As an amateur Jazz guitarist, it’s my pleasure to take a break from theology and philosophy to note the 70th anniversary of the original Birdland club.
First, happy birthday to Barry Harris (b. 1929) and Curtis Fuller (b. 1934)!
70 years ago, December 15, 1949, a basement Jazz club—following the Ubangi, the Ebony, and The Clique—opened as “Birdland: The Jazz Corner of the World.” Its birth coincided with the demise of “The Street,” i.e., the serendipitous concatenation of jazz clubs that sprung up on 52nd Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues in the wake of Prohibition. (See Patrick Burke’s scholarly Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Arnold Shaw’s 52nd Street: The Street of Jazz makes an excellent companion reader.)
A daytime shot of legendary 52nd Street—on its last legs in the late ’40s.
The upscale jazz club and restaurant on Manhattan’s West 44th Street that possesses legal title to the name “Birdland” is therefore not topic of this post. (On its home page, take the “History” link to a fact-filled page about its historic predecessor.) With all due respect to that venue for the great music and food it offers, it is not the historic Birdland that was effectively the House of Hard Bop from its first stirrings in the early ’50s to its ripening in the early ’60s.
The address is 1674 Broadway, at the northeast corner of 52nd Street . . .
. . . but Birdland had its own number, 1678 (probably to expedite delivery of the great volume of mail it must have received compared to that of other tenants), as can be seen on a flyer from 1955, every detail of which is worth savoring:
Left pane: Broadway looking north, fans lining up for Sarah Vaughn. Right pane: Broadway, looking south. This is what awaited them:
Below, the cover of contemporary sheet music for George Shearing’s “Lullaby of Birdland,” the club’s theme song is noted.
Notable guests included Duke Ellington, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Sammy Davis, Jr., Marlon Brando, . . . and Harry Belafonte, still with us, who helped open Birdland on December 15, 1949.
Just a sampling of the stars who regarded Birdland as the place to see and be seen—and hear great Jazz. Yet nothing marks the site today.
The cover of Birdland’s menu:
For the first few weeks of its existence, Birdland’s guests were greeted by birds in cages suspended from the ceiling. A nice touch, but the poor things could not survive the combination of smoke and air-conditioning.
The current occupant of that basement is Flash Dancers (part of its awning is visible, next to Leone’s Pizza Pasta) — of which I will say no more:
At All About Jazz, Bertil Holmgren sketched a portrait of Birdland as he experienced it one night in June 1962, when the John Coltrane Quartet was “on duty”:
A rather small club, maybe 150 square meters, after descending down the stairs from 52nd Street [that makes no sense to me; but in our exchange of comments, Mr. Holgren stood by his memory], which is a side street to Broadway at Times Square [Birdland was situated in the Times Square area, but Times Square, where the New York Times was once published, like Longacre Square before it, was ten blocks south of Birdland], the room opened up with the bandstand right in front and with a bar along the left wall.
Behold, the left wall (that’s Jay McNeely on tenor sax):
[Holgren continues:] To the right, on the opposite side from the bar, as well as just in front of it, there were rows of chairs reserved for listeners only, and in the middle a number of tables, maybe ten to fifteen, were placed where certain solid and liquid nourishments could be taken.
Behold, the right wall: Erroll Garner and Art Tatum
On stage: Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Lee Konitz, Art Blakey
Bird with Strings, 1951
[Holgren continues:] On the tables were nothing but white-and-red-chequered cloths and black plastic ashtrays carrying the words “Birdland – The Jazz Corner of the World” in white. . . .
For ninety-eight cents—”including tax”—one could have the history of jazz parade before one’s ears “from Dixieland to Bop.” Imagine Charlie Parker, Lennie Tristano, and Lester Young on the same stage! (Is that Max Kaminsky and Kenny Dorham on trumpets in the photo below? And who’s the fellow looking at the camera? Where is he now?)
The “Roy Haines” listed on the poster is, of course, Roy Haynes, still going strong at 94. He played the new Birdland on the original’s 60th anniversary in 2009.
Davis attempted to pursue the case in the courts, before eventually dropping the proceedings in a plea bargain in order to recover his suspended Cabaret Card, enabling him to return to work in New York clubs. [End of Wikipedia account.]
A while back, with this event on my mind, meandering near that spot, I was startled by a billboard-size advertising of VH-1’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Awards. The huge poster hung on the north wall of the Sheraton Manhattan Hotel, just south of 1674 Broadway. Startled, as though looking down on the spot where he was humiliated, across the street and across half a century, was the triumphant visage of Miles himself, a Hall inductee. I could not interest any passerby in this irony.
A collection of albums subtitled “Live at Birdland” would fill a shelf. Chronologically, this is probably the first:
But this pair of 1954 albums (Volume 1 and Volume 2) turned Birdland into the Bethlehem of Hard Bop, my favorite Jazz subgenre):
