On a recent Friday night, my friend and I were standing outside a door on Karangahape Rd, waiting for a return text to give us a security code. It felt a bit mysterious.
After the reply came, we went up the stairs, around several corners and eventually, after showing our tickets, into a lounge with a 4m stud and a stairway that plunged down through the middle of the room from a trapdoor in the ceiling. Like most of the old mercantile buildings in its block, this one harbours surprising spaces.
Most of the time, it is the home and studio extension of local record producer and soundman Bob Frisbee, a long-time tenant of unusual spaces in Auckland.
On this night it was The Apartment, the venue for the launch gigs for Joe Kaptein’s second album, Pool Sharks, released on his own label, Jandal Records.
Kaptein is a 25-year-old Whangārei native whose keyboard chops have been everywhere in the past three years. He’s a member of the jazz collective The Circling Sun and Princess Chelsea’s band, and played on the last Home Brew Album. You might find him leading a trio on a week night in a bar in Ponsonby or Grey Lynn (mindful of the local demographic, he has a good cover of April Sun in Cuba in his back pocket). He evidently just loves to play.
At The Apartment, he was leading his young jazz band, who are also called Pool Sharks, through vibrant takes on his compositions from the album. The cover in his back pocket was a marvellous deconstruction of Lipps Inc’s Funkytown, a song recorded before most people in the room were born. I felt elated to be there, as if I was in on a secret.
Across the road at Verona, the hosts of 95bFM’s long-running Friday evening station elders slot, the Gang of Four, were staging their first-ever live-to-air show and generating quite a party. A few doors up, the founders of the early 2000s electronic label Kog Transmissions were having a show like the old days, going gangbusters. But the kids were at the jazz.
Auckland is better served than most centres for places for young people to play music. A fair part of that is down to Big Fan, the venue and recording studio run by New Zealand’s superstar producer Joel Little, which is the first place many bands play. Elsewhere, Smokefreerockquest groups teem from the high schools, then don’t have anywhere to go. Imagine generations of First XV rugby players with nowhere to play when school ends.
It might be a hard ask in the current climate for councils to fund music venues the way they do sports grounds, but the country’s independent venues could do with some nurturing. Not every show launches a career, but cultural history is written in those rooms. A slice of the $40 million over two years the government announced this year to subsidise tours by big international artists would have gone a long way locally.
Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Paul Goldsmith has talked about supporting music by making liquor licensing less onerous, but it would be a better idea to make the venues less reliant on selling alcohol to survive.
Frisbee told me, “The paradigm of alcohol subsidising music venues is seriously in trouble.” (The Apartment had a drinks koha tin, big jugs of water on a table and a few beers, mostly untouched, in the fridge.) Some help with noise control issues wouldn’t go amiss, either.
After The Apartment, I paid my respects at Verona, then walked around the corner to where my bike was stored. Two girls were leaning on a car, laughing in the light of a phone as they took a selfie. The car stereo was pumping out Funkytown. We all get old, but the best tunes don’t.
