The great jazz clubs of legend were rarely beautiful. They were cramped, smoky and badly ventilated, and the music happened in spite of the room rather than because of it. The best clubs in Europe today share that indifference to comfort, but they have added something the old rooms often lacked: a genuine curiosity about where the music goes next. These five, chosen after a year of late nights and early trains, are worth planning a journey around.
In Lisbon, Cave Anselmo occupies a vaulted cellar beneath a former printworks in the Alfama, with room for sixty people and a piano that has been tuned, the owner insists, only by ear. The programme leans towards Portuguese and Cape Verdean players fusing jazz with morna and fado, and the Thursday late set, which starts after midnight, regularly runs until the trams resume. Order the vinho verde and do not ask for a table near the stage; there is no such thing.
Copenhagen's Kølvandet is a converted rowing-club boathouse on the harbour, where audiences sit on upturned hulls and the musicians play with their backs to the water. It is the unofficial home of the city's improvising scene, and the booking policy favours the strange: a trio of bass clarinets, a drummer who plays only on kitchenware. In summer the doors open onto the quay, and the music drifts across to the swimmers who gather there late into the evening.
Berlin, Naples and a surprise in Łódź
Berlin has more jazz venues than any city could reasonably need, but Klangkeller Nord, a former coal store in Wedding, stands apart for its devotion to young players. Every Monday is given over to musicians under twenty-five, who are paid the same fee as headliners. The room is bare concrete, the beer is cheap and the standard is ferociously high. Several of the players who cut their teeth here now lead bands that tour the continent's major festivals.
In Naples, Sala Velluto is the most glamorous of the five, a velvet-lined room above a pastry shop in the Chiaia district, run by a former opera singer who books vocalists almost exclusively. Expect standards sung in Neapolitan dialect and a dress code that is not enforced but is widely observed. The pastries from downstairs arrive at the interval on silver trays, and it is considered impolite to refuse a second.
A jazz club should be a little uncomfortable. If the room is too nice, people stop listening and start photographing the furniture.
The surprise is Łódź, where Piwnica Tkacza, a basement that once fed the workers of a textile mill, has become the most exciting room in Central Europe. Its owner, a retired sound engineer named Zbigniew Holub, believes comfort is the enemy of listening, and he has furnished the place accordingly with wooden benches and very little else. The programme mixes Polish players with visiting bands, and the audience, largely students, listens with an intensity that musicians describe as almost unnerving.
A few practical notes. None of these clubs takes reservations more than a week ahead, and most sell a portion of tickets at the door on the night. Arrive early, stay late and resist the urge to film the performance; in at least two of the rooms, doing so will earn you a stern word from the owner. Above all, go without a plan. The best sets in this music are the ones nobody, including the musicians, expected to happen.
