Big Apple Jazz Blog

“Living the Jazz Life” by Jacqueline Bischof Autumn 2008 It’s 11.30 on a Friday night in early Fall, and Dennis Davis is standing outside St. Nick’s pub in Sugar Hill, one of Harlem’s oldest and most famous jazz establishments.  Tall and wiry, Davis is wearing a weathered, ankle – length leather coat. Standing under the…

Some of our long-time visitors -we’ve been around since the turn of the century- have been missing our big list of NYC jazz clubs, and the content we used to include about each club. As it turns out this information was lingering somewhere in the dark web ready to be resurrected – so here it…

Then on June 22nd, the triumphant return of Emily Braden and Tommy Campbell to the series – this time together!! Harlem Jazz Singers Showcase and Jam My Airbnb concert series continues tonight with Irene Blackman’s Band.  There are a few tickets left and they are good for both sets.  Dinners are available at Gin Fizz Harlem so bring an appetite – the food is getting rave reviews.   Next Week (June 15th) I’m presenting the irrepressible Ayana Lowe and her quartet.  Secure your tickets in advance as these shows have been selling out. By the way, I’ve expanded the series to include a monthly downtown show in celebration of Billie Holiday at Zinc Bar, Last week’s show with Melanie Charles was a screaming success.  Stay tuned for the July 3rd line up. https://www.airbnb.com/experiences/219838 

Since February 2018, I have been producing jazz vocalist concerts in Harlem’s clandestine little sometimes club, Gin Fizz.  It’s the perfect hideaway for an intimate night of live music but it has limited space.  The shows have been very well received and our roster of killer performers such as Brianna Thomas, Emily Braden, Lynette Washington, Jenn Jade, Boncellia Lewis, Lucy Yeghiazaryan, and Seydurah Avecmoi have made this a Sell Out weeks in advance of the shows.  Not a bad problem to have, but a problem nonetheless.   The Zinc Bar in Greenwich Village has come to the rescue, offering more space and a great vibe and sound system.  Back in the heyday of modern jazz this space was called Cinderella’s and featured Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk.   Now I am proud to keep the tradition going by offering great…

We woke up to the devastating news of a deadly fire last night in Harlem on the set of a Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Willem Dafoe, Leslie Mann movie called Motherless Brooklyn.  With that kind of star power glaring their vision, what reporters so far have overlooked is that the charred set of this movie was in the defunct and deserted St. Nick’s Pub which closed 7 years earlier this same month. As Harlem jazz fans wake up to this news through word-of-mouth, I wanted to resurrect an article I wrote nearly 10 years ago, describing the uptown jazz scene when it was truly in it’s 21st century heyday – when St. Nick’s Pub and the Lenox Lounge were still swinging and Earl Spain was still the proprietor of the Uptown Lounge at Minton’s Playhouse.  St. Nick’s Pub…

Fridays will never be the same.  There’s no place like Harlem and there’s no other vocalist series like this one in the clandestine Gin Fizz – a speakeasy hidden in plain sight. Tickets in cooperation with AirBnB Concerts.  Singers Showcase   March 16, 2018 at Gin Fizz Boncellia Lewis with Shareef Clayton, trumpet Hilliard Greene, bass Frank Fallon, drums Paul Odeh, keys Gin Fizz,  308 Lenox Ave. (125th / 126th Streets).  2 /3 Subway to 125th Street.  Doors: 6:30. 1st set: 7PM.   2nd set: 8:30PM   It’s almost impossible to find someone who doesn’t love Billie Holiday.  Her voice, her phrasing, her songwriting, her commanding presence, and her life story all compel us toward this devotion.  Lady Day stands alone as a figure in popular culture who has left her mark on generation after generation of artists and music lovers…

  Is Billie Holiday Street Next?   In the current climate of social and political upheaval and the potential for national soul searching, there is no better representative of America’s promise outpacing America’s flaws than Billie Holiday. I’m about to set off on a year-long Billie Holiday kick. Hopefully, the end result will be a street-naming in Lady Day’s honor. You can’t help loving Billie Holiday for her talent, courage, perseverance, individualism, good humor, and her unparalleled ability to make you feel things deeply when she sang. Let’s begin this in 1939… At 24 years of age she was cracking open the civil rights movement by delivering nightly riveting encores of Strange Fruit to packed houses at the proactively integrated Cafe Society in Greenwich Village. Where did that song come from and what was it about? The song is credited…

New York City: Affordable Live Jazz Clubs In Manhattan (Where you can hear the greats from Greenwich Village to Harlem) By Gordon Polatnick I started Big Apple Jazz Tours with the understanding that jazz is at its best when musicians and audiences are sharing an intimate, interactive experience that feels like it could go on forever, and that something unexpected is bound to happen.  There are wonderful, famous Manhattan clubs like the Village Vanguard, Birdland, Blue Note, Dizzy’s, Iridium, Jazz Standard, and Smoke, which regularly present legendary performers in intimate settings but must clear the house between sets – stifling the spontaneity to some extent.  These are great venues but they don’t tell the whole story.  Jazz fans in New York have become used to plenty of options that you may not be aware of yet. New York has been home to the majority of legendary jazz…

Hi, folks, this is Gordon Polatnick, of Big Apple Jazz Tours.  There are a few things that I’m inexplicably geeky about that I want to explore in this blog.  Most are jazz related, and most of the jazz relates to jazz history as it relates to people and places rather than notes, chords, harmonies, and time…

How do you like the new site? Big Apple Jazz Tours is proud to announce we are celebrating our 20th year in business with a website face lift.  We want to thank David and Kristin and the team at Fare Harbor for the excellent work and invaluable help getting the site up and running. The…