started performing with the organist Charles Earland, and it was through that circle that producer Reggie Lucas introduced him, at nineteen years old, to Ornette Coleman. Tacuma became the electric bassist in Coleman’s Prime Time band, playing on landmark recordings including Dancing In Your Head, Body Meta and Of Human Feelings, and in April 1979 he appeared with Prime Time on Saturday Night Live, years before Shaffer’s own run on that show overlapped with anyone in this lineup. Tacuma still calls Philadelphia home, and he built the Outsiders Improvised and Creative Music Festival here to celebrate what he describes as the innovators, mavericks, interlopers, refugees and strangers who shaped Black music history and culture in this city. Sunday’s show at SOUTH is presented in collaboration with that festival, which means this is Jamaaladeen’s own creative project bringing this lineup home to the city that raised him.

A Drummer Who Has Played Nearly Everywhere That Matters

Will Calhoun was born in the Bronx in 1964 and trained at Berklee College of Music, where he later received the Buddy Rich Jazz Masters award. He is best known as the drummer for Living Colour, the band whose 1988 hit Cult of Personality won two Grammy Awards for Best Hard Rock Performance. What the Grammys do not capture is the range of what he has done since, sessions and stages with B.B. King, Wayne Shorter, Public Enemy and, notably, Pharoah Sanders, the same saxophonist whose band once employed Tisziji Munoz. That overlap is not something I am reading into the lineup after the fact. It is simply where these musicians’ careers had already crossed, decades before anyone put them in a room in New York and asked them to play without a plan. Calhoun brings rock’s force and jazz’s patience to the same kit, sometimes in the same measure, which is exactly the kind of player who belongs in a quartet built on trust instead of arrangement.

SOUTH, the Bynum Brothers, and the Room I Get to Run

I should say plainly who built the room this is happening in, because I did not. SOUTH Restaurant and Jazz Club opened in October 2015 at 600 North Broad Street, brought to life by Robert and Benjamin Bynum, two lifelong Philadelphians who had already spent 25 years in jazz and dining by the time these doors opened. Their first club, Zanzibar Blue, ran for seventeen years starting in 1990, first on 11th Street and later inside the Bellevue, and it is the reason a certain generation of this city still measures every jazz room against it. SOUTH took over the old Route 6 seafood space and rebuilt it with a bottle tree and leather furnishings, engineering the jazz parlor so that, as Robert Bynum has put it, every seat faces the stage. Under 75 seats, dinner served before and during the set, the whole room built around the idea that you should be close enough to actually watch someone’s hands. I run this room as general manager. The Bynums built it, the same way they built Zanzibar Blue before it, and I get to be the person who decides which nights matter enough to build a whole evening around. Sunday’s show, presented in collaboration with the Outsiders Improvised and Creative Music Festival, gets two sets, 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.

No Rewind Button

I keep coming back to something that has nothing to do with any of these four men individually and everything to do with why a jazz club exists at all, and why Jazz Philadelphia spends its time fighting to keep rooms like this one open across the city. You can listen to a record for years, learn every phrase on it, and still not know what a musician sounds like when nobody has told them what to play next. That only happens live, in a specific room, on a specific night, in front of specific people who showed up and sat down and ordered a drink they will forget the name of by Tuesday. There is no rewind button on Sunday night. There is no algorithm deciding what happens next between Paul Shaffer’s hands and Tisziji Munoz’s guitar. There is just four people who have spent decades, between them, learning how to listen to each other, doing it again, in a room with under 75 seats, two blocks from where the Bynum brothers first taught this city what a jazz club could hold. I will be somewhere near the back, trying very hard to look like a guy who has this under control. I already know I won’t.