The Art of Business
A Little (Ferocious) Night Music
Photo by Keith Ferris
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On a Saturday night a couple of weeks ago, something rather
extraordinary happened in uptown Kingston—fabulous live
music found a home on North Front Street. Now the opening of a nightclub wouldn’t be a big deal in, say, the East Village. But here in Kingston, the birth of The Uptown: A Gathering Place is an interesting marker on the growth chart of this 350-year old city. For the last few years Kingston has been better known as the graveyard of a dead IBM than a mecca of live music. You have to wonder, though, if the pilgrims are going to show.

On a typical summer night, uptown Kingston (aka the historic Stockade District) is silent except for sound of skateboards scraping down the middle of Wall Street. And somewhere to the north, oddly, a drum corps practices, the distant booming a reminder of Kingston’s martial history. The place is empty, too. Besides the skateboarders, there’s a guy with scary hair sitting outside a tattoo parlor, the only place that seems to be open.

The Uptown is the brainchild of Gary Wilkie and Marilyn Stablein, the folks who own Alternative Books, which happens to be right next door. Wilkie and Stablein see The Uptown as “a natural extension” of their used bookstore, which has been attracting Hudson Valley bibliophiles for seven years. “We subtitled [the nightclub] The Gathering Place,” said Stablein, “because we’d like to see it used as a place where people who’re interested in culture have the option of talking or coming for music or readings or film or theater.”

On opening night, August 10, there was a mélange of live entertainment. Janice King read luscious verses from a newly published book of poetry. Performance artist Linda Montano donned a hag mask and sang “The Man I Love.” The paintings of Dick Higgins, whose theory and practice of mixed media informed postmodern theories of art, hang from the walls.

It’s the music, though, that promises to astonish. In The Uptown’s first week, you could have heard Eva Ybarray (queen of accordion-based Tex-Mex conjunto) and her five-piece band—direct from Lincoln Center.
And at 9 o’clock every Thursday night in September and October, you can hear jazz from the likes of legendary multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, a guy The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD calls “one of the most consistently impressive and adventurous composer/instrumentalists in the world of music.”

You might say that Wilkie and Stablein are wise to supply Kingston with live music that’s smart, daring, and fun—or you could say they’re just plain crazy. The last tenant of the space The Uptown now occupies was a punk music venue called The Flying Saucer Café, which lasted about as long as the flight of a Frisbee. “Our biggest challenge is getting people used to coming to uptown Kingston in the evenings,” Wilkie said. “Especially in winter,” added Stablein.

So why fight inertia?

Wilkie said Kingston is attracting a new breed of resident, those who do something at night besides watching reruns of “Law & Order.” “Lots of artists, writers, musicians—people interested in culture—are moving here, fleeing New York.” They like the big-city feel of Kingston without the big-city bother. Plus, housing is more affordable than it is downstate. The upper stories of the 19th-century buildings along Wall Street are just as light-filled and commodious as lofts in Soho—and a lot cheaper.

“Uptown is in transition,” agreed Kingston Mayor James M. Sottile. “Fifteen years ago, it was the place for Montgomery Ward, J.C. Penney—major retail chain stores. Now you get boutique shops, restaurants, and art galleries.” He ticked off the coming attractions. Bread Alone will soon be baking gourmet carbohydrates on Front Street. Not far away, in the old Standard Furniture building, a grand new theater is in the works, complete with dance and music studios.
Geoff Meyer, a friend and musician who dropped in on The Uptown’s opening festivities, has a different take on the transition. “The yuppies are moving in,” he said, with a woeful smile. “That’s why I’m moving north of here.”

Though Meyer claimed he was attending the opening out of social obligation, it’s clear he has real affection for Wilkie and Stablein. He isn’t the only one. Around nine o’clock, The Uptown was full of folks who threw an arm around Wilkie or pumped Stablein’s hand. Even the people walking past the club waved at them from the sidewalk.
If demographics and friends don’t sustain The Uptown, Wilkie hopes that the music programming will. Composer Joe Giardullo, who dropped by the opening to make his tenor sax weep and wail, reeled off the musicians who will descend on Kingston for the jazz program set for September and October. Besides Joe McPhee, there’s the great bassist Michael Bisio. The Gold Sparkle Trio. Mark Whitecage and his electronic saxophone. The Jemeel Moondoc Quintet. The trumpet-led Pyramid Trio. Dennis Warren’s Full Metal Revolutionary Jazz Ensemble. Percussionist Luther Gray.

And there’s Giardullo himself, who lives nearby but has an international reputation as a composer and multi-instrumentalist. He said The Uptown’s jazz series is plain miraculous. “Do you know,” Giardullo said, punctuating his sentences with a spiky rhythm, “how hard it is to get these guys in the same place at the same time? This is ferocious—ferocious—music.”

The composer hopes somebody notices, remembering the time when he heard some jazz legend playing to seven people in an Ulster County bar. “You go to Montreal, and they do incredible things with music,” he said, “You go to a little place in France, and they manage because they value culture. And I think this town recognizes something special about this thing.”

“My take is,” Giardullo said, poking his finger at Wilkie and Stablein, “that these are artists, and you trust your life with artists.”

—Jane Smith