Improvising architecture: the jazz club as objet d'art

Call me a sycophant. Because I have worked there and will in future. So I have, let’s say, a certain interest in the place. But I just really like this room. I would like to say more: that this new club in a typical Village basement space is an art object. It’s a thing.

Mezzrow Jazz Club was made by someone for an expressive purpose, which others can enjoy and think about in turn. It expresses what he thinks a jazz piano bar should be like. It will last. It’s an art object with a difference, though.

This is an artwork in which artists can actually go into and create their own original, independent art. It inspires art.

If you had not previously thought of a jazz club as an artwork, think “architecture.” Like Brunelleschi’s dome or the Guggenheim, it’s noteworthy as a construction, as a space, yet it also channels and allows other artworks to speak for themselves and structures our experience of art objects as some kind of continuum past the discrete item.

We need to think about venues for jazz and improvisation in this way, as spaces that shape what can be heard and known and enjoyed. Spaces that, unlike our conventional understanding of art venues like museums or galleries, are specifically social spaces, that shape how we interact with each other as patrons of the music, but also who we are, at least while we’re there. Each venue is different as each one who comes.

We go to hear music, but we hear collectively or communally. So this frisson of tension between the highly fluid realm of improvisation and the supposedly stable, monumental world of architecture dissolves when you consider a venue as a space that will be available past any one particular gaggle of listeners, staff, and artists creating in the moment.

Others would do well, then, to think how those that built Mezzrow (or Smalls, Smoke, FatCat and many other joints) in what was basically a man-made cave created something, and the immense, lasting value of such creation.