SOUTH x Unscripted Jazz Brings Its Fall Lineup Home to North Broad Street

I have run a lot of rooms and booked a lot of nights, and every so often a partnership grows into something bigger than the sum of its shows. That is exactly what has happened with Gerald and Roxanne Veasley at SOUTH. What started as a handful of Unscripted dates on our calendar has turned into the backbone of our live music program, and I keep having the same experience every time I look at what they have queued up next. I look at the lineup, and I do not need to talk anyone into coming. I just need to show them the poster.

A Partnership That Outgrew Its Own Description

Gerald Veasley launched the Unscripted Jazz Series at SOUTH in October 2015, working alongside his wife Roxanne, and the series has since presented more than 140 nights of music in a room built for exactly this kind of night. Roxanne brings her own administrative history to the partnership, having held senior management roles at not for profit arts organizations before she and Gerald began curating the weekly series together as partners. I want to be specific about what makes this different from a typical booking relationship. Gerald and Roxanne do not just fill a calendar slot. They bring in musicians some of our regulars have followed for decades and musicians most of the room is meeting for the first time in the same set, and somehow both groups leave talking about the same show. That is the thing nobody can manufacture with marketing. It has to be earned one Thursday at a time, and this partnership has earned it more than a hundred and forty times over.

I do not need to give anyone a speech about why live jazz matters. I have tried that approach before and it never lands the way the music itself does. What I can tell you is what has actually been happening in that seventy five seat room on North Broad Street: it has been full. Not full in the generous, rounding up sense a press release uses. Full in the sense that our staff has learned to expect it on an Unscripted night, and plans the floor accordingly. Gerald Veasley is now president of Jazz Philadelphia, the organization working to keep rooms exactly like ours open across this city, and I think that role and this series come from the same instinct in him: the belief that Philadelphia’s musicians deserve a stage that takes them seriously every single week, not just on the nights a headliner sells out.

The Room the Bynum Brothers Built

I should be plain about whose room this actually is, because I did not build it. SOUTH Restaurant and Jazz Club opened at 600 North Broad Street in 2015, brought to life by brothers Robert and Benjamin Bynum, two lifelong Philadelphians with more than three decades in this city’s hospitality world between them. Benjamin runs the kitchen as Executive Chef, building a Southern menu that is every bit as intentional as the music program next to it. Their first club together, Zanzibar Blue, ran for seventeen years starting in 1990, and it is the reason a certain generation of this city still measures a jazz room against it before they measure it against anything else. I have worked with the Bynum family for more than two decades now, going back to those Zanzibar Blue days, and I have managed SOUTH as general manager since the doors opened in 2015. When people ask me what SOUTH is, my honest answer starts with Robert and Benjamin, not with me. I just get to run the room they had the nerve to build.

That timing matters for one more reason this fall. October marks eleven years since SOUTH opened and since Gerald launched Unscripted inside it that same month, and the fall lineup treats one of its Thursday and weekend runs as exactly that kind of milestone. Eleven years of a for profit Southern kitchen carrying a real jazz program six nights a week is not a small thing in this business, and I do not take it for granted.

Kim Waters Opens the November Run

Kim Waters plays SOUTH with the Gerald Veasley Band across three nights, Thursday through Saturday, November 5 through 7, with two shows each night. Waters grew up in Harford County, Maryland, and started on saxophone young, pulled in by his father’s love of jazz and by the sound of Grover Washington Jr and David Sanborn on the radio. He made his solo debut in 1989 with the self produced record Sweet and Saxy, and since then he has scored ten number one hits and sold more than a million records, putting him among the best selling instrumentalists working in contemporary jazz today. He has shared stages and sessions with Al Green, Isaac Hayes, Patti LaBelle and Gerald Albright, and Jazz Times has called him simply one of the best saxophonists on the planet. A three night run from an artist with that kind of catalog is not something every seventy five seat room gets to book, and it says something about what Gerald and Roxanne have built that Kim Waters keeps coming back to this one.

Two More November Thursdays, DC to Connecticut

The following Thursday, November 12, belongs to Spur of the Moment, a jazz, funk and soul band out of the DC area that has been together for more than two decades and has earned a reputation as one of the top acts in the DMV region. The band has shared stages with Al Jarreau, George Duke, Patti Austin, Ledisi and Lalah Hathaway, and it has served as the house band for the Capital Jazz Supercruise for years running. I want to flag something small but real here, because getting names right matters to me. A caption on our own promotional material misprinted this band’s name, and I would rather correct that plainly than let it stand: this is Spur of the Moment, not any variation on it. When a band has spent this long building an identity in a scene as tight as the DC jazz and soul circuit, the least a host room can do is spell the name correctly.

A week later, Thursday, November 19, Chris “Big Dog” Davis takes the stage with two shows on the night. Davis is a keyboardist and producer out of Waterbury, Connecticut, who started piano at five years old inside his hometown church and studied classical composition at Yale before building a career that fuses gospel, funk, classical and jazz into one sound. He is a two time Grammy nominated writer and producer with fifteen Billboard number one smooth jazz records to his credit since 2008, and he has toured and recorded with George Clinton, Will Downing, Syleena Johnson and jazz vocalist Maysa. His catalog includes a long standing partnership playing keyboards for saxophonist Gerald Albright, which puts him inside the same web of collaborators that keeps circling back through this lineup. That is not a coincidence. It is what happens when a genre this size keeps hiring the same handful of musicians everyone else already trusts.

December Opens With a Holiday Concert and a Saxophonist Building Her Own Legacy

JJ Sansaverino brings his annual holiday concert to SOUTH on Thursday, December 3, with shows at 7 and 9 in the evening. Sansaverino is a Berklee College of Music graduate who has spent thirty five years touring internationally, blending smooth jazz with blues, R&B and reggae in a style critics have compared to Wes Montgomery and George Benson filtered through a modern club groove. He has shared stages with Maceo Parker, Victor Bailey, Gerald Albright and Randy Brecker, and he once performed at Sir Paul McCartney’s wedding, which is the kind of detail that tends to come up whenever his name does. His holiday shows have become their own small tradition on rooms like ours, and having him open our December run felt right.

The following Thursday, December 10, Jazmin Ghent plays with the Gerald Veasley Band. Ghent is a saxophonist and vocalist who started on piano at ten before switching instruments to compete with her brother, and she went on to earn a master’s degree in music from Tennessee State University. Her career took off after she won the Show Your Talent competition aboard the Smooth Jazz Cruise in 2014, and she has since built a catalog that earned her the 2019 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album for The Story of Jaz, along with the 2017 NAACP Image Award for Jazz Artist of the Year. She still teaches, which tells you something about how she thinks about the music: not just as a stage to fill but as a tradition to pass along, the same instinct that runs through everything Gerald and Roxanne have built with this series.

Remembering Grover Washington Jr, Closing the Year

The fall run closes on Thursday, December 17, with a tribute that means more to this room than almost any other date on the calendar: Remembering Grover Washington Jr, performed by musicians who actually played in his band. Bill Jolly served as Washington’s keyboardist, arranger and longtime bandleader after meeting him in 1987, and he has described Washington as an artist who truly came alive on stage. Gerald Veasley joined Washington’s band that same year, debuting on the album Strawberry Moon, and has talked about how Washington made a point of putting every musician in his group in the spotlight rather than keeping it for himself. Donald Robinson played keyboards alongside them and still plays in Veasley’s own band today, and percussionist Pablo Batista rounds out the rhythm section, a friendship among all four men that outlasted the band itself and has carried through the decades since Washington’s death in 1999. The night also features saxophonist Chris Farr, who heads the saxophone department at the University of the Arts here in Philadelphia and has performed, toured and recorded with Washington over a career spanning more than fifteen years. Watching musicians who actually shared a bandstand with Grover Washington Jr play his music together, in a Philadelphia jazz club, two blocks from where he once rode the Broad Street subway to his own gigs, is not something I take lightly. It closes the year the only way that felt right to me.

What This Lineup Says About the Room

I keep thinking about the throughline in all six of these nights, because it is not just star power. It is the fact that Gerald Veasley keeps bringing in musicians who have quietly shaped decades of this genre, whether that is a chart topping saxophonist like Kim Waters, a Grammy nominated producer like Chris Big Dog Davis, or the actual surviving members of Grover Washington Jr’s own band. Every one of them is walking into a seventy five seat room where the audience can watch a hand move across a keyboard from their table. Visit Philadelphia counts SOUTH among the city’s essential jazz venues, and I do not think that happens without a decade of nights exactly like these. It happens because a room decides, week after week, that the music gets the real commitment and not the leftover attention, and because Jazz Philadelphia keeps fighting citywide for the idea that rooms like this one are worth keeping open in the first place.

I am grateful to Gerald and Roxanne for trusting us with these nights and for the work that goes into making each one land the way it does. Tickets and full showtimes for every date are available through SOUTH directly. This lineup is the reason I still get a small charge every time a new Unscripted poster lands on my desk, eleven years into this thing. Philadelphia, get ready. We will see you at SOUTH.

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About the Author

Harry Hayman is a Philadelphia-based entrepreneur, music producer, and cultural advocate. Through his work with the Feed Philly Coalition, he explores and documents the creative, culinary, and civic life of a city he believes is one of the most inspired places in America.