[ Jazz music playing ]
[ Indistinct chatter ]
♪♪
-Hi, welcome.
I'm Kabibi Monie,
and I want to take you on a journey through the magic,
the music, and the emotions of the Jazz Alley.
♪♪
-Now, ladies and gentlemen,
please make these guys feel welcome --
the world-famous Count Basie Orchestra.
♪♪
-I think that one reason that Seattle
is such a big jazz town may be
that there are so many jazz musicians living here,
so many world-class players that do live here.
-I mean, you can start an argument in this town
about the piano playing
of Marc Seales versus Randy Halberstadt.
I mean, that's a serious music town.
That's where, if you come into town,
you know, there's people with ears listening to you.
-I've been the stereotype I guess, in the old days
where we could still smoke in clubs,
you know, with a scotch in one hand
and cigarette in the other and a great band on stage.
Got to love it.
♪♪
-And if you love it,
you've probably been to the Jazz Alley,
coming up on 30 years of providing a venue
for world-class jazz.
The alley has heard the likes of Dizzy Gillespie,
Oscar Peterson, Ernestine Anderson, Ray Brown.
Just to think, it's right here in our own back alley.
-[ Scatting ]
-I think part of why it feels like coming home
is because of the appreciative audience
and the knowledgeable audience.
It's very interactive.
It has a lot of intimacy, which I really appreciate.
-[ Scatting ]
-It's a great room
It has great audiences, has a great boss.
-You know, everybody plays there
that's anybody, you know?
And it's one of the fabulous venues
in the United States, you know?
And given the the whims of a fickle market,
to stay in business this long, it takes a lot.
-♪ If you're asked ♪
♪ To give up dreaming, never say yes ♪
♪ Just how far to chase a star ♪
♪ Is anyone's guess ♪
-To be honest with you, a lot of it was trial and error.
-♪ Your dream will come true ♪
-I've always been interested in music.
I've always listened to it.
I've always been enthralled by it,
and I have a kind of a a passion that that goes way back.
-He really does know and love the music.
He's not some bozo who just got into it
because he wanted to make a dollar.
Nobody goes into jazz for that reason.
-One of the reasons that Jazz Alley has been
one of the long-running clubs,
when we see other cities, some bigger than Seattle,
that haven't had a club with this much history,
is that John is a stubborn man.
♪♪
-I think it was in 1963 or '64,
one of my first jobs was a busboy at the Edgewater Inn.
They would bring in people like the Tijuana Brass.
They had George Gobel, they had Joey Brown was there.
And I would work down in the restaurant
and I would sneak up the back stairway
and listen to some of the performers.
And I was like, really wide-eyed and really enthralled with that,
so that really piqued my curiosity.
I decided that I wanted to become a musician,
so I went out and bought a set of drums
and I formed a band called Joe Bananas and The Bunch.
It was called
Joe Bananas and The Bunch: A Group with a Peel.
And it was a lounge band,
and I was the weakest player in the band,
and actually got fired from my own band after awhile.
-We're glad he got fired, because in 1971,
John joined his brother Gus, who had opened
the Pioneer Banque Restaurant & Nightclub
at 1st and Yesler.
John took on hiring talent, and he was damn good at it,
something he credits to the smarts of
New York agent Jack Whittemore,
who was also the agent for Miles Davis.
-He had in his stable Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk,
Betty Carter, Stan Getz, Sonny Stitt, Ahmad Jamal,
and he was kind of my mentor.
We talked almost every day for years,
and he kind of really taught me a lot about the music,
about booking the music and the business of business,
of running a music club.
♪♪
-If you're thinking opening his own club came next,
hang on.
John took his new skills east
to manage the now-famous Blues Alley in Washington, DC,
which happens to be
the second longest-running jazz club in the country.
After success there, he headed back to Seattle with a new wife
and a dream.
♪♪
-When he started out at Jazz Alley in the U District,
The jazz world being what it is, people said,
"Well, they'll probably last three months,"
because jazz is a tough go, economically.
But the jazz scene was pretty darn good at that time.
[ Applause ]
♪♪
Everyone's very nostalgic in the jazz community
about the club that was on the Ave.
I mean, it was clearly not feasible.
For a long time, it was small.
I think it sat maybe 85, 125 people.
But I have such fond, warm memories
of seeing Dave McKenna there, the great saloon piano player,
as he describes himself, from Boston.
I mean, Dave just came in there,
didn't say nothing, sat down at the piano
and played his butt off for an hour.
[ Piano playing ]
People like Earl "Fatha" Hines, a legend in jazz history,
recording with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s,
for God's sake, played for Jazz Alley
in the U District for a week.
Dexter Gordon on one of his many comebacks
and returns in the late '70s.
I can just see him on stage,
holding that tenor saxophone out the way he would --
flat, present to the audience,
as if to say, "It's the horn that played the music, not me."
-I used to go down all the time on Monday nights especially.
As a matter of fact, I was working for
a radio station at the time, in the early '80s,
called K-Jazz, K-JZZ,
and we hosted a Monday night jam session there.
So it was all the fabulous local artists,
many of whom, thankfully for us, still reside here.
You could go hear John Bishop on drums
and Chuck Deardorf on bass and Dave Peck playing piano,
and Mark Seales down there with his group.
-In the early days, he hired a lot of local guys
to play behind famous people who came through town,
and I got to do a lot of that.
And that's... and I learned a lot.
-Other musicians from around town
would come do the hang on Monday night.
If you were a jazz musician, you know, Jazz Alley
in the University District was definitely the place to be.
-In fact, that club became so popular
that lines were treading outside,
and John decided, after four years
that he'd open a second club.
He called that Jazz Alley Downtown,
located over there on Second Avenue in Pioneer Square.
-For a while, John was under the influence
of a financial adviser who said,
"Well, you should really franchise this place
and have two jazz clubs."
He could barely make one work,
so nobody knew what that was about.
-The idea was bringing in bigger bands, different names,
and then trying to shake it up a little bit.
-So I said, "Well, I don't know.
I don't know if two Jazz Alleys in one town is a good idea,
but what the heck?"
So we went down there and tried it, and I was correct
in my original assumption that it wasn't a good idea.
-There are jokes about that kind of thing.
"You know, if I win the lottery, I think I'll open a jazz club
and run it until the money runs out."
-John has only survived
because he has danced with the marketplace.
-And back in '85, John was dancing as fast as he could.
He closed down both clubs in the University District
and in Pioneer Square, and later that same year,
he reopened at the current location on Sixth and Lenora.
♪♪
-Jazz Alley is really nice.
I mean, everybody that's playing music
comes to play through here.
I remember one time, being in town with the Music Maker,
and I had about a half an hour break and I came down here.
It was unbelievable. It's Hank Crawford, Frank West.
That was a real nice night here for me,
to come down and walk in and go, like,
"Oh, my God, that's a slice of music
I didn't even know still was happening."
-Jazz Alley is bigger than it used to be,
but somehow, in the redesign,
it's still a very intimate place to go hear music.
Almost anywhere in that room,
you have an uninterrupted view of the stage,
and you're never very far away.
-It helps feel like you've got to keep your chops on,
because it's intimate.
People are right there and they're hearing every note,
and it's not being masked by a big sound system
or something else.
-I come from, you know, from the club scene.
What we do runs the gamut, but the intimate thing
is very right up my alley, no pun intended,
or I should say, every pun intended.
♪♪
-You almost get spoiled by it,
because it's difficult then to go to a large arena
to see anybody because,
you know you can go to the Jazz Alley
and see, you know, a high-quality act
and you can be five feet away from that person.
♪♪
-This has been a solid space,
and a lot of people love to come out
and have a meal or a night out
and the great music that they really like to hear.
It's a really fantastic audience.
♪♪
-When artists go into a club, they need special attention.
Well, let's face it, they can be a temperamental lot.
The Alley knows that,
and they do what it takes to keep them coming back.
[ Applause ]
-I miss the days of the Hickory House
when the cash register would ring
and there would be so much noise,
but the the club owner's son, he would,
I think he would purposely ring the cash register
when I was playing a ballad.
He just knew when that was going to happen,
so just to annoy them all, after the end of the set,
I would help myself to a drink on the way out.
Not 'cause I wanted it, but 'cause I could.
If you're working at a club
where the boss doesn't seem to like the music
or he keeps fiddling with the microphone
or or stuff like that...
I mean, John lets us do our thing.
He doesn't bother us.
And I remember working for a guy years ago,
he would get us on one side and tell us what to play.
"I want to hear more bossa novas."
You know, if John did that, I'd be very surprised.
-Club owners in general,
they have to love the music, but it's a business.
The first time he hired me to play behind Mark Murphy,
he said, "And I'll pay you 400 bucks a week to do it."
And I said, "Okay." And he went -- And he was mad.
And I said, "Why are you mad?"
He said, "Well, because you didn't negotiate with me,
because that's business, right?"
And negotiation is like, it's exciting.
♪♪
-This is a man who really knows how to run a business,
but he's hard-nosed and ruthless in doing so,
and anybody who's ever worked for him
will tell you that he's fair,
but he will not spend more money than he's going to make.
And he's gone bankrupt. He knows.
He's been there, you know? He knows what leads to that.
-My very first and memorable experience at Jazz Alley,
that first week when I started there,
Ahmad Jamal was the performer.
Ahmad had played every club
that John had had either owned or managed,
so I met Ahmad for the first time by him
pointing his finger at me and said, "You, come here.
You tell John I'm not going to play." He was upset.
There was some financial thing going on and he was upset about.
So I went back to John, "John,
he's really threatening to leave."
And John's saying, "Screw him. He'll play."
You know, and they were mad at each other.
So he played and John and him did not talk,
and then the next night, went through the same thing.
And then the third night,
Ahmad and John are sitting down and drinking, laughing,
and having a great time, you know?
This was my introduction to Jazz Alley,
and I'm going, "What did I get myself into here?"
Dinner specials coming? -Right now.
We got two of them?
-I've been really lucky with some of the employees
that I've had.
The reason that they're here
is because they all have a passion for the music.
They're all excited about being involved
in some way with the music and being touched by it.
-One, two, three, four, five.
♪ Ooh ♪
-To be able to have had the opportunity
to listen to Betty Carter,
a uniquely different show every night...
-♪ What a little moonlight can do to you ♪
-And one night she's so wonderful
and on fire and gracious,
and another night, she'll be doing the same thing
and she'll turn around as she's singing,
and I see her from the side
and I see her turning around and yelling at the drummer,
"Pick up the pace, God damn it!"
And then she'll turn back to the crowd and like, nobody saw it.
-♪ So in love ♪
-I think one of the most popular artists
that used to come to the Jazz Alley
on a regular basis was the pianist Gene Harris.
And there was something about the way
that Gene Harris communicated to the audience.
I think it was just through his pure pleasure of playing,
and he just drew people in
in a way that I've never seen any other performer,
certainly, you know, jazz performer do.
-So many amazing performances there.
One of the funnier ones that's legendary in Seattle
is Abdullah Ibrahim, the great South African pianist
who came in with his band Ekaya and wouldn't get off the stage.
-I kept grabbing the microphone, thinking,
"Oh, okay, now he's over," and I go,
"Let's hear it for..." you know?
And then he started playing something else.
-I can't remember how long the show was.
It might have gone on for like, 2 1/2 hours.
-They played for 3 hours and 10 minutes straight
without a break. [ Laughs ]
♪♪
-There's been a lot of really amazing legends, really.
Dizzy Gillespie, for instance, played his very last gig there.
-I believe it was Friday night, the second show,
he was back in the band room.
He had a nurse traveling with him.
He'd been ill and they said, "Well, he's not feeling well."
You know, we got a full house here for the second show
and the crowd's waiting.
I'm thinking I'm going to have to cancel the show.
Finally, they come out and said, "Okay, he's going to play,
and he comes walking out of the dressing room."
He's got a male nurse.
He's got his arm around his arm helping him,
and he starts walking -- they had these wood stairs
that walked up to the stage then, and he,
bom, bom, bom, walks up and starts clowning around on stage
and plays this incredible set of music.
♪♪
And you go, "Wow, where did that come from?"
♪♪
-It's kind of hard being around for 27 years,
and a lot of those people that we that we knew and loved
and worked with year in and year out are all gone now.
You know, for example, Ray Brown just passed away.
Stanley Turrentine, Betty Carter,
Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter, Stan Getz
and all of those people were remarkable.
To be around them was so enlightening and so fulfilling
that it was really hard to see them go.
-Truth is,
if the Alley had only been about booking big names,
I'm not sure they'd be celebrating their 30th birthday.
Over the years, John has booked a lot of artists
who first played the club as virtual strangers.
-When I started at KPLU, I was the morning jazz host
and John Dimitriou used to call me up and say,
"Hey, what's going on?
Who's hot right now? Who do you like?"
And a couple of weeks before one of his phone calls to me,
I was in New York and I saw a young piano player
by the name of Harry Connick Jr,
and when I went back to Seattle and John called me and he said,
"Oh, you know, who's hot right now?"
And I said, "You know, there's this guy, Harry Connick Jr.
you ought to look into.
I mean, this guy's got a lot of talent."
And so John brought him out to the Alley.
And the timing was fortunate for him, too,
because "When Harry Met Sally," the movie,
had just been released.
So he thought after that, I had some kind of magic touch,
but I didn't.
I just kind of got lucky on that one.
-If John Dimitriou knows anything,
he knows jazz is no longer the private domain
of an elite group of insiders.
Now, jazz is about inviting everybody.
♪♪
-If you talk to me about Jazz Alley,
the name is "jazz."
I think they play only jazz music in this club.
This is my third time to come in Jazz Alley.
Maybe that prove they like what I do.
-Music evolves. It just keeps evolving.
-[Singing in her language]
♪♪
-I think that's what keeps the club interesting
and probably helps the success of the club,
because it reaches out to more people.
If you play lots of different styles,
you cast the jazz net wider
and you bring in more people that way.
♪♪
-A lot of the kids coming up
don't want to play the music of the old masters anymore,
and I can't say as I blame them.
I think that we need to learn
that it's really important that we concentrate
on the quality of the music,
the musicianship, what's being performed on stage,
and how it's making us feel,
not only on stage but also in the audience.
And that's kind of what we're working towards in our bookings.
-He's -- What do you call it?
Diversified his portfolio, musically, at the expense
of the really sincere jazz fan,
but he's still in business.
-Lawrence Welk always used to call this "Take a Train."
[ Laughter ]
-It's still really important to recognize that
if he weren't there, we wouldn't hear Nicholas Payton,
we wouldn't hear Oscar Peterson,
we wouldn't hear Marian McPartland.
♪♪
-I'm 57 now, and I have an 18-year-old
who is interested in music, and he works here.
He works back in the kitchen.
He likes being behind the scenes, like his dad,
but he has a passion for the music.
And I was thinking to myself,
although I haven't really talked it over with him,
that I'll probably be looking to get out of this
somewhere around the time I'm 70,
which would make him 30-31,
which is the same time that I started Jazz Alley.
That's the age I was when I started Jazz Alley.
So maybe, who knows, maybe he'll come in and take over
and send the old man home and keep the flame burning.
-♪ I betcha' goin' fishin' all o' the time
♪ Baby goin' fishing too ♪
♪ Bet your life your sweet wife ♪
♪ Catch more fish than you ♪
♪ Many fish bites if you got good bait ♪
♪ Here's a little tip I would like to relate ♪
♪ With my pole and my line ♪
♪ I'm a goin' fishin', mama, I'm goin' fishin' ♪
♪ And my baby goin' fishin' too ♪
♪ I went on down to my favorite fishin' hole ♪
♪ I got myself a pole and line ♪
♪ Caught a nine poun' catfish ♪
♪ On the bottom, yes, I got him ♪
♪ Home to mama by supper time ♪
♪ Many fish bites if you got good bait ♪
♪ Here's a little tip that I would like to relate ♪
♪ Baby, I'm going fishing ♪
♪ Going fishing, baby, going fishing ♪
♪ Baby brother 'bout to run me up outta my mind ♪
♪ Sayin', "Man, can I go fishin' with you?" ♪
♪ So I took him on down to my favorite fishin' hole ♪
♪ Now, what do you think that brother of mine did do? ♪
♪ Caught a seven poun' catfish ♪
♪ On the bottom, hear me, got him ♪
♪ Now he took him home to Mama, he was real gone ♪
♪ Baby, with his line ♪
♪ He's going fishing ♪
♪ Mama, going fishing ♪
♪ Baby going fishing too ♪
♪ I betcha' goin' fishin', baby, all o' the time ♪
♪ Baby's going fishing too ♪
♪ Bet your life, your sweet life ♪
♪ I gonna catch more fish than you ♪
♪ Many fish bites if you got good bait ♪
♪ Here's a tip that I would like to relate ♪
♪ Baby, and my line ♪
♪ I'm going fishin', Mama, going fishin' ♪
♪ And the baby going fishin' too ♪
♪♪
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Yeah. That's the power of jazz.
♪♪