[Dixielandjazz] Blues Alley celebrates 50 years

[Dick Baker]

At 12:00 PM 7/19/2015, Norman Vickers wrote:
>This item crossed my screen today. See link below.   I have some doubts
>about the statement, "Oldest continuously operated jazz supper club."
>Perhaps you jazz historians on these lists can confirm or deny this claim.

I went there several times in my many years in the DC area.  Not as 
often as you'd think, as it was pretty pricey, and generally featured 
more modern music than I craved.  I do remember going there in the 
mid-1970s to hear Joe Venuti.  Spiegle Willcox, whom I had met 
earlier at the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks Club annual reunion in 
Huntington, West Virginia, was traveling with Venuti and made a point 
of introducing me to Joe...quite an experience.

The club was a renovated carriage house and actually was in an alley, 
not a main street.  My recollection is that it had been started by 
D.C. clarinetist Tommy Gwaltney, and Johnson "Fat Cat" McRee, 
long-time proprietor of Fat Cat's Jazz Records and the Manassas Jazz 
Festival, was a partner.

The article mentioned, "Others, like Wynton Marsalis, have recorded 
live at the club."

Heck, even I recorded live at Blues Alley.  That is, when PRJC board 
member Rod Clarke rented Blues Alley on a Sunday afternoon in 1979 
and hired the Federal Jazz Commission to play for his 50th birthday 
party, he also asked me to come along and record the 
festivities.  That was when Fred Starr, then in D.C. to found and 
head the Kennan Institute for Soviet Studies, played with the Feds, 
as we locals called the band.  (Starr, of course, later founded the 
Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble when he was at Tulane 
University.)  I still have that recording; the Feds were pretty good 
then and later got a lot better--one of the better bands to come out 
of the D.C. area, although destined to be overshadowed by the Buck Creek JB.



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      Dick Baker
  djml at dickbaker.org