The Village Vanguard turns 70 in February

[Jazz Kat]

Wow, he is nice!

[Big Wheel]

well, here goes - moderators please delete if this will cause problems - I knew the bass player Curley Russell in the middle-late 1970s - he was telling me, one time, about what an incredibly nice guy the owner of Bluenote records was. "Man," Curley said, "he was so nice that he once caught his wife giving a ****job to Monk in his car, and he didn't even say a thing to her!" Well, a few years go by. I 'm sitting at a table with a bunch of people, including Lorraine Gordon, at the West End Cafe. Conversation goes around. Somebody says, "hey, did you know Lorraine used to be married to the guy who owned Bluenote Records?" I had to to leave the table until I could stop giggling. It was hard to look at her in the same way after that -

Are we sure that Curly wasn't referring to Ruth Lion instead?

[AllenLowe]

yes - I did some checking around - she was quite an admirer of Monk, as a matter of fact she's the one who came up with the term High Priest of Bebop -

[sheldonm]

yes - I did some checking around - she was quite an admirer of Monk, as a matter of fact she's the one who came up with the term High Priest of Bebop -

ok....now you know I can't really guarantee that she won't read this??? I was just kiddin' ya; that's why I used the little thing!!! Thanks for the story!

Mark

[Ron S]

yes - I did some checking around - she was quite an admirer of Monk, as a matter of fact she's the one who came up with the term High Priest of Bebop -

Hmmmm . . . yet another plausible explanation of the origin of the term "Bebop".

[AllenLowe]

well, it's been so many years since I last saw her - let the lawyers worry about it -

[Randy Twizzle]

. "Man," Curley said, "he was so nice that he once caught his wife giving a ****job to Monk in his car,

Coming in the Hudson?

Edited February 2, 2005 by Randy Twizzle

[Jazz Kat]

[sheldonm]

well, it's been so many years since I last saw her - let the lawyers worry about it -

....maybe she grants the same favors to her lawyers!

[chris olivarez]

The Village Vanguard is a place I must make a pilgramige to someday!!!

[Hardbopjazz]

The Village Vanguard is a place I must make a pilgramige to someday!!!

Like every Muslim or Jew who have to make the pilgrimage a least once in their lifetime to the holy land, every jazz fan has to do the same.

When you're there you can swear you hear the walls echoing Coltrane, Mingus, Gordon and so many others.

Just look at all the live albums that came from this club. I don't think there is any other club that put out so many live recordings.

Edited February 4, 2005 by Hardbopjazz

[robviti]

I don't think there is any other club that put out so many live recordings.

It's possible that the Copenhagen club Montmartre may have hosted more live recordings. I'm certain that's true if you consider only the time period during the sixties and seventies when it was open.

Edited February 4, 2005 by jazzshrink

[Big Wheel]

There are actually several more albums recorded at the Vanguard than the ones they list on their website. Some have not come out on CD or are gray-market type things (the Elvin Honeydews). I think there is a thread around here somewhere where Mike Fitzgerald set me straight and added most of the remaining ones.

[Big Wheel]

Here's the threadI was referring to. There may actually be a couple others I dug up in the Lord discography. I won't have access to my full listing for quite awhile, though--my hard drive crashed and I'm not certain I was able to recover the data.

Edit: Part of another Gerry Mulligan LP was at the Vanguard as well. Not out on CD as far as I know.

Edited February 4, 2005 by Big Wheel

[Michael Fitzgerald]

One could make a distinction between recordings made specifically for album issue and those done for radio broadcast and only subsequently issued on album - I think the majority of the Montmartre things fit the second (for example all those Dexter Gordon things on SteepleChase and Black Lion).

Considering that Boris Rose taped NYC radio broadcasts practically every week for years, with the majority from Birdland, if all of those were issued Birdland would be a strong contender.

But in terms of "live-albums-intended-to-be-albums", the Vanguard probably has the edge.

Mike

[Dan Gould]

When I lived in Connecticut in the early 90s, I tended to go to the Blue Note more often for Ray Brown and Gene Harris or Ralph Moore. But I did get to the Vanguard twice to see Eastern Rebellion (Cedar Walton, Moore, David Williams and Smilin' Billy).

Only one of those times was I able to see Billy smile. Damn pillar!

[Jazz Kat]

Anyone ever go to the Blue Note in Chicago before it closed down?

[ejp626]

I think I only made it to VV once to catch Don Byron. The set consisted of two pieces, long jams each over 30 minutes. The group was kind of Latin-tinged. It was fine, but I enjoyed his recent tour to support Ivey-Divey more.

[mjzee]

This is from today's Wall St Journal:

After 70 Years,

The Village Vanguard

Is Still in the Jazz Swing

By ASHLEY KAHN

February 8, 2005; Page D9

New York

Try repeating it out loud: VIL-lage VAN-guard, VIL-lage VAN-guard.

For 70 years, that alliterative name has swung in 4/4 time, marking the center of the known jazz universe to an international circle of musicians and music fans. To the uninitiated, the small club at the bottom of 15 well-trodden steps below street level may seem little more than a cramped, triangular-shaped room. But to a hip populace its where the ghosts of past jazz giants still play, where the best living jazz talent aspire to record, and where sound waves seem to reverberate in a manner unlike any other club, anywhere.

"I call it the Carnegie Hall of jazz because most jazz clubs just don't have the sound that that place has," says pianist Jason Moran, whose last album was recorded at the Vanguard. "It's the place where Moses and Mohammed and Jesus walked!"

Saxophonist Joe Lovano, whose most recent live album was also a Vanguard gig, agrees. "It might affect you to be sitting in that room, imagining, 'Oh, [Thelonious] Monk was here!' 'Man, Miles [Davis] and Hank Mobley played here, and Bill Evans's trio!' You're feeling the spirits. Well, that's how I feel when I record there -- we're calling the spirits."

Other jazz venues once claimed that kind of primacy. "The corner of the jazz world" was the boast of the original Birdland at Broadway and 55th. But the Vanguard, seven decades old this Feb. 21 -- still at 178 Seventh Avenue South, still with a seating capacity of 123 -- has survived them all.

[This historical photo of the building that houses the Village Vanguard (its entrance sign can be seen just below that of the Rialto Cleaners') was taken in the 1930s. The triangular shape of the building has been said to help project the sound.]

"Years ago there was Birdland, the Five Spot, Cafe Society and the Royal Roost and all of 52nd Street. It's a shame that's all gone," says Lorraine Gordon, who inherited the basement room from her husband Max when he passed away in 1989. "Why did the Vanguard last? I mean Max was not a pretentious nightclub man. He just loved what he did and loved the people he booked."

Gordon first opened the Vanguard in 1935 as a variety venue presenting sketch comedy, poetry and dinner. Since then, the club's tradition of left-leaning politics and irreverence -- Yiddish poets in the '30s, absurdists like Professor Irwin Corey in the '50s -- is reflected in the progressive jazz it still presents.

"The club has followed a roadmap that began with the poets, to the folksingers like Pete Seeger, to vocalists like Harry Belafonte and finally to almost every phase of jazz," maintains Ms. Gordon. She sees the club today as a star landmark in a landmark neighborhood ("it's made the Village more important because it's been so steadfast") and the city agrees. Not for nothing does a street sign on the nearest corner read "Max Gordon Place."

Of wiry build, Ms. Gordon is usually at the Vanguard six nights a week, overseeing the club with an energy unhindered by four-score years. She is "Lorraine" to all musicians, whom she first-names as well: the trumpeter Wynton (Marsalis), the saxophonist Sonny (Rollins), the singer Shirley (Horn, who chuckles: "Lorraine? I call her the Sergeant.") Ms. Gordon speaks in energetic bursts from her command post -- a desk in the club's former kitchen that continues to serve as the offstage area for generations of musicians.

"I never had an office -- I wonder what that would feel like," she says with a laugh, noting that like any other club "the Vanguard has gone through all kinds of problems. We've had a flood, part of the ceiling's fallen down, but the walls are still filled with photos of great artists that are no longer with us, who are here in spirit."

The Vanguard's enduring stature as the jazz mecca -- calling the faithful to hear, to play and to record there -- owes much to a half-century's worth of classic albums recorded in the basement room, from Sonny Rollins's "A Night at the Village Vanguard" in 1957 and John Coltrane's and Bill Evans's famed Vanguard titles, both from '61, to Art Pepper's "Thursday Night at..." in '77, Tommy Flanagan's "Nights at..." in '86 and Wynton Marsalis's voluminous seven-disc "Live at..." in '99. A dozen more in the past two years alone have brought the number of titles generated at the club to close to 150. "The words 'Live at the Village Vanguard' do have a direct and positive influence on an album's sales," claims Bruce Lundvall, head of Blue Note Records, a leading jazz label with over a dozen "Live at the Vanguard" titles in its catalog.

A "Live at the Vanguard" album has become a rite of passage for modern jazz players, many of whom credit the room's unusual shape as the secret behind the club's complimentary acoustics. "The way the band can set up in that triangle-type corner, the sound really projects out," maintains Mr. Lovano. "It has a real opera house kind of a feeling -- there's nothing that goes behind you or on the sides." Kurt Lundvall, engineer on the recent Moran and Lovano sessions at the club, explains that "other clubs are like boxes, but in here, you have hardly any parallel or reflective surfaces, so the Vanguard is the best venue on the East Coast for recording jazz, period."

The forces that originally shaped the Vanguard make for an interesting, "only in New York" story. In 1914, the City tore a nine-block swath through the upper heart of Greenwich Village, to add a subway link between Seventh Avenue and 12th Street and Varick Street. Entire blocks were razed and the corners of buildings were sheared off. By 1917, Village geometry had changed forever, leaving a number of unusual triangular lots along the newly created Seventh Avenue South.

In 1921, developer Morris Weinstein hastily erected a thin, cake-slice building on the southern tip of one of those half-blocks and began renting space to various businesses, including a cleaner on street level and a speakeasy in the basement that was aptly named The Golden Triangle.

After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 the tavern closed, and a young Max Gordon discovered the room that for two years had been "closed for alterations," and offered all he needed: "two johns, two exits, two hundred feet away from a church or synagogue or school, and with rent under $100 a month," as he wrote in his 1980 autobiography. Though Ms. Gordon declined to disclose the Vanguard's current rent, she notes that in 70 years the club has never missed its monthly payment.

Today, time and the eternal bottom line have distilled the Vanguard experience down to the essentials: music, drinks (no coffee or tea) and history. The angled walls display generation-old photographs and posters of those who once regularly played the room: Charles Mingus. Dexter Gordon. Elvin Jones. A battered tuba breaks the array, and an unusual double-belled euphonium (a gift from trumpeter Jabbo Smith, it turns out) hangs above the bar.

It may seem so artfully minimal, but then jazz culture has always prized economy over embellishment. Still, Ms. Gordon feels that "this little old club deserves a birthday of its own. It's going to get a cake and a buffet: a real party for a 70-year-old grande dame." The celebration will last a full week, from Feb. 14 to 20, featuring a new or established Vanguard favorite headlining each night: trumpeter Roy Hargrove, the jazz-rock trio Bad Plus, guitarist Jim Hall, Philadelphia's famed Heath Brothers, and pianist Bill Charlap.

"It's a very well-rounded group -- each one has their own incredible style," notes Ms. Gordon, who is reaching uptown for a little extra dazzle. "Wynton Marsalis I've invited as my guest -- and I'd be thrilled to have him. Who wouldn't be?"

What of the club itself: Will there be any special banners, a big "7-0" out front?

"You know those restaurants that are so chic they don't even put their name outside? I think the Vanguard has been chic for 70 years," Ms. Gordon chuckles. "But I will have the awning cleaned."

Mr. Kahn is a music journalist and author of "A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album" (Viking, 2002).

[Hardbopjazz]

Should I gosee Jim Hall or the Heath Brothers? I donw for one of these two shows. Can't make up my mind.

[Jim Alfredson]

We called the VV last night to see who was playing... it was Wynton and it was sold out. Obviously we didn't go.

B-)

[Free For All]

it was Wynton and it was sold out.  Obviously we didn't go.

Because it was sold out or because it was Wynton? B-)

[Chalupa]