Joanne McNeill: Oh, those sweet, sweet jams

Joanne McNeill.

Reva Meredith's first Whangarei pizza parlour opened in the late 1970s, long before cafe society arrived.

Back then, hardware was sold by men in dust coats climbing ladders to scoop nails and screws from high wooden shelves. Wages came in cash in little brown pay-packets. Espresso, garlic, wine drinking, pizzas and art galleries were radical foreign hippy concepts. Eftpos, smartphones, GPS, big box global corporates and the internet were pure science fiction.

After weekly grocery trips to the Dollarwise in town, we were in the habit of downing a convivial couple at the only main-street pub.

When baby came though, he was refused his first attempted entry to Lofty's Bar, so we stumbled out blinking through the dark, closed streets ... and into the warm, candle-lit, family atmosphere at Reva's.

There we found our tribe - an unlikely, far-flung, cosmopolitan outpost of the make-love-not-war, BYO, pre-organic counterculture.

Until then I thought I understood music. I'd sung in church and school choirs, read the dots.

Then I'd thrashed Bach, Verdi and Sibelius, was converted by Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen and tripped through Krautrock, but this was all via recordings. An old collector tried to play me his jazz records but I just didn't get why they wilfully deviated from set melodies.

Somehow though, I had never experienced live jamming.

Reva's jam nights were a revelation. There, around the old piano, musicians, some of them passing yachties - whose company seems to include a higher percentage of musicians than the average demographic, maybe because they need plenty to do in long hours at sea or maybe because the kinds of people brave enough to set sail across unknown oceans are more likely to be capable of making their own fun - gathered with talented locals who emerged mysteriously from the woodwork.

With no conductor, play list, star-billing or sheet music, someone would just start and all-comers would join in until magically it all came together and the joint was jumping.

Many of the musicians had never met before, and maybe never would again, but somehow in this shining conjunction of time and place, together they made wonderful sounds for the pure joy of it. Realising the uniqueness of live improvised music and what a privilege it is to be there physically, feeling its vibrations, was an epiphany.

Recorded music was a red herring in this understanding. The very fact perfected recordings can be played over and over again negates the real tension of live moments in which literally anything can happen.

Thanks to Reva's creative space, I began to understand jazz at last ... and far too many other things for one column.

However, I (who can barely keep a civil tongue in my head for five minutes) will never understand how Reva - whose third Whangarei restaurant closed at the Town Basin last weekend - has managed to keep up her welcoming warmth to so many for 40-odd years.

Now, the fickle crowd trips from one glossy new bar/eatery to another - a lost tribe spoilt for choice, in search of the ghost of something genuine, the like of which they will be very lucky to stumble into.