T
he return to playing his trumpet in front of a live audience was emotional for John D’earth—and for the crowd that had gathered once again for Thursday Night at Miller’s earlier this year to see him perform.
“The minute we played the first notes, they were yelling and cheering,” D’earth says. “And we were elated to be playing again.”
D’earth started performing at Miller’s in the early ’80s, after he, Dawn Thompson, and Robert Jospé, the core members of the band Cosmology, moved to Charlottesville from New York City. Recognizing their immense talent, Miller’s owner Steve Tharpe invited them to take the stage at his Downtown Mall bar, sweetening the deal by also getting the best players from Richmond, Washington, D.C., and beyond to join them. Current owner Scottie Kaylor picked up the baton and ran with it, keeping Thursday Night at Miller’s alive for hundreds of audiences.
These days, the band includes D’earth on trumpet, Peter Spaar on bass, Devonne Harris on drums, JC Kuhl or Charles Owens on sax, and Garen Dorsey and Mark Payne on piano, but D’earth says for the more than 30 years they’ve been playing at Miller’s, there’s been a rotating cast of musicians. They’re what he calls “WWCGH” (when we can get him/her), lending even more magic to the one-of-a-kind performances that, over the last three decades, have gained national (“though secretly,” D’earth says) renown in jazz circles.
D’earth says he doesn’t think these gem performances could have happened anywhere but Charlottesville and, more specifically, anywhere but “the sustainable cultural vortex” that is Miller’s.
“As musicians being invited into this milieu, we recognize that we are just damn lucky,” he says. As are we.
