On a recent afternoon, Alan Braufman, the jazz composer and saxophonist, stopped outside what used to be his home, at 501 Canal Street, by the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. In 1973, when he was twenty-two, he and four other musicians moved into a derelict building that was there at the time, to eat, sleep, practice, and perform; this was the loft in their iteration of loft jazz, a term for the style and the era of avant-garde music germinating in the then ghostly districts of downtown. “The two sax players lived on the second floor,” he said. “The pianist on three. Bassist on four. Drummer on five.”
The building didn’t have heat, or much of anything, although there was a pay phone in the entryway which, if you touched two wires together, spat out all the change. “You could call Europe for free,” Braufman said. The whole building cost them five hundred and fifty dollars a month, roughly equivalent to one night at the Arlo hotel, which now occupies the lot.
Braufman, at seventy-three, has an ex-marathoner’s skinny legs and a horn-blower’s bellowsy torso. He wore slim-cut jeans and a green pullover with the sleeves rolled up. He was accompanied by his nephew Nabil Ayers, a writer and a musician, who runs a couple of independent record labels, one of which, Valley of Search, he founded to issue, and reissue, his uncle’s work. “Valley of Search” was the name of Braufman’s first album, recorded at 501 Canal, in 1974. “Infinite Love Infinite Tears” was the name of the latest one, released in May and produced by Nabil.
The night before, they’d been in Park Slope at the home of Nabil’s mother, Braufman’s older sister, to celebrate her birthday. The Braufmans grew up in Wantagh, on Long Island. When Braufman was in high school, he often stayed at his sister’s place in the West Village. He got a summer job as an usher at the Bleecker Street Cinema, which had a reciprocal deal with the Village Gate. Sometimes he’d practice his horn in the theatre after it had closed, then head to the club to catch the last set. Miles, Mingus, Roland Kirk, Roy Haynes.
Here’s how Nabil came to be: after high school and before Canal Street, Braufman attended the Berklee College of Music, in Boston, and took a job at the Jazz Workshop and Paul’s Mall, where he got to know the vibraphonist Roy Ayers. Later, Braufman and his sister, who was a ballet dancer, ran into Ayers at the Village Gate, and she decided that she wanted to have a baby with him and told him so. He said he was cool with that, as long as she’d be cool rearing the child without him. Deal. In his 2022 memoir, “My Life in the Sunshine,” Nabil writes, “My mother insists that it was that brief—that easy.” He also quotes his uncle: “ ‘It was New York City in the early seventies.’ ”
Braufman, who later had two kids, treated his sister’s son almost as his own. You could say that the nephew, in championing the uncle and urging him to record, has been returning the kindness. Braufman had gone twenty-five years between albums. “I realize I got a lot of music left in me,” he said.
From Canal Street, Braufman set out on a loft-jazz tour of downtown. Nabil peeled off. At 77 Greene Street, Braufman summoned the memory of Ali’s Alley, the home/club owned by Rashied Ali, Coltrane’s drummer, which closed at the end of the seventies. (It’s now an Ami Paris clothing shop.) “I was extremely shy,” he said. “I’d come and listen. Sit in the corner.”
Braufman kept going, past 2 Bond Street, the former site of the Ladies’ Fort, a loft space set up by Joe Lee Wilson, and then 24 Bond, the former home of Studio Rivbea and the sax player Sam Rivers. (Robert De Niro’s mother had owned the building; Robert Mapplethorpe used to have a place upstairs.)
He motored through the East Village to East Third Street and the site of Slugs’ Saloon, which he described as “the most vital jazz club of the sixties.” He’d been a regular there, too, as a teen. Sun Ra on Mondays, and then a headliner for six nights: McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders. “My last time there, it was Tony Williams’s band with John McLaughlin,” he said. Slugs closed abruptly, in 1972, after the trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot and killed on the bandstand by his wife. Now it’s a deli.
In 1992, Braufman moved to Salt Lake City. His wife didn’t like New York. “It was like going to the minors—I had some developing to do,” he said. “I’d move back here, but I can’t afford it.” He still gigs and teaches in Utah. “The kids there aren’t so great at counting. They can’t come in on the upbeat. My theory is it’s baseball. With baseball, you get good at math. In New York, everyone played. In Utah, it’s soccer, and every game is 1–0.”
Fifty-plus years ago, David Lee, Jr.—the drummer for Roy Ayers—and a bunch of New Orleans players had a loft space in Chinatown, on Chatham Square, but Braufman, who used to go there to jam, couldn’t find the building; the address had vanished. “Those sessions led to my first recording,” he said. “And then Philip Glass asked me to be in his band. But I went back to Boston, to go to school. Probably a silly decision. If I could do it again, I’d always choose playing music instead of going to school.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misattributed a quote from Braufman.
