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Courtesy of the Lawrence Group, Jamieson Design
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Courtesy of the Lawrence Group, Jamieson Design
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by Ernesto Pacheco
Boo Cat Club
Let’s get one thing straight: Jazz at the Bistro’s already one of the best jazz clubs in America. But when the $10 million Harold & Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz opens in October, it’ll push the Bistro up into a yet-higher tier. We paid a visit this summer (yes, in a hard hat), and the ever-charming Gene Dobbs Bradford sketched out a vision of what would be coming in the fall.
“There are a few things that are really neat about this project,” he said. “One is the fact that we are going to reconfigure the Bistro in order to make it more intimate, and to im-prove the experience for the musicians on thestage and the audience.” That required pull-ing out a stairwell, moving the stage more front-and-center, and rebuilding the balcony—a process that also increased the Bistro’s seating capacity from 150 to about 220.
The room, Bradford says, will literally be built for listening to jazz—Jazz St. Louis hasbrought in acoustical engineer Sam Berkow, who’s consulted for Jazz at Lincoln Center and New York’s Jazz Standard club. The venue’s old door will be bricked up, with the main en-trance shifting to the former Greenberg VanDoren space. There, people will step straight into the Ferring Jazz Bistro, which seats ab-out 75. You can eat dinner here, get a drink atthe serpentine bar, or watch a live stream of the show.
“And this,” Bradford says with a grin, ges-turing toward a big empty space trussed with metal that goes up and up and up, “is our elevator shaft! It’s a thing of beauty. It’s a big elevator, because we may need to move a piano up to the third floor.” That’s wherethe Centene Jazz Education Center will be, with practice spaces for both student and adult musicians, as well as a recording studio and a rehearsal room. Jazz St. Louis also has the ability to record concerts now(oh, the concerts they could’ve recorded, hadthey had the equipment in the past, Bradford laments), as well as live-stream them around the world. There are office suites, too, stretching across the second floor of both buildings.
“The nice thing for us is, it’s going to consolidate our entire operation in one building,” Bradford says. “So as you see, there won’t be any walking next door from another building; it’s all going to be right here.” It’ll be a place envisioned as one of the leading centers for jazz in the country—and to finally celebrate, locally, the jazz geniuses the city has nurtured.
Jazz at the Bistro, 3536 Washington, 314-534-3663, jazzstl.org.
Rhymes with New
A St. Louis arts hub rises again.
In 1906, the city hired architect Louis Spiering—the guy behind many World’s Fair build-ings—to design an Arts and Crafts–style cottage to house the St. Louis Artists’ Guild. Laurence Ewald added a theater wing in 1915, where a young Tennessee Williams performed his plays. Over time, it aged, wasneglected, sat empty, grew shabby.
Enter artists Pat and Carol Schuchard: The couple fell in love with the building and decided not just to restore it, but also to once again make it a community arts center, dub-bing it the Boo Cat Club (812 Union, 314-440-4866, boocatclub.com). This November, they will stage Williams’ early play Stairs to the Roof, in homage to the playwright’s history here (director Carrie Houk hopes the space might eventually anchor an entire Tennessee Williams festival).
This month is the venue’s grand opening, and it has a lot on the calendar already, including monthly exhibits, concerts, and fashion shows. It’s also got a cool piece of per-manent art: a formal portrait of Spiering, painted by Pat Schuchard.
