THE TWO OLDEST JAZZ CLUBS IN THE WORLD STILL GOING STRONG
By Dee Dee McNeil

There are two long running jazz clubs in the United States that are famous worldwide. One turned 75 years young recently and that one is New York’s Village Vanguard, still going strong and featuring some of the greatest Jazz talent in the world. The other is Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, Michigan. Edging out the Village Vanguard by a few months and prestigiously regarded as the oldest Jazz Club in the world, Bakers Keyboard Lounge has stayed open consecutively for the past seventy-six years in May. Happy Birthday to both establishments and may they have many more Jazzy B-days to come.

The Village Vanguard was founded February 23, 1935 by Max Gordon in the basement of a building located at 178th street and 7th . His widow, Lorraine Gordon, recently released a book entitled, “Alive at the Village Vanguard: My Life in and out of Jazz Time.” A young Max Gordon dreamed of opening a nightclub, but his parents sent him to college, expecting he would become an attorney. Instead, he found a deserted Speakeasy and opened it up as a Jazz room and stage for spoken word poets. It became a New York hangout for actors, writers, blues and jazz lovers. Harry Belafonte, Josh White, and Eartha Kitt helped build the popularity of the Village Vanguard in its early years. It featured great guitarists like Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and even troubadour Richard Dyer-Bennett. Enid Mosier and her Trinidad Calypso musicians and Maya Angelou billed as Miss Calypso showcased the open-mindedness of Gordon. Variety and art kept Gordon’s establishment growing and going all these years.

Bakers Keyboard Lounge is not much different. Clarence Baker’s dad had him as a sidekick from age 15. When his father (Chris Baker) had a stroke, Clarence took over the sandwich shop at the young age of twenty and introduced music as part of the menu. It started with a single piano player. Thus the name changed from Bakers Lounge to Bakers Keyboard Lounge. Soon there was a line around the block trying to get in. The place moved from sandwiches and beer to Jazz in the blink of an eye. The club’s seen the likes of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck on its tiny stage. Art Tatum, Eddie Jefferson, Marlena Shaw and Spanky Wilson packed the place. It was Art Tatum who picked out the grand piano and had it shipped to Baker’s from New York. During its heyday the nightspot entertained Ella Fitzgerald who popped in to hang out with Tommy Flanagan and Nat King Cole who sat-in on Jam session night. It was no big thing to walk into Bakers and enjoy an evening with Yusef Lateef, Kenny Burrell, John Coltrane, Donald Byrd or Barry Harris. When Baker sold the club in 1996 to John Colbert and Juanita Jackson, Juanita brought her soulful cooking to spruce up the Jazz scene. The food is so good that it became a big draw for multi-cultural audiences, who love not only the Jazz but love smothered chicken, macaroni and cheese, greens, cornbread and other soulful Southern cuisine to tempt the palate. It’s that mixture of down-home cooking, and the Jazz cats burnin’ up the stage, that endears Bakers to me and makes it my favorite Jazz room of all times.

One of the saddest things about the Los Angeles Jazz Scene today is that we do not have one African-American owned Jazz room in this city. The days of Marla’s Memory Lane and the Parisian Room on LaBrea and Washington (now a post office) are dead and gone. We are in dire need of a soulful room in our own community where we can get a home-cooked meal, a stiff drink and hear some amazing Jazz seven nights a week.

By Dee Dee McNeil
March 2010

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