You never know where you might find a jazz club these days.
For years, New York has had no shortage of jazz musicians but finding enough places for them to play has been another story. Lately, though, something seems to be changing. A small crop of clubs is opening all over town, from midtown to the Lower East Side, from Jersey City to the Financial District.
One Flight Up, a new venue located on Greenwich Street in the Financial District, was opened by veteran drummer Joe Strasser and his business partner Mark Quinn. Strasser and Mark met while hanging out at jazz clubs in Greenwich Village in the 90s, and have dreamed of opening a club together for years.
“Mark has wanted to do this for a long time and he comes from a business background. He’s an attorney. We’ve kept in touch over the years. [...] I think we met, I don’t know if it was Bradley’s or Sweet Basil, one of those places. So it’s a fun full circle that we now own a jazz club together. It is daunting in many ways but I felt like we make a good team. Mark knows business, I know nothing about it. I’ve been playing on the scene for about 35 years and I know a lot of musicians.”
Listening to them, it was almost impossible to get either man to talk about himself. Each preferred talking about the other.
Joe says, “Mark is one of the biggest fans of the music. There were regulars who kind of traveled Sweet Basil, the Vanguard, then Smoke, Bradleys. You’ve been on the scene for a long time and you know a lot of musicians really well.”
Mark counters, “What’s going to make this place successful is the vibe that Joe brings to it with the musicians particularly.”
On a recent Friday night, the musicians included trumpeter John Sneider who was kicking the tires of the new club with his quartet. He said he felt at home right away.
Sneider told me, “The sound here is really intimate and it feels really good to play in the room. The vibe from the people here is great. Welcoming to whatever we were doing. People were really into it.”
As for what the trend in so many new clubs opening at the same time might represent, Mark and Joe are encouraged by it.
Mark says: “I think this a great trend, the fact that there are a bunch of other places opening. I don’t think of it as competition. I think that the more places there are, the more places there are for musicians, and more people are likely to get into the scene and hang out there.”
Joe seconds that, “It speaks to a level of demand. People, I think whether it’s because things shut down when they did… there’s a yearning for actual experiences, and maybe there’s a pendulum shift just with people being boxed in at home, just in general with their devices.
Ironically, Joe found the space for One Flight Up online.
“We didn’t set out to be in this neighborhood. But the space just seemed like it was ideal and evocative of Bradleys,” says Joe. “I’m actually a real estate agent as well. [...] I found this place through no real estate acumen whatsoever. I looked on Facebook Marketplace. And this bar was listed for sale, and the rent that was listed was so low that I thought there has to be a catch. Someone was just murdered there or something.”
In fact the only killing that would be done in the space would be done by the musicians who are killing it every night. Still, it wasn’t necessarily the part of town they were expecting, but they’re excited about the possibilities that their newly adopted surroundings might offer.
Mark says, “If you just walk down Greenwich Street here there are three or four new sorta ultra luxury high rise buildings. I don’t know if that’s necessarily our market but I think there’s fertile ground there.”
Anyone who has ever owned a bar will tell you that the real secret to fertilizing the experience is management, and when it came to One Flight Up, Joe enlisted Darcy Burke, who was the longest-standing bartender of Smalls Jazz Club in the West Village before moving to the new club.
In fact it’s hard not to think about Smalls - and its sister club Mezzrow - when talking about One Flight Up. Like Smalls and Mezzrow, One Flight Up is owned by musicians and inspired in part by the memory of Bradley's.
So perhaps it wasn't surprising that opening night featured Spike Wilner himself, a reminder that in New York jazz, a new club isn't necessarily a rival. Sometimes it's another home.
Yes, you never know where you'll find a jazz club. It might be above a deli in the Financial District, opened by two friends who met hanging around clubs thirty years ago, and filled with musicians who are still looking for another place to play.
One Flight Up is currently open four nights a week, with plans to expand.
