Big Apple Jazz Blog

Do you love jazz and are searching for “jazz clubs near me?” If so, then a jazz tour in New York City is exactly what you need.  The Big Apple is known for having the highest number of top jazz clubs across the city! It’s the best place to visit to go on a jazz…

Midtown Manhattan is a popular neighborhood in New York City as the city’s primary and largest central business district.  The business epicenter has the headquarters of major companies of all industries, including Bloomberg LP, Colgate-Palmolive, Barnes & Noble, Citigroup, and many more. When you are in this borough of NYC, you can plan to do…

  Heading to the hit   Just like every part of New York City, Lower Manhattan is full of history and various cultures. It’s a popular borough of New York City and is a must-visit for any tourist.  From museums to parks and eateries, the area offers so much to do. It’s one of the…

Do you love jazz music? If so, the Big Apple is where you need to visit for your next trip. The city is filled with world-famous jazz clubs and is alive with jazz music. Not to mention, the cultural diversity in New York is something you should experience at least once in your lifetime. Any…

Are you looking at doing something different to do in New York? If so, then booking a group jazz tour is exactly what you should do! Whether you are a musician yourself or someone who loves music, jazz is a great genre to listen to. Jazz tours give you a deep dive into the world-famous…

Big Apple Jazz Tours takes visitors to see where the Tree of Hope stump was placed and explains what happened to it.  Visit the jazz tour pages and select the Harlem Juke Joint Tour. Happy 90th Anniversary wishes are due Harlem’s Tree of Hope stump which was relocated to the southern spot on the median…

Marcus Persiani, Avi Cohen, Patience Higgins, Wayne Escoffery – St. Nick’s Pub jam session Having just discovered this vintage blog post from the “smoking-in-clubs-days” on an old hard drive, I rush now to chuck it up here to give New York city’s live jazz fans, a chance to feel nostalgic and maybe a little old….

NAMA – New Amsterdam Musical Association – photo by Gordon Polatnick Happy Autumn Friends: The Good News First: This has been a bounce-back year in the storied Harlem jazz club world, (which we’ve been tracking since 1997). The pandemic and resulting inflationary economy has done a number on the scene.  Minton’s Playhouse, which had a…

I was wondering if ChatGPT, the latest Artificial Intelligence phenomenon, would be a useful tool for blogging about jazz subjects that I’m interested in, so I started a chat about Billie Holiday and I found out that it was an unreliable source of accurate information.  I would ask it a question like, are there any…

This blog post was taken down (by the guy who wrote it) for being too ornery.

Harlem Jazz Crawl and Harlem Joint Tour guide, Gordon Polatnick.        When I started leading jazz tours in New York City back in 1997, part of my business model was to cater to those who wanted the insider knowledge without the tour.  I would have been my best client if I were able…

The light at the end of the tunnel report – We are finding it difficult to pull together jazz tours that can get to three clubs a night within 4-5-hours as we did prior to March 2020.  In March 2021 we were able to start touring again – taking guests to live jazz performances in only one club per night, which was a blessing, hearing some of the most joyous nights of music we ever witnessed.   Nowadays, we are happy to report that hearing live jazz in two clubs per night is becoming typical on certain nights of the week.  Importantly, some regularly scheduled outdoor jazz events have been produced by local heroes throughout the pre-vaccine pandemic to great effect – bringing all-star players into intimate settings with little or no fanfare.  These events helped sustain the scene through…