[Dixielandjazz] More on The Oak Room

[Stephen G Barbone]

The below is from "The Wall Street Journal", Feb 3, via "Jazz Promo  
Services".  Bruce McNichols and Herb Gardner will want to see the last  
paragraph since they played with the Smith Street Society Jazz Band on  
an extended gig at the Oak Room with Julie Wilson.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Start article:

The Oak Room Supper Club, which has been presenting top shelf cabaret  
and jazz singers inside the Algonquin Hotel for 32 years is now  
permanently shuttered, the hotel announced on Thursday.

General Manager Gary Budge, said then when the hotel, which has been  
closed for renovations since Jan 1, reopens in the spring, the Oak  
Room will no longer be there. Instead, its Blue Bar will be enlarged  
and the remainder of the Oak Room will be repurposed as a lounge for  
Marriott Rewards elite guests. (The hotel is affiliated with Marriott  
International)

"The Oak Room has been a cultural institution since 1980," Mr Budge  
said Thursday. "However with declining guest counts, it seemed like  
the appropriate thing for us to do right now."

Over the years, the Oak Room helped make the careers of such jazz and  
cabaret starts as Harry Connick Jr., Diana Krall, Michael Feinstein,  
Jane Monheit and many others.

"That was always my endgame, to get to the Oak Room in New York, Ghat  
always seemed like the pinnacle of a cabaret singer's career," said  
Emily Bergl, who made a triumphant debut at bthe Algonquin last fall  
and now, seemingly, will be the last cabaret star to emerge from the  
Oak Room. "You couldd feel that immense history, it resonated in the  
walls. All of those people that had come before you."

She added, "People have died in the Oak Room," referring to jazz  
singer Sylvia Syms, whom breathed her last at the finish of a late  
show in 1992. "That's the way that I wanted to go - to die in the Oak  
Room during a set."

The Oak Room, a New York landmark as the site of the legendary  
Algonquin Round Table, became a night club for the first time in 1939  
(the first performer there was Greta Keller) but was silenced a few  
years later during World War II, and did not present live music again  
on a regular basis until 1980.

"The first time I was there was to see the great Julie Wilson, with   
feather boa," said singer KT Sullivan, who starred in more than 15  
different shows at the Oak Room over a 20 year period. "Well it closed  
and opened before - maybe it will open in another 37 years.

End article