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The Poetry of Listening

ByElise Krentzel

Aug 25, 2025 #b-side, #Kevin Witt

Kevin Witt’s b-side opened the set at Batch with a question directed to the audience: “What is jazz?” And with the tune, Contemplation by McCoy Tyner, circling the room like a whispered prayer.

So what is jazz?

It’s freedom.
It’s freezing, hesitating.
It’s loving, it’s defiance.
It’s allowing.
It’s the sunshine, the moon, and the earth that we live on.
It’s a symphony of what we hear — and what we don’t see.

It’s sublime. It’s sexy. And it drifts away the moment you think you’ve got it.
It’s elusive yet dynamically clear.
Mostly, it’s hopeful.

That’s how the evening began at Batch in Austin, where b-side — a quartet with an unusual lineup of organ, trombone, guitar, and drums — took the stage. The performance I saw was a trio, sans pianist Terry Bowness.

b-side, an Austin-based jazz quartet led by drummer Kevin Witt, which has been together for fifteen years, epitomizes the road less traveled. Together with André Hayward on trombone, and Bruce Saunders on guitar, the trio ripped through the numbers. They play not the overexposed standards but the overlooked B-sides, the tunes that deserve more air, and songs borrowed from other genres and reshaped in their own voice. Missing from this set was organist Terry Bowness.

At the end of Come Rain or Come Shine, a tune written in 1946 by Harold Arlen, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer for the Broadway musical St. Louis Woman, Kevin closed it with a drum solo that fell like raindrops on a tin roof. Saunders’ guitar slumbered toward a crossroads. Just as the room thought the tune was over, trombonist Andre Hayward entered with hushed and muted colors that steadied the air again and set it all right.

Then came Strange Meeting by Bill Frissell, featuring Bruce’s haunting guitar work; , followed by Burt Bacharach’s Wives and Lovers — made famous by Dionne Warwick. In b-side’s hands, the familiar song fractured and reassembled, shifting tempos five times, teasing the audience into surprise after surprise. Some newcomers looked confused when seasoned jazz fans shouted “Yeah!” or “Whoa!” in response to a solo. They’d never been to jazz before.

Kevin, a storyteller at heart, gave the audience a fun fact. When Carlos Jobim was waiting to meet Frank Sinatra at a hotel, he wrote the song Triste (which means sad in all the Romance languages). Kevin pronounced it with a Texas twang, Tris-tay. The tune was pretty upbeat, though it was supposed to be sad.

Hayward’s original tune, Dre’s Blues, had a pop-jazz feel to it. The tune Blue Monk by Theolonius Monk closed with a groove both bluesy and sly. Recordings of cats meowing screeched in the background toward the end of the tune because Monk had a house of over one hundred cats. Watching Hayward shape his trombone — fingers curling into an almost comical gesture, like a secret sign — was as visual as it was sonic.

The last song was Jan Jan. Kevin entertained the audience with an anecdote from past shows. “There was this 80-year-old guy who came in wearing a kilt and carrying a cane dancing to this number.” You could picture that scene vividly, and as the pace intensified into a frenzy, I started laughing out loud imagining that dude bopping around in his kilt on a Saturday Night Live set.

“Why not reinterpret the songs that people don’t hear often enough?” Drummer Kevin Witt told me after the set. “Why not cross genres, surprise people, put our own stamp on them? That’s the b-side concept.”

Why not indeed? I seconded.

“Organ, trombone, guitar, and drums,” Kevin mused. “Nobody I know has that configuration. But it works. The organ carries the bass line. It’s a groove and a voice concurrently.”

The sound is singular: warm and full, yet spacious. Without the conventional bass and piano roles, every player has to stretch. When Witt first came to Austin, the jazz pickings were slim, one club, the Elephant Room — and that was it. Nothing else. Today in 2025, the landscape is shifting. Parker Jazz Club has joined the fold and Monk’s Jazz Club is one of the finest rooms in the city. Musicians who once worked only in New York or Chicago have moved to Austin — especially post-COVID.

“You see these guys crawling out of the woodwork,” Kevin said. “And you go, ‘You’ve been here how long? Twenty years?’ Suddenly there’s this critical mass.”

Names like Tom Brechtlein, Joel Frahm, Chase Baird, and Diego Rivera now circulate alongside Austin stalwarts like Ephraim Owens, Elias Haslanger, and Brannen Temple. “They carried the torch for years,” Kevin noted. “Now there’s more firepower, more venues, and more reason to believe this city could finally support a lasting jazz community.”

Kevin’s own story is one of improvisation. Born to a Canadian mother and a Texas “Cajun-like” father (whose relatives were from Louisiana)., He describes himself as “half Texan, half Canadian.” Music was always present. Kevin picked up the torch, though not without detours. He spent years between Colorado, New York, and Texas, balancing family life with music.

“I made the choice,” he said. “I wanted to raise a family. That meant I couldn’t go all-in on music full-time. Even in New York, I had to work and study to play. Now in my 50s, I’m finally stretching out, saying yes to more.”

That stretch has led him not just to the bandstand but to the classroom.
At Rutgers University, Kevin now teaches an online course titled What is Jazz? He frames it around three pillars:

1. Experience.
“Jazz has always been about lived experience,” he said. “Struggles and joy, slavery and freedom, heartbreak and love. Start with the vocalists — you hear it in their voices. That’s the door into jazz.”

2. Conversation.
“Jazz is a dialogue. Like this interview — you ask, I respond. On stage, it’s the same. People think we’re just winging it. No, we’ve got a roadmap. But within that, we improvise. It’s a musical conversation.”

Here he pointed to Miles Davis’s famous formula: imitate, assimilate, then innovate. “That’s what we’re doing on the bandstand,” Kevin said. “We don’t make it up out of thin air. We build from what came before, then push it into something new.”

3. Cultural Roots.
“Jazz IS Black music. It’s America’s only original art form. It rose out of the African American diaspora and then shaped everything else — fashion, food, hip-hop. When we talk about jazz, we’re talking about freedom itself.”

Kevin doesn’t shy away from naming the politics. “African Americans defined this country — in struggle, in foodways, in music. Jazz is part of that cultural DNA. Gil Scott-Heron and his contemporaries gave us the soundtrack of social change. John Coltrane wrote a love letter to God. Martin Luther King’s voice echoed through the music of the time. That’s what I want my students to hear: jazz isn’t their parents’ elevator music. It’s lived culture, rebellion, prayer, protest, and joy all at once.”

Later that evening, Kevin gave me a compliment I didn’t expect. He said my ability to free-form write about music — to catch what notes are doing to the soul in real time — was rare. Usually, he said, that kind of writing comes under anesthesia or altered states. But somehow, I arrive there by listening deeply.

It struck me: writing, like jazz, isn’t about control. It’s about being fully present. It’s about trusting the flow while letting discipline frame the surrounding space.

And maybe that’s the answer to Kevin’s question. When Kevin asked, “What is jazz?” another answer was simple:

It’s the art of listening, then shaping what you hear into something others can feel.

That night, b-side reminded Austin that jazz is not background music, nor nostalgia, nor a museum piece. It is alive, shifting, resisting definition — hopeful, elusive, and always ready to surprise.

Contact Kevin Witt www.kevinwitt.com or on IG @kevinwittmusic

b-side plays at Batch Craft Beer & Kolaches monthly. Find their live music schedule here batchatx.com. Call 512-401-3025 or email info@batchatx.com

Contact Kevin Witt on IG @kevinwittmusic

By Elise Krentzel

Elise Krentzel is the author of the bestselling memoir Under My Skin - Drama, Trauma & Rock 'n' Roll, a ghostwriter, book coach to professionals who want to write their memoir, how-to or management book or fiction, and contributing author to several travel books and series. Elise has written about art, food, culture, music, and travel in magazines and blogs worldwide for most of her life, and was formerly the Tokyo Bureau Chief of Billboard Magazine. For 25 years, she lived overseas in five countries and now calls Austin, TX, her home. Find her at https://elisekrentzel.com, FB: @OfficiallyElise, Instagram: @elisekrentzel, LI: linkedin.com/in/elisekrentzel.

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