For 65 years music fans have descended into the red darkness of the Village Vanguard - the world's most famous jazz club. A Greenwich Village basement with few frills, this smallish, wedge-shaped room is a genuine place of pilgrimage for the jazz fan - a shady, near-religious site with white-topped tables, red velvet curtains and pictures of its own special saints around the walls - Miles, Coltrane, Dizzy, Mingus and Monk. It might well be my very favourite place and sometimes I find myself atop one of its bar stools before I have even unpacked my bags.
My friend Tom Dillon tends bar in this venerable spot. He welcomes me simply by slapping down a coaster, and we pick up where we left off. Nothing much ever changes at the bar of the Vanguard - the big tub of ice, the mad mural and that antique cash register which really ought to be in the Guggenheim. According to Dillon, an old-fashioned till is the sign of a good joint. I relax and read the names on the bottles - Seagrams, Kentucky Gentleman, Noilly Prat, English Market Gin, Mr Boston, Dewar's Blended Scotch, Mount Gay Rum, Stolichnaya and Jameson. I lay my money down.
I'm glad Dillon's here tonight. It might well have been the other one - a more reserved curate who prefers not to engage with visitors like me. He fears, with good reason, that he might be asked directions to places such as Yankee Stadium. With Dillon, however, I just nod and silently arrange to postpone all chat until the music is over. After all, this is a place for listening to music - and the noisy tourist will be reminded of the fact. The band appears for the second set - Jackie McLean, Cedar Walton, David Williams and Billy Higgins. It's top drawer stuff tonight: apart from the crunching ice behind the bar, all you can hear is the very best in jazz.
On Seventh Avenue South (just below West 11th Street), the Vanguard has been a central force in Greenwich Village for many years. In the early days, it was a venue for poets ready to declaim in exchange for small change thrown by the audience, or free drink. They were finally moved out in 1941 and replaced by purveyors of old-style revue, among them Adolph Green and Betty Comden, who later wrote the musical On The Town. Then when that particular era had gone, in moved the folkies and the Vanguard became the place to see Leadbelly, Josh White, Woody Guthrie, Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger. There were also appearances by Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen but from about 1957, the Village Vanguard was more or less a jazz club.
The success of the venue in its various incarnations was largely down to its enlightened owner, Max Gordon. Born in Lithuania in 1908, Gordon arrived in the US at the age of five and grew up in Portland, Oregon. He was a well-educated man who ultimately dropped out of law school and neatly swapped Columbia for the hippest part of town. He opened up on Seventh Avenue South in 1935, turning a former speakeasy into the city's first integrated club and one of the most famous basements in the world. Gordon died in 1989 and the place is now run by his wife, Lorraine - a tough but extremely admirable lady who, like her late husband, knows a good act when she books it.
And this has long been the success of the club. It only books good acts and it remains good business for the younger performers to make their mark here - Cyrus Chestnut and Brad Meldhau are among those younger regulars on the bandstand. The very best of the survivors faithfully turn up, too - Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Barron, Clark Terry, Lou Donaldson are very much stalwart Vanguard acts. The year 2000 began with Wynton Marsalis in residence on the back of his Live at the Village Vanguard Recordings. The place was packed night after night. Both Dillon and the cash register held up.
But the real secret of the place is that musicians like it. The sound is perfect and consequently there have been very many Live at the Village Vanguard discs, most famously those of Coltrane, Bill Evans and Sonny Rollins. Musicians turn up to listen too and I've run into many great people at that tiny bar - at a Clark Terry gig a couple of years ago I met Duke Ellington's sister and Charlie Parker's wife on the same night! It really is that kind of place - there is an actual sense of history about the Vanguard which is palpably missing from the glitzier places.
Behind the bar is the kitchen - a mysterious territory where the musicians hang out between sets. It's a relic of the days when the place used to serve food but, as the joke goes in the Vanguard, they haven't served food in 25 years so be sure to check the expiry date if anybody offers you a hamburger. What the kitchen does offer, however, is a comfort zone for the players to talk, laugh and work out what they're at. Jazz musicians do tend to be extraordinary people and, as far as I can make out, most of them are extremely disciplined and drink only cranberry juice. Most seem to be absolute gentlemen too and always happy to talk. When they find out I'm from Ireland they usually ask about Louis Stewart - and maybe play Danny Boy in the next set. Jazz does tend to be a generous music.
There were always exceptions, however, and Max Gordon's memoir (also called Live at the Village Vanguard) offers up many tales of working with the unexpected. Miles Davis, according to Gordon, was by far "the toughest to handle." On one occasion Gordon offered him a week's work and told him the venue was free in May. Miles didn't want to wait until May and said he'd open the very next night.
"How much?" asks Gordon.
"Six thousand," says Miles.
"You know the Vanguard can't pay that kind of money," insists Gordon.
"Get yourself a bigger place," says Miles.
And so, with the ghost of Miles being weird in the kitchen and the very much alive Jackie McLean letting loose on stage, I settle in for the night. When it's all over I'll maybe wait for Tom to close up and maybe head off somewhere else. But for now I'll applaud every solo, salute every holy picture on the wall and read the labels on those bottles one more time - Seagrams, Kentucky Gentleman, Noilly Prat, English Market Gin, Mr Boston, Dewar's Blended Scotch, Mount Gay Rum, Stolichnaya and Jameson.
"Mine's a cranberry juice," says I.
"Straight up?" says Dillon.