The sounds of creativity pour out onto Williamson Street on the first Thursday of every month.
Those who can track the music down find themselves walking into Cafe Coda, eager to pay the $15 cover to hear more.
A soprano saxophone sings, filling the room, and allows the audience to disappear.
“This is called Night of the Improviser because anything can happen,” Hanah Jon Taylor, the jazz club’s owner, said as he stepped up to the microphone in between sets.
As soon as he says it, he swaps out the soprano and hooks a tenor saxophone, one of the four horns he’s playing that night, to his neck strap.
The drummer, Victor Campbell, takes off. There’s not an obvious beat or rhythm at first. He’s improvising.
After a minute or so, he slips into a consistent, countable beat, and the bassist, Aiden Steele joins in. It’s his turn to tell a story.
And just as the bass line begins to walk, Taylor steps forward with his tenor sax pressed to his lips and commands his horn to chant. It’s staccato at first. Short. Quiet.
The soft chants make way for a melodic solo, prompting a lengthy conversation between the three musicians, communicating through their instruments.
They speak to one another, and sometimes play all at once, building their music until it reaches a climax. At this point, the audience members who strolled through Cafe Coda’s doors are fully immersed. The artwork highlighting famous jazz musicians lining the walls of the club slips away. It’s impossible to notice anything but the music.
Jazz exists in Madison, and it has for a long time. But that doesn’t mean that it has always thrived. For jazz to truly take off in Wisconsin’s capital city, a lot of things need to go right. There needs to be engagement from young people, lots of venues and support from the Black community. Madison has had some of these pieces throughout history, but not all of them.
Eventually, the Cafe Coda musicians’ discourse is over. They told their story. The roughly 30 people sitting in red chairs scattered around the bar burst into applause.
Taylor should be overjoyed. He was getting to perform the music he loves, and has dedicated over 50 years of his life to– jazz. More, the club that he opened just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit is still scraping by.
But looking out into the audience, something didn’t sit right.
“Do you know how hurtful it is, how painful it is for me, to come into my own place, and I’m the only Black person in the place, playing Black music,” Taylor said.
Jazz is ‘Black music’
Jazz can be traced all the way back to the Antebellum period. Jim Crow ruled the south, and although emancipated following the Civil War, Black people were still forced into indentured servitude. It was illegal for them to be taught to read.
That’s when messages began to be passed through fields by way of song. These melodies were the first traces of the genre now considered to be jazz.
Jazz was birthed and made successful by Black people. At every stage of its innovation, the music developed through expression from oppression, forcing white Americans to confront their discomfort.
So, in Madison, Wisconsin, a city nearly 75% white in 2024, the jazz scene, at times, struggles to take off.
“There have been artists who have left this community because there was no support due to ignorance and fear,” Taylor said.
But jazz is not completely obsolete in Wisconsin’s capital city. And it’s also managed to have a rich history.
Monday nights at Cafe Coda
Every Monday at 7 p.m., a group of guys get together to play the bass, organ, drums and guitar. It’s Blue Mondays at Cafe Coda.
Someone, maybe an audience member, shouts out the name of a classic blues tune. The organ player, Todd Phipps, calls out a key, and the group starts to play.
After about an hour, the group takes a set break. Afterward, they’ll invite audience members to play any instrument alongside them.
Joe White, the drummer, steps to the microphone at the front of the club’s stage, a little out of breath. He just spent the last hour driving the 12-bar blues forward. He speaks directly to the crowd, which at this point hardly consists of 20 people.
“The whole thing we’re doing here is preserving places like this,” White said. “We’re keeping the dream alive on a Monday night.”
White is no stranger to Monday nights in Madison. In fact, Blue Mondays are merely an attempted resurrection of a weekly staple among the jazz scene for years that was beloved by students and community members alike –– “Funky Mondays.”
Originally organized by Clyde Stubblefield, colloquially known as the Funky Drummer from the James Brown Band, these weekly performances were widely popular for nearly 30 years, from 1989 to 2017. After touring for five years, Stubblefield relocated to Madison in 1971, an unusual move for a member of such a famous and influential band.
A swing in the ’70s
It’s hard to get by as a jazz musician anywhere, even in the largest cities across the U.S.
For jazz players in Madison, which is considered a mid-sized city at best, a lot of things need to be going right in order for there to be a scene that’s thriving enough to support musicians.
According to Howard Landsman, the chairman of Madison’s Greater Jazz Consortium, there need to be venues, an audience, and young people eager to learn from and play with musicians from older generations.
“I mean, that’s how you set the cycle all over again. You got to get young people interested,” Landsman said.
Young people in Madison mostly come from one place –– the university.
And for the first time, back in the 1970s, UW-Madison was a place to be for aspiring jazz musicians.
In 1969, a group of Black students organized a strike against the university. They demanded an education “relevant to Black people.” From this, the African American Studies Department was born.
A year later, the jazz department took off under the leadership of Jimmy Cheatham and Richard Davis, both influential names across the country in terms of jazz musicians.
There was not yet a full jazz department or specialized major, but these two professors launched the first jazz courses, a student big band and a residency for professional jazz musicians.
Duke Ellington was the most famous to stop by. He served a week-long residency in 1972, his longest stint at any university. He performed the first-ever concert in Camp Randall history.
Johannes Wallmann, the current director of the UW jazz department noted that even without an official major, bringing jazz to the university started to influence the local scene.
“We did have some students [from the 70s] very successfully go through a program who are now mainstays of our Madison scene as well. So they absolutely were a benefit to the community,” Wallmann said.
University students became an audience. With an audience, local venues were able to bring in big names.
“In the ’70s, you could see great touring musicians, and local musicians who were getting gigs,” Landsman said. “It was a very lively scene, and I can’t really say why it crashed.”
‘The crash’
Across the country, the Baby Boomer generation carried jazz throughout the ’70s. But eventually, they began having kids, getting older and wanting to spend less time at jazz clubs late at night.
According to Landsman, Madison saw this same trend.
The Madison Jazz Society, which had brought the big-name concerts such as Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus to State Street, was no longer able to fill the concert hall at the Orpheum Theater.
Eventually, they stopped trying.
By the mid-90s, UW-Madison saw the same lack of enthusiasm. The music department was never able to gather the funding to completely establish a jazz department, and with a declining interest in jazz across Madison, the program was put on hold.
Yet through it all, the live music scene in Madison continued to limp along. After all, the Funky Drummer still managed to turn up a crowd every Monday night.
Today, Madison might have the right notes
In 2013, Landsman began to feel an energy shift in Madison. People might want jazz again.
Together with other longtime Madison jazz lovers and musicians, he helped found the Madison Jazz Consortium, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing this music to a broader audience.
They conducted a survey among the genre’s fans, players and educators, asking what they hoped would come of jazz in Madison. They got 300 responses.
“Musicians, again, were kind of feeling like, nobody’s gonna come and save us. We have to get active. There was a real hunger again,” Landsman said.
Young people were asking for places to play and musicians to learn from.
And once again, they came from the university.
In 2012, Johannes Wallmann was brought to UW-Madison to finally establish a jazz department and major unique from the school of music. There was enough funding for Wallmann to hire a specialized faculty and build a proper department.
In 2014, he piloted the jazz major and in 2024, it has 25 students who officially declared jazz as their major, fueling both their passion and their career aspirations.
He would not have been able to do it without jazz reigniting in the community as well.
“Our students are incredibly enriched by having a vibrant jazz community outside of the university, both in terms of being able to hear music, but also for them to have playing opportunities and collaboration opportunities with other community members who are great jazz musicians,” Wallmann said.
Many students play at open mic nights at venues like Cafe Coda, and some even book paying gigs. For a student looking to be a successful jazz musician, playing live shows is a priceless skill.
And for places like Cafe Coda, booking students brings their friends to the audience–– capturing the younger crowd so necessary for jazz to thrive.
(Photo by A. David Dahmer)
The Monday scene lives on
Cafe Coda isn’t packed for Blue Mondays. But there are people there, eager to hear live music.
A couple people are on dates. A few might have just stopped in for a drink when they heard the one-four-five alternating baseline pouring onto Williamson Street.
Some are there to play.
After the set is over, anyone can take over one of the instruments on stage or bring their own to hop into the jam session.
One guy tells the bartender that he was trained in classical piano, but now is teaching himself how to play jazz. He’s still too nervous to improvise.
Another sits across from a sprawling John Coltrane painting that nearly stretches the length of the bar. He’s holding a tenor saxophone, and for the first time, he’s going to get on stage and play.
Todd Phipps, the Blue Mondays’ organist, loves this part of the night. He restored an original Hammond organ and Leslie speaker to leave at Cafe Coda for anyone to play.
He appreciates playing around Madison in different bands and venues, but he’s certainly not earning his living by doing so.
“There’s a reason why I’ve been in IT for 20 years,” Phipps said. “I still have to keep the roof over my head and health insurance for me and my wife, right?”
For Phipps, getting to play music at any level makes his day job worth it. But people trying to make a career out of playing jazz are not looking to settle down in Madison.
“Here is what I wish. I wish that Madison had such a scene that people wouldn’t leave, OK? Because that’s the ultimate thing that will happen if you don’t have places and spaces that are really welcoming,” Phipps said.
For five years, Cafe Coda has managed to be a stable venue, consistently booking performers and drawing in an audience. They’ve got young people playing and listening: everything that was present right before the Madison jazz scene exploded in the 1970s.
But, the ’70s boom crashed. And relying on the university alone to fuel the jazz scene might not be enough to sustain it long term.
What more will it take for jazz in Madison?
“We’re depending too much for this wonderful university to give us all of the cultural insight that we need to go forward, and it’s just not the case,” Taylor said.
Without a thriving Black community to support it, jazz continues to struggle to thrive in Madison.
Taylor, originally from the more racially diverse city of Chicago, has managed to keep Cafe Coda open for the past five years. He survived the pandemic and has been able to introduce innovative music within the club. Dance classes, DJ nights, Karaoke Wednesdays’ and youth music lessons fill up their events calendar.
Yet, after over 30 years as a proud Madisonian, Taylor still might not be convinced to stay.
He was recently offered the position of director of the Association for the Advancement for Creative Musicians, a prestigious organization in Chicago dedicated to nurturing and enhancing creative music.
“Do I stay here and relegate all my attention and energy into this community, or do I go back to Chicago and take that challenge, which would bring me closer to my people?” Taylor said.
Cafe Coda is a key ingredient to a flourishing jazz scene in Madison. If Taylor left and closed the club, the music would take a hit in the city. But a supportive community is also necessary.
And if a supportive community means a thriving Black population, it will be difficult for jazz to completely hit the Madison streets.
But not impossible, especially with initiatives that reach young Madisonians.
For example, the Madison Jazz Society offers $500 grants to support jazz programs in local schools. It’s not clear if those grants are targeted in any way toward schools that serve large numbers of students of color.
Cafe Coda is also playing its part. Most Saturdays, Taylor hosts Cool School, a free class to teach local students about jazz and improvisation. He teaches students from different backgrounds, some coming from as far as Baraboo, and some coming from around the corner.
“I ask you, is there another place here that has this environment where Black kids can come and look on the wall and see people that look like them?” Taylor said.
Behind its artfully decorated doors, Taylor’s Cafe Coda is offering a space to build up the community necessary for jazz to thrive.
“When someone’s sitting in here and they’re hearing the music, not isolating themself from this experience, I have hope,” Taylor said.
