Shrine

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…

Everyone is asking the same question and dealing with the same conundrum: Is indoor jazz clubbing out of the question during COVID in NYC, and if not, how does it work?  New York got hit so hard at the start of Covid that the lockdown period was followed by a very prudent and organized phased…

We wanted to share this video of photos and clips from our time on the Harlem jazz scene.  It covers the underground clubs and magnificent players we’ve been enjoying during our over 20 years in business. Some close friends: Gary Samuels, Alex Layne, Linda Carr, Samuel Hargress Jr.,  were lost at the start of 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…

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…