Inside a soundcheck at SOUTH, the hour before a Philadelphia jazz room fills

The tables are set and nobody is sitting at them. Glassware catches the stage wash, napkins are folded, the little table cards are standing upright, and eight musicians are on the bandstand working through something the room will not hear for another two hours. Harry Hayman photographed that hour at SOUTH on North Broad Street, and the picture argues something he has made a habit of arguing: the part of a night that gets skipped in the telling is usually the part that decides how the night goes.

Why Harry Hayman keeps turning up before the doors open

A soundcheck is not a rehearsal and it is not a performance. It is the hour in which a group of players and a room negotiate with each other. Monitors get pushed and pulled, a horn finds out how much of itself is coming back, a keyboard player learns where the low end disappears, and somebody decides that a tune that worked last week needs a different tempo in this particular space. The general practice is standard across live music, but what it produces is specific to one band in one room on one night.

Harry Hayman has spent years around Philadelphia venues, and the thing he returns to is the talk. Not the playing, the talk. The short exchanges between numbers, the shorthand about who takes the head and who comes in on the second chorus, the small corrections that never get explained because everyone on the stand already understands them. That language is the craft, and audiences almost never hear it because by the time the audience arrives the negotiation is finished.

What SOUTH is, and what it came from

SOUTH opened on North Broad Street in 2016, the work of brothers Robert and Benjamin Bynum, who have been building Philadelphia hospitality rooms for more than three decades. The WHYY account of the opening described a family carrying a jazz tradition up Broad Street rather than starting one. The restaurant’s own history makes the same point about lineage.

The lineage matters because of what came before. The Bynums ran Zanzibar Blue, which opened in 1990 and later moved into the Bellevue on South Broad, and which closed in 2007. For seventeen years that room was where a great many people in this city first sat close enough to a working band to hear the count. When it closed, the city lost a particular kind of space: a room where dinner and a set were the same evening rather than two separate decisions.

SOUTH was built to be that again. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s restaurant critic reviewed it shortly after it opened and took the food as seriously as the music, which is the correct way to review a supper club and not the way most jazz rooms get covered. The building had been a Stephen Starr seafood house before the Bynums reworked it, splitting the floor so that a jazz parlor and a dining room could share a night without either one losing.

The wall behind the band

In the photograph there is a line painted on the back wall behind the bandstand, in a loose hand, attributed there to George Gershwin: life is a lot like jazz, it is best when you improvise. Whether Gershwin ever said it is a matter for someone else to settle. What is interesting is where the club chose to put it. Not in the entryway where guests would read it on the way in. Behind the players, facing the room, where the band has it at their backs all night and the audience reads it over their shoulders.

That placement is a small piece of design thinking about what the room is for. The sentence is aimed at the people who paid to be there, and the people it describes are standing in front of it with instruments.

The room in the picture

The frame shows the working version of the space rather than the advertised one. Stage lights are hung on a truss with greenery and candle lanterns strung through it. There is exposed brick on one side and tall windows on the other. A Roland keyboard sits centre stage, a Yamaha kit is set up to the right, a saxophone rests on a stand near the front, and a second horn player is reading off a music stand. Somebody is at the vocal microphone. Nobody is dressed for a show.

In front of them, three or four rows of tables are already dressed for service. That contrast is the whole photograph. Two crews are getting ready for the same evening in the same room at the same time, and only one of them will be visible when it starts.

What this has to do with the rest of the city

Philadelphia has a habit of talking about its jazz history in the past tense, and a parallel habit of underfunding the present. The city’s centenary programming around John Coltrane, catalogued by Jazz Philadelphia, has put more than thirty events on the calendar this year and has been a useful corrective. So has the steady booking work done by organisations like Ars Nova Workshop, which has presented jazz and new music here since 2000.

But a centenary is a year and a booking season is a season. A room like SOUTH is a payroll. It is a kitchen, a service staff, a sound engineer, a booking calendar and a bandstand that has to be filled several nights a week whether or not there is an anniversary to hang it on. Harry Hayman has made the point repeatedly that cultural infrastructure is the unglamorous version of cultural support: not the festival, the building that is open on an ordinary Tuesday.

Jazz Philadelphia exists in part to connect those pieces, because the musicians, the venues and the audiences in this city do not automatically find each other. The photograph of an empty room at soundcheck is a picture of that infrastructure working. Somebody paid for the lights. Somebody scheduled the load in. Somebody set the tables early so the band could have the room first.

The hour that does not get posted

Nobody photographs a soundcheck because it does not look like anything. There is no crowd, the lighting is half finished, and the musicians are wearing whatever they drove in wearing. It is also the only hour in which the night can still be changed.

Harry Hayman’s interest in these hours is consistent with how he approaches food systems, civic projects and arts funding: look at the part of the process that decides the outcome, not the part that gets the applause. On a bandstand, that is the conversation between players before anyone is listening. In a restaurant, it is the pre shift. In a city, it is the budget line nobody reads.

The set that follows will be the thing people remember. The hour in the photograph is the thing that makes it possible.