Free weekly performances at Chalfonte Hotel draw hundreds
This article is featured in the August 21 edition of Do the Shore magazine. Pick it up for more stories about local arts and culture.
CAPE MAY – It’s a hot summer Thursday evening on Cape May’s Howard Street, and the Howard Street Ramble is playing its third eight-minute song in a row on the balcony of the historic Chalfonte Hotel.
The crowd is eating it up, spilling out into the street; people of all ages are dancing. It’s what locals call “The Ramble,” a phenomenon in Cape May that draws hundreds of people every week, some of whom visit every Thursday until the season ends with a costumed Halloween finale.
“It’s one thing to hear it, it’s another thing to see it live,” Chris Gillin-Schwartz, lead singer of the band, said of the Ramble and jam bands more broadly. Gillin-Schwartz is a lawyer by day — he is helping defend the Sunset Beach Sportsmen’s Club against a state challenge — and a passionate jam musician by night.
Ten years ago he started playing Thursdays at the Chalfonte by himself. The next year he wanted to turn the night into “a more freewheeling thing,” he said. So he teamed up with his father, Joe “Doc” Schwartz, on bass and with Tom Naglee on fiddle, and started playing bluegrass tunes at the King Edward Bar.
The bar itself, inside the Chalfonte, is incredibly small. It was sufficient for the first few years of the Ramble, but Covid forced them outside and really kicked the event into motion.
The local adoration evokes memories of the Cape May Diamonds, which former Diamonds lead singer Ric Rutherford said used to attract huge crowds to the beach behind Cape May Convention Hall in the 1970s and ’80s.
“Surfers would sit out on the beach by Convention Hall, and hundreds of people would pack the beach to see the Diamonds play,” Rutherford said. “There’s really nothing else like it around here.”
Rutherford now plays the Yamaha keyboard in the Howard Street Ramble, and says that the band carries on the spirit of the Diamonds. He switches from grand piano tones to electric synth-like notes as the song demands.
The long songs, which change every time they are played depending on the whims of the musicians, are most commonly associated with the Grateful Dead. The Howard Street Ramble brings what Gillin-Schwartz calls a “Jersey flair” to these sprawling tunes. They play whimsical versions of classics like Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” and Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band.”
Members of the band come week by week as the mood suits them, but usually, at least nine are crammed onto the Chalfonte’s downstairs corner porch.
They all face each other as they play. They have played together so long, and separately for much longer, that each song is like a conversation with tension, climax, and release. Gillin-Schwartz said that most of the time, the band has no idea what song will be played next. But they figure it out, and the “figuring it out” is where the conversation happens.
Dillon Mullock, operations manager at the Chalfonte and whose family owns the property, said that he sees a huge cast of the same folks every week at the Ramble. The hotel, massive with its white wooden siding and Southern-style columned balconies, is a fitting backdrop for the festivities.
But things have been a bit hectic there lately. The chaos is managed and things have always worked out well, but the huge crowds have started to annoy the neighbors. The band has begun to remind folks between songs to “stay on the Chalfonte property” and not sit on neighboring lawns. A small police presence helped keep things in order at the July 17 Ramble.
“Sometimes it can be so overwhelming, I get anxiety,” Mullock said. “But it’s well worth it. It is many people’s favorite night of the week.”
He runs around the property on Thursdays to make sure the bar has been stocked, people are staying on the property, and the chaos of the night remains at a low boil.
Mullock is a huge fan of the Howard Street Ramble; he said that the lead singer is his best friend.
“We’ve always tried to support arts at the Chalfonte,” he said. “It has always been the case here, long before my family owned it.” Cape May Stage once performed shows here, and the previous owner, a schoolteacher from South Jersey, held painting nights and art classes here long before that was trendy.
Jeff Hebron, an early member who plays drums and sings vocals for the band, said, “The reason the Ramble is such a special weekly event is because of the exchange of energy between the audience and the performers.”
He calls it a “musicological phenomenon.”
“It’s hard to make a distinction between a standing ovation and a simple compliment when the people are already standing when they begin to ovate,” Hebron said.
Come see the Howard Street Ramble every Thursday at the Chalfonte Hotel at 301 Howard St. in Cape May. The band plays every Thursday evening from Memorial Day to Halloween.
Contact the reporter, Collin Hall, at chall@cmcherald.com or 609-886-8600, ext. 156.
