The story of the 55 Bar dates back to Prohibition, when the underground West Village watering hole opened as a speakeasy. It entered jazz lore in 1983, when the late bassist Jeff Andrews approached then-owner Peter Williams about performing there. Andrews later recruited Mike Stern, then Miles Davis’ hotshot young guitarist, who began a twice-weekly residency that would last until the club’s demise nearly 40 years later.
Stern put 55 Bar on the jazz map, attracting international visitors to a space that was little more than a subterranean dive bar. When she bought the 55 in 2001, Queva Lutz endeavored to transform the space into a higher-class venue. It never lost the dive bar shabbiness, but it did become a breeding ground for a generation of musicians who used it as a workshop for fresh ideas. Following the club’s closure in May 2022, a number of former regulars shared their stories and memories.
THE HOUSE THE STERNS BUILT
Jeff Andrews (from a 2018 Facebook post): The space was dingy and lacked any lighting… The floorboards had some holes in them and sagged in places and there were some funky booths in the back. And the place was an eternal cloud of cigarette smoke that you had to escape between sets by going across the street to the coffee shop. We got through a couple of sets that first night and then Peter Williams approached us about doing a regular Monday night.
Mike Stern (guitarist): I’ve been playing at 55 Bar literally since it started. I was still playing with Miles at the time. My wife Leni and I used to play at 55 Grand Street because we were living in a loft space a couple of floors above the bar. It was just a coincidence that Jeff had found this other place, 55 Christopher Street. We started playing duo, and we set up just to the left of the front door.
Lincoln Goines (bassist): Mike was getting himself cleaned up and I was right behind him, so we hooked up through the gettin’ sober thing. He said, “Come on down to the 55 Bar and sit in.” I came in one night and Jaco was there, playing with Jeff Andrews. They played “Donna Lee” and some other stuff, and then I sat in.
M. Stern: We started playing with a drummer, Yves Gerard, so we went to the back, which became the little space for the “stage.” We were scared that the drums were going to be too loud, so Yves brought in brushes and chopsticks and played really soft. When we realized no one was complaining and the bar didn’t seem to mind, we cranked it a little bit.
Leni Stern (guitarist/vocalist): I started playing at 55 Bar within the same week. I was studying with Bill Frisell and he kept telling me that I should start gigging. I was totally shy and didn’t want to play. Bill said, “If you get a gig, I’ll play.” I finally ran out of excuses. Bill said that Paul Motian had just told Keith Jarrett that he wasn’t going to play with him anymore but he hadn’t lined up any other shows, so he was available. Paul always liked to play with the ladies: He played with Geri Allen, he played with me. He came to the gig with not one but two girlfriends.
M. Stern: For a while Adam Nussbaum and Jeff Andrews were playing with me down there, and we became the Michael Brecker Band. Mike came down one night when there were very few people there. He just sat in the back and dug the whole thing so much that he said, “I think I’d like to try that trio in my band.”
L. Stern: We would rehearse, but then we’d take the music to the 55 Bar to mature it out in front of people. It was a small club with no pressure. And because it was a regular slot, people would just show up. If anybody wanted to have anything to do with me, they knew where to find me on Sundays.
M. Stern: Whenever I was in town, I would play every Monday and Wednesday. I played there a bunch with Victor Lewis, Adam Nussbaum, Richie Morales, Lincoln Goines, Steve Slagle. Roy Hargrove used to come down sometimes and sit in.
Adam Rogers (guitarist): My first memories of 55 Bar are going to hear Mike Stern in the mid-‘80s. He had played with Miles, so there was a lot of excitement. I remember being absolutely knocked off my feet, because he played so great and had a really unique style.
Ben Monder (guitarist): It was always inspiring to see Mike Stern, and I did that for years. The first time I ever saw Paul Motian and Bill Frisell live was at the 55 Bar. They were both playing with Leni Stern, along with Harvie Swartz. Hearing those guys in physical space, because I’d been listening to their records for years, was quite a revelation.
Mark Kirby (bartender): My first week, I worked the door for a Mike Stern show and it was packed. There were no reservations in those days, and a couple from Australia comes up and goes, “Two tickets, mate!” I said, “I’m sorry, the show is sold out.” The woman started bawling. The guy goes, “You gotta let us in, we came from Australia.” Normally I would say something like, “Well, you shoulda got an earlier flight.” But I could tell it was a man-to-man moment of desperation. This couple had planned their whole honeymoon around coming to the famous 55 Bar to see their hero Mike Stern in his home court in a little tiny bar, and they got lost in the West Village. Their whole plan was crashing and burning. So I said, “You can stand just inside the door.” When they left, the guy gave me the $50 handshake. That was when I realized that 55 Bar was a big deal.
Kyra Kverno (bartender/photographer): There used to be this man that would call from Japan every single night that Mike played, drunk out of his mind. We’d pick up the phone and hear, “MIKE STERN!” We were so busy that we started handing the phone to everybody in the bar.
Kirby: We gave the phone to some Japanese people and asked what he was saying, and they were like, “He’s just babbling gibberish.”
THE DUMP
Wayne Krantz (guitarist, from a 2007 remembrance): I started playing there in 1987, a few years after I had moved to New York. Back then it was still just a place for hardcore boozers and drug dealers, some of them lost souls, others just taking a temporary break from life. It was a lot funkier then but still had a warm feeling to it. You knew it was going to be a good place to play and there was already some good music happening there: the first thing I heard there was Leni Stern with Larry Willis, Harvie Swartz, and Paul Motian. It was wild, seeing really good stuff in such shabby surroundings.
M. Stern: We used to affectionately call it “The Dump.” Back then it was really, really funky. It remained very funky, but that was kind of the charm.
Goines: “Hey, you wanna play The Dump tonight?” I never heard the words 55 Bar. I don’t know if they embraced that name or not, but it definitely was a dump, especially before they implemented the smoking ban and tried to clean up the people freebasing in the back room. The place was a health hazard. One time I found a dead rat in the back of one of Mike’s amps.
L. Stern: In the very beginning, they would be open until four or five in the morning and they would serve people regardless of theirstate of mind. The club next door was called the Lion’s Head, where all the writers and journalists met. When they cut them off at the Lion’s Head, they would come over to 55 Bar. They would be completely nonverbal at that point.
M. Stern: That’s how they made their bread at that point: real professional drinkers. They would come in and drink at four in the morning, when everything else had closed. You’d come in sometimes to get a piece of equipment and there would be people there at eight in the morning, still juicing. After the smoking ban, everybody stayed home and drank. After that it became mainly a music club.
Kverno: The ceiling looks like it’s going to fall down. I think it has fallen on people occasionally—drummers, usually. There was a leak from the bathroom in the real estate office upstairs and you would see water hitting the snare drum, creating an ambient noise. It’s a dirty old New York dive bar with really incredible music, and it feels like no other place that I’ve ever been to.
David Binney (saxophonist): There were crazy scenes. It’s the West Village at all hours of the early morning with people drinking and music playing, so things would happen. It was really a New York place where stories were made that people would carry for the rest of their lives.
Kirby: There was the Night of the Sexy Dwarf. Brooklyn Boogaloo Blowout shows always involved a lot of drunkenness. The place was packed and people were dancing in the aisles. A small person was trying to dance and getting buffeted about by people because she’s about three feet tall, wearing an orange mini-dress and white go-go boots up to her knees. She lets her hair down and starts doing this incredible, completely hot dance on the bar. I look up at the guy next to me and go, “What do you see?” And he goes, “I see a little person in an orange mini dress and white go-go boots.” I said, “Good, I thought I was having an acid flashback.”
OUR HOLE IN THE WALL
Ben Allison (bassist): I was never part of the punk rock scene, but I imagine CBGB’s would be the analogue in the punk scene: a well-respected, well-known name, but kind of a dump. You’d plug in an amp and there was always a 50/50 chance that sparks would fly out.
Kate McGarry (vocalist): You never knew what you were going to get. If the cord was going to be broken, the mic was broken, whatever. You knew that people were really supportive and interested in what you were doing, but navigating the equipment was its own fresh hell every time.
Chris Potter (saxophonist): As much as I loved the bar, it was always on that line between charming and quaint or moldy and dangerous. Which was part of the appeal. It felt like it needed a little love and care.
“As much as people called it a dive, I felt like it had a kind of magic.” — Kate McGarry
Rogers: There was a popcorn machine in the corner, which was part of the entertainment somehow. This big, movie theater-sized popcorn machine where you could see the popcorn through the glass.
Jon Cowherd (pianist): They had a jukebox of jazz 45s, Miles and Trane and all these classic records. It had a real family-friendly local vibe, even though it seems like an international mecca of jazz.
Donny McCaslin (saxophonist): It was rugged and old and funky in all the right ways. With the acoustics, you could play loud music but it sounded very clear to the audience. I think that was one thing that made it such a great room for electric music.
Mark Guiliana (drummer): “Dive” has always been a compliment in my book. It’s one of those rooms where it’s not really obvious why it sounds good. Maybe it’s all the wood. But it’s just another bar where stuff sounded really good, and obviously the way it was curated made it a place to be.
McGarry: As much as people called it a dive, I felt like it had a kind of magic. Whether it was the stupid twinkle lights or the old record covers and the broken clock, which was forever 15 minutes fast or slow, it felt like its own little magic land. Once the show started, it transformed from this dank basement into a place where the energy was palpable and it had a kind of authenticity created from all the nights of music being played there.
Monder: Kind of like the Vanguard, something about the history of the space seems to seep into everything that’s played there.
Thana Alexa (vocalist): There was something that radiated out of those walls. I think there must be some kind of energy force that existed in that space because of the amount of music that was played there over decades. It really did feel special, even though it was dirty and the women’s bathroom door never fricking locked. It was a hole in the wall, but it was our hole in the wall.
FROM DIVE BAR TO DIVE VENUE
Krantz: When Queva Lutz took over the bar in 2001 we thought the place was finished. We couldn’t imagine that it could continue the way it had. A place where you could play anything you wanted, as loud as you wanted to, where it wasn’t too expensive, where the room sounded pretty good and was easily accessible in NYC? No, not in these modern times. But we were wrong. Queva made a few sharp changes that we wondered about, but ended up making the place better.
Binney: Queva was a maverick. She was a very individual, very strong woman. She had great stories of coming up in San Francisco and being friends with Janis Joplin. She knew Hendrix. She was obviously a woman who liked musicians and had been around music all her life. She became successful with real estate and when she could afford it, she got back into the music scene.
McGarry: Queva didn’t suffer fools. She was straightforward and tough and loving and had a youthful, sassy, New York “F- You” vibe. To me she was a role model. I had grown up with a lot of polite women, and she just wasn’t interested in that.
Antonio Sanchez (drummer): The place became what it became because of Queva’s vision. She had an open mind for music and let artists do their thing. Some clubs are very particular in who they book and might even give you crap right as you come off the stage. The Vanguard has that reputation. 55 Bar was the opposite. You could have thevkeys to the place, musically speaking. I think Queva’s attitude and her vision molded the jazz scene for many, many years.
Binney: Queva and I became really friendly. She wanted to change the 55 into more of a jazz club, but she didn’t have any history with jazz. I was struggling along trying to pay rent at that time, and she used to pay me secretly, maybe $500 a month, to advise her on who to get into the club. So I turned her on to a lot of people: Chris Potter, Adam Rogers. And it worked. The crowds started to pick up and it became more of a dedicated club.
Monder: 55 became a much more serious listening room. It would be regularly full and people would sit reverently listening to whatever was going on. It took on a concert hall atmosphere.
Sanchez: The place was unique in the scene because it had very eclectic programming. They had singer-songwriters and blues musicians and hardcore jazz musicians and avant-gardists. One of the main attractions of the 55 Bar for me was to become a part of that very eclectic scene.
THE WORKSHOP
McCaslin: When Queva took over, I started having a regular gig. I was able to work out original music because she gave free rein to whatever we wanted to do. Whatever period I was in, whether it was the electric thing with Tim Lefebvre, Mark Guiliana, and Jason Lindner, or exploring folkloric rhythms with Adam Cruz and Ben Monder, I was able to workshop and develop so much music there over the years.
Allison: There was zero pressure at the 55 Bar. If I play in one of the better paying, higher end clubs in New York City, I feel a certain amount of pressure to come prepared with my A game. Whereas 55 Bar was so casual, so laid back, it opened up possibilities for trying stuff out and experimenting. Music scenes need places like that.
Monder: I liked the informal atmosphere. If you were in the audience and wanted to listen, it wasn’t so informal that it was distracting, but the atmosphere also wasn’t uptight, like you were in a smelly Carnegie Hall.
McGarry: I sat in with somebody and Queva came out and said, “I like what you’re doing. I want to give you a shot.” She was an ally, somebody who cared about more than just numbers and butts in seats. I used it as a place to try different things and workshop new material and arrangements. Every time I went I got a little surer, a little clearer and a little more grounded in my own voice as a musician.
Binney: Queva offered me every other Tuesday. I used to throw weird groups of people together and we’d improvise. I put bands together with two different people on every instrument: Wayne Krantz and Adam Rogers on guitar, Tim LeFebvre and Scott Colley or Thomas Morgan on bass, Dan Weiss and Jim Black on drums, Craig Taborn on piano, and different horns: Greg Osby, Mark Turner, and Chris Potter all did it.
Kirby: I was the grumpy old man of jazz. I thought there was no good new jazz. I was not into the Wynton Marsalis reformation where the avant-garde is weird and you had to wear a suit. I was working the door for Dave Binney and friends on a Thursday night, and I went in and had my face melted. I told Queva, “I’ve never been so happy to be completely wrong. Jazz is happening, and it’s happening right here.”
“That was the spirit of the 55 Bar: people wanted you to go all the way.”
— Ambrose Akinmusire
Binney: The music was on a ridiculously high level. We were pushing things. We played some of the same music for twenty years and it was never even close to being the same every week. I think it was fascinating for people to come and hear what would happen with the music.
Kverno: That’s how it was with a lot of the people who had residencies. There would always be surprises. You’d be like, “I’ve seen this five thousand times,” and then somebody would try something different or somebody else would sit in, and it would completely alter everything and captivate you all over again.
Binney: I wanted to have a regular band, so I put together Dan Weiss, Thomas Morgan, and Jacob Sacks. I did that for more than twenty years, every other Tuesday. At various times Craig Taborn took over, and for the last several years Matt Mitchell was playing piano and Eivind Opsvik was playing bass. That became a pretty famous gig in New York. A lot of students came to watch.
Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpeter): I was at school at the same time as Dan Weiss, Thomas Morgan and Jacob Sacks, so I started going to the shows all the time. Eventually Binney hired me to do some things, and it was life-changing on a lot of levels – mainly endurance. The music kept going deeper. You would fall into a groove that would almost never end. Dave would get onto a one-note vamp thing and say, “Man, we keep going until they fuckin’ freak out!” I remember at first thinking, “People are gonna get tired of this shit.” But he was totally right. That was the spirit of the 55 Bar: people wanted you to go all the way.
Krantz: Around 1992 or ’93 I noticed a guy sitting directly in front of the band fiddling around with some headphones. I asked him what he was listening to. “You,” he replied. It was Marc Bobrowsky, chiropractor/taper/music fanatic, who ended up being the archivist for that first period of the band. His tapes were subsequently used for 2 Drink Minimum and Greenwich Mean, the first two records [of four] I made at 55.
Monder: When I would have a regular slot, I would get my group with Tony Malaby and Tom Rainey in there as much as I could. We managed to record Live at the 55 Bar right before everything shut down. I thought it captured the way we play fairly well, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that it captures the spirit of the 55 Bar other than maybe the freedom that the space allowed people to play with.
McCaslin: I remember Chris Potter’s record Underground. He’s sitting in the 55 Bar on the cover, and that group really came to fruition there.
Potter: That came about through a series of gigs there. I tried a few different configurations. I had been familiar with Craig Taborn performing on the Rhodes without a bass player from Tim Berne’s band, which I had also seen at the 55. There was a sound that I was hearing. The traditional bass/drums/piano jazz group wasn’t quite the right sound for the music that I wanted to write and to hear.
Alexa: One of my favorite bands to ever come out of the 55 Bar was Adam Rogers’ band, Dice.
Rogers: Dice was probably the clearest example of how I took advantage of the space to develop a project. Around 2008 I wanted to explore music in that power trio setting. It was the perfect place to work out the music for a while before recording it. We played frequently enough to allow the music to develop in an organic fashion so that some of my foggy ideas revealed themselves over time.
McCaslin: You could play a type of music that doesn’t go over as well in other venues, which was a good fit for the aesthetic that I was trying to get to. Stuff you wouldn’t hear at Smalls or Mezzrow. It was an outlet for the electric improvisational scene.
L. Stern: I went to play the Festival in the Desert in 2006 and got hired by Salif Keita to do a project for the UNESCO Foundation. After that, I started playing with world music musicians. I started bringing in kora and oud players to the 55 Bar, and that really changed the vibe.
McGarry: You could take the small risks. It was no big deal. But it was in a way, because your peers were going to be there. I used to invite Kurt Elling to come and play with us there. None of the people that I loved were too good for the 55 Bar.
Paul Jost (vocalist): It’s been the breeding ground for so much wonderful music. It’s been a hotbed for artists to explore in a safe environment.
FROM DIVE BAR TO DIVE VENUE
Krantz: When Queva Lutz took over the bar in 2001 we thought the place was finished. We couldn’t imagine that it could continue the way it had. A place where you could play anything you wanted, as loud as you wanted to, where it wasn’t too expensive, where the room sounded pretty good and was easily accessible in NYC? No, not in these modern times. But we were wrong. Queva made a few sharp changes that we wondered about, but ended up making the place better.
Binney: Queva was a maverick. She was a very individual, very strong woman. She had great stories of coming up in San Francisco and being friends with Janis Joplin. She knew Hendrix. She was obviously a woman who liked musicians and had been around music all her life. She became successful with real estate and when she could afford it, she got back into the music scene.
McGarry: Queva didn’t suffer fools. She was straightforward and tough and loving and had a youthful, sassy, New York “F- You” vibe. To me she was a role model. I had grown up with a lot of polite women, and she just wasn’t interested in that.
Antonio Sanchez (drummer): The place became what it became because of Queva’s vision. She had an open mind for music and let artists do their thing. Some clubs are very particular in who they book and might even give you crap right as you come off the stage. The Vanguard has that reputation. 55 Bar was the opposite. You could have thevkeys to the place, musically speaking. I think Queva’s attitude and her vision molded the jazz scene for many, many years.
Binney: Queva and I became really friendly. She wanted to change the 55 into more of a jazz club, but she didn’t have any history with jazz. I was struggling along trying to pay rent at that time, and she used to pay me secretly, maybe $500 a month, to advise her on who to get into the club. So I turned her on to a lot of people: Chris Potter, Adam Rogers. And it worked. The crowds started to pick up and it became more of a dedicated club.
Monder: 55 became a much more serious listening room. It would be regularly full and people would sit reverently listening to whatever was going on. It took on a concert hall atmosphere.
Sanchez: The place was unique in the scene because it had very eclectic programming. They had singer-songwriters and blues musicians and hardcore jazz musicians and avant-gardists. One of the main attractions of the 55 Bar for me was to become a part of that very eclectic scene.
THE WORKSHOP
McCaslin: When Queva took over, I started having a regular gig. I was able to work out original music because she gave free rein to whatever we wanted to do. Whatever period I was in, whether it was the electric thing with Tim Lefebvre, Mark Guiliana, and Jason Lindner, or exploring folkloric rhythms with Adam Cruz and Ben Monder, I was able to workshop and develop so much music there over the years.
Allison: There was zero pressure at the 55 Bar. If I play in one of the better paying, higher end clubs in New York City, I feel a certain amount of pressure to come prepared with my A game. Whereas 55 Bar was so casual, so laid back, it opened up possibilities for trying stuff out and experimenting. Music scenes need places like that.
Monder: I liked the informal atmosphere. If you were in the audience and wanted to listen, it wasn’t so informal that it was distracting, but the atmosphere also wasn’t uptight, like you were in a smelly Carnegie Hall.
McGarry: I sat in with somebody and Queva came out and said, “I like what you’re doing. I want to give you a shot.” She was an ally, somebody who cared about more than just numbers and butts in seats. I used it as a place to try different things and workshop new material and arrangements. Every time I went I got a little surer, a little clearer and a little more grounded in my own voice as a musician.
Binney: Queva offered me every other Tuesday. I used to throw weird groups of people together and we’d improvise. I put bands together with two different people on every instrument: Wayne Krantz and Adam Rogers on guitar, Tim LeFebvre and Scott Colley or Thomas Morgan on bass, Dan Weiss and Jim Black on drums, Craig Taborn on piano, and different horns: Greg Osby, Mark Turner, and Chris Potter all did it.
Kirby: I was the grumpy old man of jazz. I thought there was no good new jazz. I was not into the Wynton Marsalis reformation where the avant-garde is weird and you had to wear a suit. I was working the door for Dave Binney and friends on a Thursday night, and I went in and had my face melted. I told Queva, “I’ve never been so happy to be completely wrong. Jazz is happening, and it’s happening right here.”
“That was the spirit of the 55 Bar: people wanted you to go all the way.”
— Ambrose Akinmusire
Binney: The music was on a ridiculously high level. We were pushing things. We played some of the same music for twenty years and it was never even close to being the same every week. I think it was fascinating for people to come and hear what would happen with the music.
Kverno: That’s how it was with a lot of the people who had residencies. There would always be surprises. You’d be like, “I’ve seen this five thousand times,” and then somebody would try something different or somebody else would sit in, and it would completely alter everything and captivate you all over again.
Binney: I wanted to have a regular band, so I put together Dan Weiss, Thomas Morgan, and Jacob Sacks. I did that for more than twenty years, every other Tuesday. At various times Craig Taborn took over, and for the last several years Matt Mitchell was playing piano and Eivind Opsvik was playing bass. That became a pretty famous gig in New York. A lot of students came to watch.
Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpeter): I was at school at the same time as Dan Weiss, Thomas Morgan and Jacob Sacks, so I started going to the shows all the time. Eventually Binney hired me to do some things, and it was life-changing on a lot of levels – mainly endurance. The music kept going deeper. You would fall into a groove that would almost never end. Dave would get onto a one-note vamp thing and say, “Man, we keep going until they fuckin’ freak out!” I remember at first thinking, “People are gonna get tired of this shit.” But he was totally right. That was the spirit of the 55 Bar: people wanted you to go all the way.
Krantz: Around 1992 or ’93 I noticed a guy sitting directly in front of the band fiddling around with some headphones. I asked him what he was listening to. “You,” he replied. It was Marc Bobrowsky, chiropractor/taper/music fanatic, who ended up being the archivist for that first period of the band. His tapes were subsequently used for 2 Drink Minimum and Greenwich Mean, the first two records [of four] I made at 55.
Monder: When I would have a regular slot, I would get my group with Tony Malaby and Tom Rainey in there as much as I could. We managed to record Live at the 55 Bar right before everything shut down. I thought it captured the way we play fairly well, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that it captures the spirit of the 55 Bar other than maybe the freedom that the space allowed people to play with.
McCaslin: I remember Chris Potter’s record Underground. He’s sitting in the 55 Bar on the cover, and that group really came to fruition there.
Potter: That came about through a series of gigs there. I tried a few different configurations. I had been familiar with Craig Taborn performing on the Rhodes without a bass player from Tim Berne’s band, which I had also seen at the 55. There was a sound that I was hearing. The traditional bass/drums/piano jazz group wasn’t quite the right sound for the music that I wanted to write and to hear.
Alexa: One of my favorite bands to ever come out of the 55 Bar was Adam Rogers’ band, Dice.
Rogers: Dice was probably the clearest example of how I took advantage of the space to develop a project. Around 2008 I wanted to explore music in that power trio setting. It was the perfect place to work out the music for a while before recording it. We played frequently enough to allow the music to develop in an organic fashion so that some of my foggy ideas revealed themselves over time.
McCaslin: You could play a type of music that doesn’t go over as well in other venues, which was a good fit for the aesthetic that I was trying to get to. Stuff you wouldn’t hear at Smalls or Mezzrow. It was an outlet for the electric improvisational scene.
L. Stern: I went to play the Festival in the Desert in 2006 and got hired by Salif Keita to do a project for the UNESCO Foundation. After that, I started playing with world music musicians. I started bringing in kora and oud players to the 55 Bar, and that really changed the vibe.
McGarry: You could take the small risks. It was no big deal. But it was in a way, because your peers were going to be there. I used to invite Kurt Elling to come and play with us there. None of the people that I loved were too good for the 55 Bar.
Paul Jost (vocalist): It’s been the breeding ground for so much wonderful music. It’s been a hotbed for artists to explore in a safe environment.
WATERING HOLE
Allison: It was a place where the conversations would spill out into the street. Musicians would go in and listen to their peers and when they wanted to hang and talk, they would just go outside. The watering hole aspect is significant, because so much of the music is social. Projects and ideas can emerge in those moments when musicians connect and start bullshitting and hanging and talking.
Potter: It was a friendly spot to meet up and bounce things off each other, which is so valuable. I compare it to Minton’s back in the day.
Sanchez: That became the center of my community and Thana’s community. Every time we just wanted to hang out, that’s where we would end up because we knew the staff and everybody knew us. It was really a family vibe.
Potter: My wife gave me a surprise 40th birthday party there. I went down to the bar and people from various parts of my life were sitting there. We were trying to hit a piñata and my daughter, who was three or four at the time, was just screaming.
McCaslin: In the back room there were pictures of a lot of the staff over the years, some who were still there and some who had departed. There was a real sense of community, and I think Queva really fostered that. It reminds me of the theme song from Cheers: a place where everybody knows your name.
Stern: Kirby was the cat who became famous. Everybody dug Kirby, and he was there for a bunch of years.
Akinmusire: Like at the Village Vanguard, where Lorraine was a part of the music, Kirby was a part of the music at the 55 Bar. They were the characters of the place.
Kirby: What I was doing made me indispensable so I wouldn’t get fired. I’ve worked in places where people would get fired for no reason but at 55 Bar, there were people that worked there who should have been fired ten times over.
Kverno: They had jobs for life. You’d scratch your head and think, do they have to kill somebody?
Kirby: It was like the Supreme Court, except a Supreme Court where you can show up drunk, fuck off, get totally drunk and cry about your personal life.
McCaslin: There’s that old adage that you need to play your very best if there’s one person in the audience or one thousand. There was one miserable, rainy February night that I was playing there and there was one person in the audience – and it turned out to be Cecil Taylor.
Binney: For many years, Cecil was a fixture at the bar. I had many late night hangs with Cecil. He would talk for two hours and you’d think he was just going off on tangents, then somehow he would bring it back to the original subject in a way that was mind blowing.
Allison: I remember having the longest conversation I ever had with Cecil Taylor there. It gave me some insight into his brain and how he thinks. He speaks like he plays, so you can imagine.
Potter: You would have the thought that you weren’t quite sure how to extricate yourself. And then you weren’t really sure that you wanted to.
Binney: He would talk about Miles, who he called the Mean Devil. He and Stanley Crouch would get these screaming arguments about music, which was hysterical.
Kirby: He would come in with that much hated and also brilliant jazz critic Stanley Crouch. He used to rip Cecil Taylor in The Voice all the time, but they’d be in there drinking together like the odd couple. Cecil always drank Brandy Alexanders and Stanley Crouch always drank vodka martinis.
Binney: One night I was talking to him until three in the morning and he said, “I must with Max.” It was so funny to me that somebody would hang that hard and then go play duo with Max Roach the next day in Paris.
Kverno: Members of Metallica would come in to see Lenny White play drums. That would be a spectacle. The David Bowie moment was pretty spectacular.
McCaslin: Bowie was working with Maria Schneider on this piece called “Sue (or in a Season of Crime),” and she played him a record of mine called Casting for Gravity. The first song on that record is called “Stadium Jazz,” which was inspired by my performances at the 55 Bar. We came to this wild ending at the end of a set and Mark Guiliana stood up, hit the cymbal, looked at me and said, “Man, that was some stadium jazz.” We both burst out laughing. A couple of months later that song came to be what David heard. A little while later he said to Maria, “I see Donny’s playing at the 55 Bar,” and they came down together to hear us play.
Kverno: He was shopping for a new band for his record, which would become Blackstar. He was a great tipper. He was happy, dancing in his chair, and nobody recognized him. I went out at one point and told the doorman, “Did you know David Bowie’s inside?” He said, “Oh my God, I just charged him a cover.” I don’t think he sweated the $10.
McCaslin: In retrospect, that was kind of the audition for Blackstar. It was weird because it was also our warmup gig for a recording of mine called Fast Future, so I didn’t want to freak anybody out. I wanted to keep the attention on the music in front of us, so I told Mark but I didn’t tell Tim and Jason.
Guiliana: We didn’t meet him that night, it just happened that he was in the room. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, and it was obviously an honor to have him there but we just did our thing. It was like any other night playing-wise, but it started an exciting musical relationship.
A GREAT DAY IN THE WEST VILLAGE
Kyra Kverno: I’m a music photographer, so I travel all over. I shoot a lot of music festivals: the Newport Jazz Festival, the Folk Festival, the New Orleans Jazz Festival. I wanted a part-time job that would be flexible so that I could still go away when the festivals were happening, but then have some steady work when they weren’t. I kept saying I was going to quit, and then 12 years later the bar quit first.
Kirby: Luckily Kyra had the idea of doing a 55 Bar version of the Great Day in Harlem picture. We did that a year ago in July, when the place was first reopening.
Kverno: I was sitting at the bar one day and thought it would be really cool to do a photograph and get all the West Village musicians involved. I always referred to the area as the Jazz Triangle because there are so many little clubs right there. Then I realized we could just do all the people who played the 55 Bar, because they played all those other bars too. Then the pandemic happened, so it got pushed back. But we didn’t think it was the end. We thought we were celebrating our future.
“One of the main attractions of the 55 Bar was to become a part of a very eclectic scene.”
— Antonio Sanchez
THE END
Binney: It was very sad when Queva passed.
Kate McGarry: Scott’s dedication to Queva’s vision was extraordinary. He has his own work as a real estate agent, and he’s very busy with two kids. He didn’t have to shoulder that. I’m so grateful to him. I think he’s a fucking hero.
Kverno: After the pandemic, I never thought that I would miss it as much as I did. That horrible smell of stale beer and desperation. Scott had every intention of keeping it open, but I guess they owed some back rent.
Rogers: I and other musicians who played there a lot helped put together a benefit at the end of September 2021, which was helpful for a while but wasn’t strong enough to weather the tides of whatever ended up making it necessary to shut the doors. It’s a real loss, but I’m grateful that it lasted as long as it did.
McGarry: I had an absolute pit in my stomach and in my heart. I’m so tired of the profit motive being the only thing that counts. Capitalism is just going to ruin everything. That place was precious, and I feel like it’s still alive in my body.
Sanchez: I was there for the last night. It was very beautiful and it was very sad. We hadn’t heard anything about it closing, and then all of a sudden it was imminent.
Alexa: It felt a little unceremonious. I think Scott was in a bit of denial, so there was no announcement. People found out by word of mouth and it was the musicians who made Monday night a party. It became ceremonious when we all came together and collectively decided that we’re going to celebrate this last night.
Paul Jost: I hadn’t been there for almost two years because of COVID. So I went from being excited about being back to feeling sad that this Monday would be the last. I thought there had to be somebody on after me – I surely can’t be the last act to play at 55. But that is in fact how it turned out. I say this in all humility, but maybe that was the best call, because 55 didn’t just represent the name, well-known jazz artists, but the people that were unknown but had talent and needed a place to express themselves.
Kverno: Nobody could get in. People were outside socializing, and then a second line started and everybody was dancing in the street. I was behind the bar crying. Customers were crying. Musicians were coming in and crying. Everybody cried and then everybody got drunk and continued to cry.
Goines: It’s the passing of an era.
Akinmusire: It’s sad when it’s one of our homes, these places where you can come and develop something and just be grungy and loose. At the Vanguard, Birdland, the Blue Note, you already have to be established. You need somewhere where people can keep the ugly parts of the music in there, and learn that those ugly parts can move people too.
Stern: It’s a drag that it closed. But it sure was a great run.
