On a recent Friday night at Smoke, the hip jazz club on the Upper West Side that has been largely closed since the spring of 2020, owners and staff scrambled around as you’d expect in the lead up to a highly anticipated reopening. As the audience settled in for a preview concert, technicians climbed ladders and solved minor crises. One of the co-owners of the venue, Paul Stache, consulted with an engineer about the sound in the room and the live stream, while the other, Molly Sparrow Johnson, oversaw the waitstaff that will expand an expanded capacity of approximately 80. serve when it opens again Thursday.
The band couldn’t have looked calmer in the meantime. On the newly widened bandstand, with red curtains as plush as the inside of a jewelry box as a backdrop, pianist David Hazeltine and his long-standing trio — “the cats,” as Stache called them — beamed at each other, happy to be back. . Their set, once it started, exemplifies Smoke’s sound: warm, small-group jazz steeped in tradition but powered by in-the-moment invention. Inviting yet uncompromising, sophisticated yet playful, the sound of a neighborhood jazz club with an international reputation.
“It’s always been a musician’s dream to play here, even if it was a hole in the wall,” Hazeltine said in an interview between sets. “From the outset, it has mainly been set up as a music room, which is actually rare for jazz clubs. Smoke’s always had the best sound system, and the owners care deeply about the music itself and the well-being of the musicians.”
Legendary singer Mary Stallings, who has been performing since the early 1960s, agrees. “Smoke is at home,” she said in an interview in early July. “It has that real jazz room feel that is hard to describe. It reminds me of when I was a kid and how the clubs used to be.” Stallings, who will be performing in Smoke from August 11-14, added: “In an environment like that, when you make music, you have the feeling that you can do anything.”
Stache and Frank Christopher founded Smoke in 1999 in the space at 2751 Broadway that had been Augie’s Jazz Bar, where Berlin-born Stache had run the bar and waited for tables when he moved to New York. “The inspiration at the time was to build a club that a grand piano for Harold Mabern could play in,” Stache said, referring to the bandleader and composer who would be associated with the club. Mabern passed away in 2019.
Smoke gave Mabern not only a place to play, but also a place to record his last half dozen albums for Smoke Sessions, the label Stache and Christopher founded in 2014. “It was really at the insistence of the cats that play here,” Stache said. He had always recorded the music in his club and shared it with the musicians.
In the end, the sound quality was so high that some musicians wanted to release the recordings. Smoke Sessions released several of those live releases, recorded and produced by Stache, including Hazeltine’s 2014 “For All We Know” album (“a work worthy of much praise,” said The New York City Jazz Record).
But, in the usual Smoke fashion, the venture soon became more ambitious, as the label began booking studio time at Sear Sound in Hell’s Kitchen to document the work of several generations of top musicians, including Renee Rosnes, Orrin Evans, Jimmy Cobb, Vincent Herring and Eddie Henderson. At a time when major labels tend to overlook mid- and late-career jazz players, Smoke Sessions has gone all-in, with eight albums slated for 2023, including LPs by Al Foster, Wayne Escoffery and Nicholas Payton.
Independent jazz labels, such as neighborhood jazz clubs, aren’t exactly a growth industry in 2022. While venues like Smalls and Zinc Bar have weathered the pandemic, scene pillars like the Jazz Standard and 55 Bar have closed. At the same time, more and more enterprising musicians are performing outside the world of booze clubs, in restaurants, homes and venues like the Downtown Music Gallery, a record store or run-of-the-mill bars like Brooklyn’s Bar Bayeux. The moment is reminiscent of the early days of the 1970s loft scene, which sparked a vital creative boom, but left legacy musicians like those who booked with Smoke fewer opportunities for high-paying gigs.
Stache and Sparrow Johnson, who are not only married but also business partners, recognize that for the club and label to thrive and the players to get paid, the bar and restaurant must also thrive. Hence the expansion.
The old Smoke was tight, so intimate that during a ballad, the audience could hear more than they’d like of what was going on in the bathroom. During the pandemic shutdown, as Smoke experimented with sidewalk concerts and live streaming, the co-owners struck a deal with their landlord to take over the leases of two vacant spaces next door, a former law firm and dry cleaner. Now the bar and bathrooms have been moved to a completely separate lounge area. The revamped music room offers the audience more personal space than many other jazz clubs, and has sightlines so clear that someone seated at a table in the back row can still see the pianist’s fingers.
Sparrow Johnson raves about the lounge, a welcoming space designed to invite people – like the many passersby who peer through the windows during a performance – who just want a drink or a chat but might feel intimidated by a jazz club or cover costs. She is also moved by signs of Smoke’s established place in the neighborhood atmosphere of a club where it is not uncommon to see children in the audience. She said, “I recently had someone interviewed as a server, and he said, ‘I have really formative memories of my parents bringing me here.’ That’s what it’s all about. People have these memories, and it’s also an ongoing living thing that’s still happening.”
Those memories now go back decades — and are still in progress. The act that Stache and Christopher booked for Smoke’s first opening, in 1999, was saxophonist and NEA Jazz Master George Coleman, who will also star at the official reopening this week. This is the third time Coleman, now 87, has ushered in a new era for the club; in 2001, a Coleman group played the first Smoke sets after 9/11. “People sat there a little broken, and he went there and calmed people down,” Stache recalls. “He wasn’t trying to cheer people up. It was more about we’re here together, and I’m going to play for you what I can.”
That night, Coleman and his company did what musicians always do at Smoke: they played the room in its moment. Hazeltine and his trio did the same two Fridays back, with a lavish array of standards and originals. Stache has heard these musicians countless times over the years, in the club or in the studio, yet, by the end of the first set, he was in the back of the club filming a Hazeltine solo on his phone. As a co-owner, he could probably catch it on the livestream recording. But in the room, at that moment, he couldn’t help it.
