Former club owner Mikell has departed

[Christiern]

Mikell's was my neighborhood hangout--a great place that has become a drab coffee shop.--CA

Gone to Vermont

November 21, 2005

Mike Mikell, 80, Owner of an Influential R&B and Jazz Club, Dies

By JON PARELES

M

ike Mikell, whose Upper West Side club, Mikell's, was a vital part of New York City rhythm-and-blues and jazz scenes for two decades, died on Friday in Kingston, N.Y. He was 80 and lived in Woodstock, N.Y.

The cause was cancer and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known and Lou Gehrig's disease, his wife, Pat, said.

Mikell's opened in 1969 at the corner of 97th Street and Columbus Avenue, and became both a literary and musical magnet, which it remained until it closed, in 1991. At a tribute to the club last year, Paul Shaffer, the bandleader for CBS's "Late Show With David Letterman," called Mikell's "soul heaven."

Harold Craig Mikell, who was known as Mike, was born in Quincy, Fla., and grew up in Hartford. As a young man, he earned a living picking tobacco. He served in the Army Air Corps during World War II and returned to Hartford to work in restaurants as a chef and manager. But he would regularly visit New York and the jazz clubs that were thriving on 52nd Street, and he eventually moved to the city.

He was the manager of Terry's Pub on the Upper West Side when the owner decided to give up the lease, and Mr. Mikell took it over with the help of a Small Business Administration loan; he renamed it Mikell's.

In 1971 he married Patricia Nuccitelli, who survives him, along with a son, Zachary Mikell, of Hartford and two daughters, Deborah Glover of Georgia and Monique Mikell of Woodstock.

With the writer James Baldwin's brother David working at the club as a bartender, Mikell's drew Baldwin and other authors as regulars, including Tony Morrison, Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou. Top studio musicians came to unwind there with late-night jam sessions, and around them a 1970's New York City style coalesced that mixed blues, gospel and soul roots with urban sophistication. It was a style that would permeate albums by Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan and many others, and would also define the sound of late-night television bands on "Saturday Night Live" and Mr. Letterman's shows.

An instrumental group of studio musicians, called Stuff, which formed in 1974, played at Mikell's three nights a week until 1980, and singers like Stevie Wonder and Joe Cocker would show up to sing with them. A teenage Whitney Houston made her solo debut at Mikell's after performing regularly there with her mother, the gospel singer Cissy Houston. One night, Cissy Houston told her daughter she was too ill to perform and Whitney would have to sing a set herself; it was a ploy to give Whitney her start. Clive Davis of Arista Records later discovered Whitney Houston during a Mikell's engagement.

The club remained an Upper West Side landmark through the 1980's, presenting mainstream jazz groups, pop-soul singers and Latin jazz. Ms. Mikell said that the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis sat in with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers there one night and was offered a spot in the group, a turning point in his career.

In 1991, Mr. Mikell took on outside investors to get a longer lease for the club, and problems with those investors led to bankruptcy and the club's closing. In the early 1990's, Mr. Mikell and his wife moved to Woodstock.

A 2004 tribute concert at Symphony Space reunited many of the club's performers and brought a proclamation from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that praised Mr. Mikell for "providing a stage for the world's most talented and ingenious poets, musicians and artists."

[ValerieB]

boy, oh, boy, that obit/article really took me back to some of my happiest new york memories. i lived on 93rd near columbus so these were some of my favorite haunts in the sixties. i remember seeing lots of the folks mentioned plus many, many others. my favorite person to see there on occasion was sidney poitier. he was a close friend of terry's. there were several incarnations on that site: vic & terry's, terry's pub and then mikell's. what wonderful nights and times were had in those clubs by yours truly!!

my sincere condolences to mike's family and friends.

valerie bishop

[Harold_Z]

Yeah...sorry to hear this news.

I used to go there very often in the 70s and 80s - always good times and good music.