There were only a few working Christmas tree lights hung around the walls of the 55 Bar on Monday. But on the West Village club’s final night in operation, the room glowed.
More than a hundred musicians and bar regulars from across the city packed themselves inside the subterranean venue to say goodbye to the grimy jazz club that both emerging artists and Grammy-award winners have called their musical home – and where David Bowie once sat in the audience, scouting the band he would use on his final album, “Blackstar.”
“It is surreal. It still hasn’t sunk in – the fact that we are going to lose one of the most iconic music venues in the world,” said drummer and composer Antonio Sánchez. A four-time Grammy winner and Golden Globe nominee for composing the film score of “Birdman,” Sánchez came to pay his respects to the venue that gave him his first chance as a bandleader.
The 55 Bar joins a growing list of New York City jazz venues – others include Jazz Standard and Rue-B – forced to shutter after losing revenue during pandemic closures. “It’s a small place and COVID has had a big impact – a very big impact,” said Scott Ellard, the club’s owner. Musicians played benefits for the club last fall, and a GoFundMe page launched in September with a goal of $100,000 raised close to $61,000.
Ultimately, it wasn’t enough to save the widely admired club, which Ellard had taken over from his mother, Queva Lutz, in the early 2000’s. The space at 55 Christopher Street had opened to the public in 1919–at the tail end of a previous pandemic a century ago. The dive bar started presenting live jazz in the 1980s, with guitarists like Mike and Leni Stern and Wayne Krantz establishing long-term residencies. But the 55 Bar also provided a welcoming place for musical experimentation – right up to its final night.
“I have a thing with, ‘Freedom Jazz Dance' — I ended up using a Ukrainian scale,” Paul Jost told audience members, many of whom didn’t know until the night before that they would be listening to the last band to close out the bar. “I was re-learning it on this scale and I was like why am I doing this? But here we are... we have never done it as a quartet, but we’re going to give it a shot.”
“Only at the 55 Bar!” bartender Mark Kirby shouted. The crowd whistled.
Jost’s on-the-fly experimentation, bouncing around the loud, lively wood-floored space, offered evidence of an attribute musicians valued most about the club: the opportunity to take risks in a welcoming environment.
“I run my flute through a lot of pedals, which is very risky because sometimes it doesn’t go how I planned,” said Elsa Nilsson, a composer and flutist who has workshopped five albums at the 55 Bar. “This is a really great space to see, how does it respond in a room?”
Those opportunities weren’t limited to name-brand performers. Vocalist Michelle Walker said she felt respected by the club, which gave her the chance to experiment when she was just starting out, after changing careers in her late 20s to pursue music.
“Unless you are already super established and you’ve already gone through it and can step onto a jazz festival stage – you can do whatever you want,” Walker said. “But where do you grow? And this was the room where you could do that.”
Kirby, himself a musician known to patrons by his last name only, described watching the growth happening from behind the bar. “I’d be like, they kind of suck, but there is something there,” the barman teasingly said of the acts he'd seen. But over the course of years, or even months, he’d notice a change: “They would get better and better and better. And next thing you know, they are getting nominated for Grammys.”
The venue’s history, along with its openness and room for experimentation, never stopped resonating with younger generations of musicians. Marcelle Pena, a 33-year-old Brazilian singer who moved to New York City from Washington, D.C. a year ago, said the 55 Bar had become the spot for her and her friends to build community while absorbing a fusion of sounds.
“People today are looking for authentic places, and we have less and less authentic places in cities,” Pena said. “All the economic pressures are making them disappear. It’s a loss for all of us.”
On Monday night, that loss exceeded the capacity of one cozy basement club on Christopher Street, which couldn’t hold all the patrons and musicians who showed up for one more night. After the second set ended inside, brass musicians assembled out on the street took their cue from a phone tree. They wanted to give the 55 Bar a proper send-off – which, for jazz musicians, meant a 16-piece band out on the pavement, soloing and improvising until the police said it was time to stop.
