Skip to primary navigation Skip to content Skip to footer

Big Apple Jazz Blog

St. Nicks Pub

“Bebopping…” The 1st blog blast from the past.

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….

Read More »

October 21, 2024

WSJ – The Alhambra Ballroom in Harlem

     If you’re a hopeless romantic pining for a sepia toned, 100 year ago version of New York City you will marvel at how well-preserved Harlem still appears to be.  If coming from the laughably tall and thin sky-scraper race to the clouds on 57th Street, it’s strangely comforting to note that the buildings…

Read More »

November 12, 2020

Resurrection of our old NYC Jazz Club Bible

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…

Read More »

December 2, 2019

The Harlem Jazz Scene – a retrospective on the day after St. Nick’s Pub fire

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…

Read More »

March 23, 2018

Cheap NYC Jazz Clubs

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…

Read More »

June 22, 2017