NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- In a different age, about three months ago, 20 bucks could buy you up to four sets of music at Smalls, the pulsing Greenwich Village basement club celebrated for crowd-pleasing, unfussy jazz. Squeeze into the front row and you’d be close enough to the musicians to sweat on one other. Buy a drink and you were welcome to stick around for a 1 a.m. jam session featuring brash up-and-comers — and maybe guest turns by established stars. That cover charge, and a willingness to pack yourself in, also bought access to the intimate Mezzrow, Smalls’ sister club, just across Seventh Avenue South.

Smalls and Mezzrow haven’t been packed in the past 12 weeks, of course. The clubs shuttered after performances on March 15, and their owner, Spike Wilner, said that even before the mandated shutdown, the crowds had diminished and musicians had been canceling gigs.

But there’s a funny thing about jazz: It keeps roaring back to life. Live music returns to Smalls on Monday, in a socially distant way, thanks to Wilner’s persistence, the club’s shift into full nonprofit mode and a windfall from a celebrity benefactor — a $25,000 donation to the SmallsLIVE Foundation from Billy Joel.

“That gift was such a positive vibe at a time when things were really dark,” Wilner said last week. “The impact of the virus has been devastating on the jazz community.”

In a phone interview, Joel said he felt compelled to support Smalls in its time of need: “Live music is the vitality of New York.” He added: “That great sound is the hum of the city. And during this pandemic, it’s the jazz and classical players who get hit first.”

Wilner’s plan for the money addresses the greatest hardship that jazz players are facing during the shutdown: lost gigs. He has booked a different jazz band at Smalls for two sets a night, at 7 and 8:30 p.m., all through June, paying the usual gig rate. It’s not quite a reopening, though. The musicians will be alone in the club except for an engineer and a manager. The audience will be at home, watching via the livestream that has regularly broadcast Smalls shows.

Smalls makes its sets available in real time, then archives them behind a paywall for donors who have given at least $10 to the SmallsLIVE Foundation. The livestreams will also be available on the club’s Facebook page.

No other major New York City jazz club is getting back to live, on-site performances so early. Trumpeter and composer Jeremy Pelt, who plays Smalls on reopening night in drummer Joe Farnsworth’s quartet, has no qualms about being cautious while performing. “We’re armed with the basic knowledge of how the virus spreads. When I go down to Smalls, I’m not going to be hugging people and slapping high-fives, even with my very dear friends. We’re going to make this music and leave.”

Organist and composer Akiko Tsuruga noted that the Smalls stage is large enough for the players to connect while still staying 6 feet apart. She said that when her quartet plays there on June 12 she’ll miss the club’s community — the crowds of aficionados and out-of-towners, the musicians who pop in to hang — but will simply be happy for the chance to play. “The lockdown has reminded me how important playing music is to my life,” Tsuruga said.

The money matters, too, of course. Jazz musicians rely more than ever on live performances to pay their bills, especially as streaming has gutted revenues from recordings. Tsuruga has lost gigs with the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra and the all-female collective Lioness, and Pelt had to cut short a European tour.

“This hit everybody right where it hurts, right in the pocket,” Pelt said. “That’s not even mentioning the mental effect of not playing with your colleagues.”

Some help has come from the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, whose current president is Wynton Marsalis. The organization has allocated $1 million for grants of $1,000 to the region’s working jazz musicians to be dispensed through an emergency fund.

Other clubs have booked players for Zoom gigs, like the Jazz Gallery’s Lockdown Sessions, in which musicians like Joel Ross or Camila Meza chat over Zoom with Rio Sakairi, the Gallery’s artistic director, and then present new, homemade videos of themselves playing solo or with a live-in partner. Some festivals, too, have moved online, such as the annual celebration for artists on pianist Fabian Almazan’s Biophilia Records.

But jazz players insist that a Zoom connection doesn’t cut it when it comes to collaborative improvisation. “That connection can’t happen over a computer,” pianist and singer Johnny O’Neal said.

Tsuruga agreed: “Musicians need eye contact and the same vibe.”

Pelt titled his most recent album “The Art of Intimacy, Vol. 1,” which refers not just to the romantic yearning of the set’s luminous ballads. “It’s not necessarily about the love aspect. It’s the fact that listening to this music is like listening in on a private conversation between the musicians.”

Conversations like that, Pelt believes, demand physical presence. “We’re almost able to play and interact digitally, with no blips and not being a nanosecond off. But what will never be replaced is the human interaction with your fellow musicians.”

Joel agrees. “There’s something about the atmosphere or the acoustics of playing together live in a small place that you can’t replicate any other way,” he said. “It’s an immediate sensation, feeling the vibrations of the drum and the resonance of a standup bass.”

Like the jazz players, Joel has also tired of canceled gigs, including a summer tour and his Madison Square Garden residency. The singer and pianist said that he’s fortunate enough to be able to pay his band and crew full salary during the shutdown, but he misses “the community aspect” of playing live — connecting with other musicians.

Wilner, meanwhile, is doing what jazz players do best. He’s improvising. Besides reaching out to other potential big-ticket supporters, he’s upgraded Smalls’ livestream technology and redesigned the club’s website to allow for financial contributions, large and small.

The cost of a donation allows patrons access to the Smalls archive of 18,000 recorded performances from about 4,000 musicians. Wilner’s royalty system cuts checks to musicians whose archived sets get streamed, though the issue of performance rights royalties for original compositions remains murky. “We look at it as a sponsorship rather than a subscription,” Wilner said. “We don’t want to sell this music. We want people to support it.”

He’s trying to get the cats playing again — and to get the cats paid. “We need to collect about $25,000 a month,” he said. “That would pay for 28 bands and one month’s rent.”

The Smalls that returns Monday won’t be the Smalls of old, exactly. But it will still be Smalls. That means something to O’Neal, whose exuberant trio performs there June 2. “Everybody comes to Smalls. Everybody. It will go down in history as one of the premiere jazz clubs in history.”

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