Lois Smith recalls a situation that occurred years gone, when she was a teen. One day in her mother's rooming house in Cape May, N.J, she was timidly singing gospel tunes when a visiting vocalist reprimanded her. Open your damned mouth and sing!" the lady screamed. Today, the retired teacher is one of Cape May's top jazz and blues vocalists, and her photograph hangs near that of jazz great Carmen McRae, her inspiration, in an exhibit on local African-American jazz and blues musicians and the people that influenced them. I saw the show, "Black, Blue & True : To the Tune of Inspiration," one contemporary weekend when I went to the beach city to test out its eclectic music scene. The exhibit is in the Carriage House Studio on the Emlen Physick Estate, a Victorian house museum owned by the Mid-Atlantic Center for the humanities and Humanities, thru Apr eighteen. It showcases photos by William W. May, who played double bass with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra for twenty-six years. "I never planned to be either a musician or a photographer," May said in a panel conversation on the programme. He taught for forty years in Newark public faculties. Like May, the majority of the featured musicians, who range in age from 34 to 81, hold day jobs but play personal gigs and holidays. As trumpeter and music teacher Eddie Morgan asserted, it's difficult to survive as a jazzman.

"If folk need to pay a cover charge, they back away from it," he claimed. Pianist Johnny Andrews passed around a photograph of his Uncle Parker, who played jazz regionally, too. "I've been working for roughly fifty years to imitate his style," Andrews asserted. Andrews also voiced how Afro-American churches used to denounce jazz, which is what attracted a few people to it. "lots of churches were pronouncing, 'You do not want to hear jazz, because that is the devil's music, '" he recollected. No more. The Sunday I went to, a poster advertisement outside of the First Presbyterian Church lured hundreds within for a Jazz Vespers service. Children giggled when Antfarm Quartet vocalist Paul Jost set free with a stream of foolishness syllables.

Bruce Jeffries-Fox, who has run Jazz Vespers for six years, joked that it's "for jazz lovers who can not afford the festival," talking about the twice-yearly Cape May Jazz Holiday , which comes to the city again April 16-18.Attempting to find more music, I followed a person on Jackson Street carrying a load of wood into the classy Virginia Hotel, where Paul Sottile Jr.Was playing a grand piano in the lounge. I ordered tea and sat close to the roaring fire to hear Sottile's tunes, a lot of them original compositions. Neighbors said to me that I should definitely check out the Merion Hotel , where Grammy-nominated jazz pianist George Mesterhazy, 57, has played for fourteen years. But that weekend, alas, he was performing in San Francisco.

Whatever. Music is all around in Cape May, though it is not all jazz. Adjacent to the Virginia, the Insane Batter Restaurant had folks guitar. On Washington Street, the Repellent Mug bar and cafe had a rock group. At Congress Hall, a grand yellow hotel with white pillars, I found singer-pianist Darin MacDonald in the dark-paneled Brown Room. MacDonald is there most Saturdays with his stock of Billy Joel, Elton John and original compositions. He appears popular, maybe as he encourages singalongs. "he actually energises the crowd," recounted Myra Vassian, activities director for Congress Hall. The Brown Room is the place to be when you are "feeling mellow," Vassian asserted. The downstairs Boiler Room draws a different sort of crowd : " We are calling that an underground dance party." the subsequent morning, feeling mellow, I drove to Cape May Point State Park to hear the sea and had the beach to myself. It was scary. But less scary than the Physick Estate, where I went next. In the hall, a deer head missing a glass eye greets visitors.

Emlen Physick Jr, whose granddad invented the gut pump, built the place in 1879 for his widowed mummy. The house has a music room because, as the tour guide mentioned Victorians mostly entertained themselves. They did not have the choice of hearing percussionist Michael Dempsey and other neighbors play at the imminent jazz holiday jam.Dempsey, at 34 the youngest musician featured in the jazz exhibit, said to the audience at the panel discourse that he's "keen on Afro-Cuban or Latin jazz." As for the jam, he would not foretell how it might turn out.They will improvise, he said. That is the excitement of jazz.