Running a jazz club has long been a challenging business, offering the challenge of presenting a sometimes difficult to follow genre that rewards close listening. In Cleveland, the former Nighttown responded by combining dinner and concerts, with some patrons complaining that serving food was distracting, while the old BOP STOP, prior to the Music Settlement’s takeover of the room could feel like a classroom where listeners were under scrutiny: a former colleague of mine once got evicted by the owner for whispering and clinking his glass or something like that while the band was playing.
Now more than a dozen jazz clubs, mostly 100-200 capacity listening-oriented rooms) across the Midwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri and Iowa) have formed the Midwest Jazz Collective to coordinate tour booking and offer enhanced educational opportunities such as masterclasses with universities. They include the BOP STOP in Cleveland.
“Jazz clubs have always offered a unique and connective experience between artist and audience,” they say. “Outside of New York City and a few major metropolitan areas across the country, music clubs dedicated to Jazz may be few and far between, but the passion and spirit that binds them as a community is vibrant and strong.”
They point out that there is only a two-to-four hour drive between most of the clubs, and that coordinated tours will be more efficient and money-saving for artists, offering them potentially a dozen gigs in a period of two to three weeks.
The MJC has announced its first routed tour with the Benny Benack III Quartet, featuring trumpet player/vocalist Benack from March 22-April 10. He’ll be at the BOP STOP on March 25.
The tour includes more than a dozen club concerts and a half-dozen educational workshops at regional universities.