All Night Jams in NYC?

[bertrand]

I just found out that sadly, that great little joint that was Small's is closed.

Does anyone know of any all-night jams like they used to have in some other club? Or any all-night place to hang-out in NYC? I was thinking of going up June 28th for the Shorter Carnegie Hall bash, but instead of getting a hotel, I was thinking of just hanging out until taking a bus back that Sunday afternoon.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Bertrand.

Edited June 5, 2003 by bertrand

[J Larsen]

Smalls' closing is very sad. I went as often as I could. One of my closer friends met his fiance there! Any idea what happened? The place was always packed whenever I went. Also, any idea where the regular musicians will be playing? I'd particularly like to know where I can catch that Bud Powell-esque pianist.

[J Larsen]

Okay, I answered my own questions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/31/arts/mus...sic/31SMAL.html

Of course, it's the Times, so maybe take it with a grain of salt!

Can you believe the landlord wanted $8,000/month for that little hole in the ground?!?!? Unbelievable!! It's crap like that that has me seriously considering moving back to California. The cost of living/doing business here is completely unrealistic.

Bertrand, to offer a partial answer to your question, Cleopatra's Needle on BWay and 85ish St. has jam sessions from about midnight to 4am, and I believe St. Nick's has jam sessions on certain nights, but you'd have to call to verify. I've seen a couple lengthy jams there, but I'm not certain it's a regular occurance. Cleopatra's is not nearly as cool as Smalls (it's essentially a sports bar that happens to have a stage open to jazz musicians), but it's worked for me in a pinch. The big screen TV behind the musicians showing soccer, rugby, etc. can be a bit distracting.

Edited June 5, 2003 by J Larsen

[Dmitry]

Go to Smoke uptown. They hold jams, with a lot of susrprise "pop-ins" by the well-known players.

As much as I liked Smalls, their jam sessions were at times nothing more than 20 or so New School students rolling through the changes till 5 am.

In recent memory the jams at the Savoy were the tops. That one's gone as well.

Edited June 5, 2003 by Dmitry

[Jim Alfredson]

J Larsen,

Can you copy and paste that article here? I'd love to read it but I'm not registered.

Thanks...

[Dmitry]

Forgot to add- THE jam is up in Harlem at St.Nick's Pub on Mondays. I think Patience Higgins is in charge of it.

THE trumpeter to watch there is Kenyatta Beasley. Smokin' !

[J Larsen]

J Larsen,

Can you copy and paste that article here? I'd love to read it but I'm not registered.

Thanks...

Here's the article:

The Lesson of Smalls, a Little Club With a Big Heart

By BEN RATLIFF

n the common model for a jazz club in New York, the emphasis is on established musicians who have a new album, weeklong runs of a single band, a healthy bar business. (Something has to make up for those nights when four people show up.)

But in 1994, when Mitchell Borden opened Smalls, a boxy basement club on 10th Street in the West Village, he ignored the common model. Mr. Borden had been hanging out at Augie's, the club on upper Broadway popular with Columbia students. He wanted something similar but more ?a space where musicians could play, rehearse, teach, network and crash. He did not want a a liquor license and ID-checking. He didn't know or care about new albums. He simply believed that the longer a band has a place in which to play and rehearse, the better it develops.

What happened was extraordinary. "It was the mecca for young musicians," said Ali Jackson, a drummer who first performed at Smalls when he was 18 and is now a member of Wynton Marsalis's band. "That's where all of us met, our generation of New York musicians."

Now that Smalls is closing ?its final night is tonight ?we can begin to appreciate how rare it was, how helpful it was for developing musicians and how hard it would be for anyone else to duplicate.

Mr. Borden, 46, is a genuine New York eccentric: a small, deadpan, shaved-headed man who usually hangs out in the club's stairwell, talking to musicians or reading dog-eared paperbacks, or practicing his violin on 10th Street. If you spent a few minutes with him, you heard stern musical opinions ?about the high-water mark set by bebop, about the elements that make a band work, about rhythm and harmony. Sometimes he didn't love what he booked and told you so with surprising honesty. But he trusted the opinions of certain musicians, he saw an interesting community taking shape and he trusted the response of an audience.

At times he worked 15-hour days, seldom seeing his wife and two children as he operated the club and even slept there. In exchange for help from musicians, he gave them room to sleep in the club's back areas. At 10 p.m., with a sellout line often already formed (the club's official capacity was 50), he opened up, taking $10 per person for the whole night, letting in a lot of musicians without charge. He closed at 6 a.m., after four sets of jazz. He didn't serve food or alcohol. Students arrived by the bushel, smoking and talking and hanging out; to hear the music you could sit at caf?style tables, sprawl on couches, stand behind the nonworking bar.

He paid most of his bands at the beginning of each month, so he took care of their rent as well as his own. And he kept giving shelter to musicians. Among the living spaces at Smalls were a closet, a boiler room and a defunct walk-in freezer, complete with a piano. (If you were sounding rusty, Mr. Jackson recalled, musicians would say, "You need to head to the freezer.") Within two years Mr. Borden had 17 rotating bands at the club, some of them playing once a week. There were trios and big bands, 18-year-olds and jazz elders like the drummer Jimmy Lovelace. The styles ranged from straight-ahead 1950's-style jazz, to new variations created by players like Mark Turner, Kurt Rosenwinkel, James Hurt, Aaron Goldberg, Guillermo Klein, Magali Souriau, Jason Lindner, Greg Tardy, Brian Blade and Avishai Cohen ?a high percentage of the names in the New York jazz scene to emerge over the last decade.

Late at night there were jam sessions, rare around New York. "Whenever someone moved to town, that's where they'd gravitate," said Mr. Lindner, who started a Monday night big band at Smalls and performed there for eight years. And the strange mix of styles seeped into the musicians, creating a new kind of jazz mainstream, young New York musicians fresh out of school who found their own sound more quickly.

And the major record labels took notice. Impulse, part of the Universal records group, sensed a new wave and recorded "Live at Smalls," featuring six different bands. It came out in late 1998, a little too late to capitalize on the street buzz. No matter: people kept packing the club, particularly students and tourists, because it was Smalls.

Finally, Mr. Borden's luck ran out. When he originally started the club, getting recommendations about whom to book at the club from teachers and students at the New School jazz program, the club's monthly rent was $2,650. It grew to $8,000, and he said he could not keep it going by himself. "I was in a unique situation," Mr. Borden said. "I could put on music that was unpopular, and yet there would be an audience there."

For now he will concentrate on another club ?the Fat Cat, a room within a pool hall at 75 Christopher Street; he has been booking the place as a sideline on weekends for nearly three years. He can get about 25 more people into the Fat Cat than he could at Smalls. But he isn't a leaseholder, so at the moment he is restricted to booking only Thursdays through Saturdays. Musicians can't rehearse in the room during the day, and Mr. Borden can't keep the music going past two in the morning, when the pool hall closes.

Before deciding to lose money supporting unknown saxophone players, Mr. Borden grew up in Freehold, N.J. He played violin in a bluegrass band during the 70's and later became a nurse and a schoolteacher. His previous work experience helped him run the club, he said. "Smalls, all night long, is like triage," he said three years ago, when he was thinking of closing the club. "And keeping the audience down is like running a classroom."

Smalls was a compact box of a place. Listening to music there was like listening through headphones, and could almost give a musician a false sense of security. "It was the most intimate connection with an audience that I've ever had," said Charles Owens, a young saxophonist who worked there from the beginning. "For a long time I was playing at Smalls exclusively. When I started working at Kavehaz, on Mercer Street, I said, `Hey, what happened to my sound?' "

It's hard to say what the Smalls legacy will be. Since Mr. Borden is nearly selfless, he remains the opposite of a good business model. But the Fat Cat, which this weekend features the pianist Pete Malinverni's trio, will continue to show bandleaders, developed and developing, in a setting with no commercial distractions. The Jazz Gallery, on Hudson Street, run by Dale Fitzgerald, has become another club where musicians feel comfortable hanging out ?and creating that kind of atmosphere is the most important thing that a club owner who cares about music can do.

But the clubhouse atmosphere of Smalls, with all its wee-hours mingling, had a definite effect on New York jazz, offering a stage for unforgettable performances: Wynton Marsalis working out on "Cherokee" with a band of just-out-of-school musicians; Lee Konitz poring over the lines of "The Song Is You," then drifting off into abstraction with the guitarist Ben Monder and the drummer Matt Wilson; the bassist Omer Avital's dynamic sextet, with four saxophones; the alto saxophonist Myron Walden playing hard for 90 minutes in a pianoless trio; the bassist Reid Anderson presenting remarkable music with long, melodic themes and sneaky backbeats.

Goodbye, Smalls. Come back soon, in another form.

******************************

Here's a letter published today:

Farewell to a Jazz Club

o the Editor:

The closing of Smalls, one of the city's last true bohemian hangouts, is a loss for every New Yorker ("The Lesson of Smalls, a Little Club With a Big Heart," by Ben Ratliff, Critic's Notebook, May 31).

The dark, underground club wasn't only a safe haven for young and old musicians alike, exploring and developing the struggling form of jazz; it was a gathering place for enthusiasts, some just being introduced to this real American art form. For $10, a cover price unheard of in Manhattan's other clubs, you could hang out all night along with some of the most talented and interesting musicians in the city.

How tragic for a city that prides itself on its cultural wealth, its contributions to the arts and to the history of jazz to lose a place like Smalls over something as absurd as an impossibly high rent. No wonder Chicago, the "second city," is now becoming first in the arts: the artists can afford to live there.

************

Links to a couple other articles can be found at www.smallsjazz.com.

[bertrand]

Thanks for the info everyone.

Dmitry, is the Smoke session all night long?

Bertrand.

[Dmitry]

It's on Monday's, with Joe Farnsworth presiding, lasts till 2am.

St.Nick's goes till 3 or 4 maybe and it has 100x more of the vibe than Smoke.

It was once called Luckey’s Rendezvous, in the 40s, when Sonny Rollins and Jackie McLean were kids in the neighborhood. Before that it was called something else, and also a jazz club.

Lenox Lounge hosts a pretty smokin' jam on Mondays as well, with Roy Campbell and Zane Massey. Also till 2 or so.

[Jim Alfredson]

Damn... $8,000 a month? That's fuckin' retarded.

There's a cafe here in town that just closed called "The Lite-R-Side" and the owner was a really nice, if somewhat ditzy woman who actually booked jazz (a rare occurrence in this town, let me tell you). Her rent was $5000 per month. I knew it wouldn't last when she told me that. Especially considering that an Applebee's is right across the street. In a non-culture town like Lansing, everyone would rather go eat fried God-knows-what than eat at a healthy restaurant and listen to live music (her food was all fat free and absolutely excellant).

[Soul Stream]

hey, that's a real shame. chaulk another one up to capitalism. and another one down for arts, artists, jazz and general creativity. every club wants a "hot" group so they can sell a lot of drinks and pack the house. few clubowners want to nourish talent. Small's, and to a lesser degree Smoke, are two that did (do).

[J Larsen]

I haven't been to Smoke in a couple years. Has it changed at all? I remember it being overpriced and over stocked with the Columbia crowd. I sort of like getting away from the college set when I go out.