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There’s no heat there and we freeze in the winter. It is definitely a basement that nobody
in their right mind would have ever rented except Max Gordon.
Anyway - once you get down those stairs, you’re in heaven. You’re away from the world, it's
lovely.
When we were kids sometimes we’d come here, believe it or not, to the Village Vanguard.
It was the golden age of nightclubs for me. You could go into one club, hear Art Tatum,
go to the next one, hear Billie Holiday, go over across the street, you’d hear Lester
Young. It was heaven.
Sitting across from the banquette I was in and that banquette was Alfred Lion. I used
to collect all those Blue Note records, those fabulous early Blue Notes. And I don’t know,
Alfred and I looked at each other, “Hi,” you know. Somehow there was a connection because
a couple of years later we were married.
Alfred and I were now venturing into new forms of jazz, or new people. Thelonious Monk to
this day, I will never forget it as a cornerstone in my life.
Inadvertently, I booked Monk into the Vanguard because I met Max at the Fire Island summer
place. I said, “You know, there’s a great artist. You ought to hear him.” I just went
up to him cold. Well, that was easy to do in the summer because I had a cute little
yellow bathing suit on. And I’m 28. He was Mr. Gordon to me then.
Somehow we connected, and I got tired of living in this little one-room down in the Village,
and Max offered me a bigger room further on the other side of the Village. I decided to
take it. Max was not a jazz nut like me, he loved poetry and he loved writing and he loved
artists. And then Max got involved more with jazz musicians. The sound at the Vanguard
is so incredible, there is no recording studio that can equal it. And that’s why the musicians
like to play there, they can relate to the audience because of the shape of the room,
the pie shape, I don’t know. It’s just beautiful sound. Hey, Miles Davis was there.
Bill Evans played for weeks on end. And then Coltrane recorded his masterworks there. And
it became a jazz club, total jazz club. And that’s how it started. And then when Max
died, I didn’t have to take the Vanguard over, he never asked me, he never thought
about it, frankly. But it seemed my whole life was motivated - at the end of the road
was the club. The goal was there. And you finally reached it without trying to. But
it was preordained, I think. A couple of years ago all you would hear from people is, “Jazz
is dead! Jazz is dead!” I said, “Really?" I said, "When’s the funeral?”
Because there’s so many people coming here to hear jazz, so it’s hardly dead. Hardly.