Something interesting is happening in New York jazz right now. New clubs are opening around the city, including several in Midtown, an area that was once synonymous with jazz nightlife but for decades has been mostly absent from the conversation.
One of the newest is The Pocket, a 170-seat listening room on West 46th Street, just off Times Square.
The club was founded by Grant Gardner and Martin Porter, two veterans of the much-loved Jazz Standard, which closed during the pandemic.
For Porter, The Pocket began with what happened after the Standard disappeared.
“When The Standard closed, like, all of these artists reached out to us, and regulars and stuff, and said, ‘Oh, what’s gonna happen? What’s gonna happen?’” Porter told me. “We called all the powers that be to see if they were gonna open it up, and no one was gonna do anything. And then we kinda just locked eyes and said, ‘Man, no one’s gonna do it. Someone’s gotta do it. Is it us?’ And then, six years later, here we are.”
Porter originally came to New York to be a jazz pianist himself. After a bus accident damaged the nerves in his right arm, he changed course, eventually becoming a programmer at Jazz Standard.
He says The Standard remains an important model for The Pocket — especially the idea that a jazz club can take the music seriously without making the experience forbidding.
He said, “We want everyone who comes through the door to feel welcome, just this is the place you’re supposed to be. What do you need? Be comfortable, you know, let’s listen to some great music together.”
That philosophy even determined something you might not notice when you first walk into The Pocket. There’s no bar.
“Grant and I are musicians, and we have just… there’s been one too many cocktails shaken during the ballad,” He explained. “So it’s just, like, this is a listening room. The music comes first. The musicians come first. And it’s like, I can’t have that happen in a club that I own. I don’t wanna hear the ice being dumped. I don’t want the cocktails shaken. I don’t want someone yelling that they want another beer. So we just, we hid the bar in the kitchen.”
The Pocket opened this summer at an unusual moment. After years when the story of New York jazz clubs often seemed to be about the ones that were disappearing, suddenly there are new rooms opening around town — including several within a few blocks of one another in Midtown.
For Porter, that's good news.
And when it comes to deciding what belongs onstage at The Pocket, the philosophy is right there in the name.
Martin laid it out: “The pocket in music is when everything just feels right, where rhythmically people are locking in. It’s like telepathic. It’s like the magic of music where everyone’s nodding their head or tapping their foot or dancing or whatever it is. And that’s my booking philosophy. If I can’t help but tap my foot or nod my head, then that’s a pretty good indicator that I’m about to book you at The Pocket.”
That might mean jazz, Latin music, soul, funk or hip hop.
Ultimately, Porter says, the idea is for everything else about the club to disappear once the music begins.
“We’re a conduit. We’re a conduit for the music,” he told me. “When the lights go down, you should feel as, like, as close to someone across the table talking to you that you are hearing this music, you are in the living room, you are right there in the mix. And then when the lights go up, there’s the feeling of being in the room with 170 people that just saw the same thing, and, ‘Oh my God, can you believe we just saw that?’”
