Veteran Singer Rescues Ailing Jazz Club, Plans to Tune It Up

Herb Jeffries frowned at his interior decorator. He looked toward the middle of the nightclub he had just bought, where the decorator had suggested putting the stage, and brushed the idea away with his big hand. “I hate theaters in the round,” he said.

“I don’t know any performers who like theaters in the round,” he said as he waded through chaotic bunches of small, round cocktail tables. The sound system, which a workman was adjusting, squeaked.

Putting a stage where performers would want it is one way the 72-year-old singer is stamping his personality on Carmelo’s, the Sherman Oaks jazz club that he and his son Robert bought--and thereby saved--Thursday.

The club doesn’t currently have a stage because Ruth Hoover, the club’s owner for the past two years, didn’t want one. She said a shortage of capital and the high prices charged by many artists combined to bring Carmelo’s, a popular jazz club for nearly six years and a restaurant for more than 20, to the brink of extinction.

Jeffries Calls

Two weeks ago, “out of the blue,” came a call from Jeffries, Hoover said. She saw him as just the right man to make Carmelo’s profitable and push the establishment--which is among the best known of about five restaurants and clubs that feature jazz in the San Fernando Valley--toward a new level of prominence.

Jeffries is at the far end of a career that has included stints as a screen actor and recording company owner. He has been singing in nightclubs for more than 50 years.

“People have associated Herb Jeffries with show business for years and years,” said Chuck Niles, who has had a radio show for 20 years on KKGO, Los Angeles’ 24-hour jazz station. “Herb Jeffries is a legend.”

Jeffries said he bought the club on Van Nuys Boulevard in part to re-create the era of nightclub elegance that he associates with the 1940s and 1950s. From 1951 to 1959, he owned a nightclub in Paris that was frequented, he recalled, by the “international jet set, kings and cons.” It was “a laid-back hangout for the beautiful people.”

He said he hopes those years of experience will help him take Carmelo’s out of the red and into the pink.

Flamingo Is Symbol

The color pink has special meaning to Jeffries because the abiding symbol of success in his life has been the flamingo.

His most noted achievement was the song named for the bubble-gum-colored bird, which he sang with Duke Ellington’s band in the early 1940s. He still sings it, beginning and ending every performance with its swaying, romantic melody. Niles said: “He’s married to that song and no divorce is pending.”

The Paris nightclub was named The Flamingo. For last week’s meeting with the interior decorator, Jeffries showed up in a black shirt imprinted with a large flamingo standing on one leg. It is one of a dozen such shirts he owns. He collects ceramic flamingos and has two pink ones on the lawn of his home in Sherman Oaks.

His son, Robert, plans to install three stuffed flamingos on the wall behind the stage of the revamped Carmelo’s, under a spotlight, as soon as the taxidermist calls to say they’re ready. The Jeffrieses said they may change the name of the Sherman Oaks club to The Flamingo and introduce an art-deco motif like the one in the original Paris club.

Herb Jeffries said he is relying on his name to draw both an audience and a steady flow of established entertainers and new talent.

He said he is making a commitment to regularly host local big bands, as Carmelo’s has in the past. And he said he will spend the money needed to redecorate a club whose appearance Hoover acknowledged has sagged.

In Jeffries’ words, “We’re going to dump a lot of money in here, I’d say about a half-million, and we’re going to make this place beautiful.”

Jeffries has an expansive show business personality and a big, seemingly untiring tenor-baritone. He is physically large also--Jeffries and his 41-year-old son are both 6 feet, 3 inches tall.

Financed by Trust Fund

The money for the renovation, Robert Jeffries said, will come from a trust fund provided by his mother’s side of the family.

“You won’t know it after we’re done,” the younger Jeffries said of the club, which seats about 150. Wearing a plush, tan jogging suit and a gold necklace, he sat with his legs up on a chair and spoke between exchanges with workmen. “Maybe it will look like the Coterie Room in the Beverly Hills Hotel, very fancy. It’s going to be all in white and brown.”

Robert Jeffries said he’s also contemplating putting in a glass ceiling, giant palms, a new sound booth and a new bar.

The club was founded as a restaurant about 1960 by Carmelo Piscitello, a former barber who envisioned having the best Italian food in Los Angeles, said Niles, a friend of the founder.

It was a neighborhood restaurant, Niles said, until Piscitello’s brother Chuck--a professional musician described by Niles as “a swinging little be-bop drummer”--persuaded him to start offering jazz in 1979.

The place became popular, with name performers such as sax player Stan Getz, blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon, singer Carmen McRae, big bandsman Louis Bellson and jazz organist Jimmy Smith among the headliners.

‘High Fees’ Cited

After Carmelo Piscitello died two years ago of a heart condition, Hoover bought the club. She said she found the financial odds were against her. “The trouble is, so many of the performers charge such high fees,” she said. “We just can’t afford to book them in a relatively small room.”

When Hoover talks about Herb Jeffries’ personality as an asset in promoting Carmelo’s, she emphasizes his ability to draw other performers. Jeffries has an insider’s identification with other artists that was evident one night last week when he was singing at another Sherman Oaks club, Chez Siam.

By the time his midnight set had started, professional musicians made up a good part of the small crowd in the club’s darkened interior. Jeffries did a set that included songs by Gershwin, Harold Arlen and Ellington.

When finished, he introduced four Los Angeles nightclub singers in the audience, Spanky Wilson, Jimmy Spencer, Maurice Davis and Frances Coche. Each of them sang, making the evening something of a performers’ convention.

Later, the musicians speculated about the qualities Herb Jeffries would bring to his own club. “I don’t know Herb as a club owner, but as a musician,” said Spencer, who has sung at Carmelo’s. “But I think it’s going to be a very warm room to work, a very beautiful room, a classy room, because that’s Herb.”

“Once upon a time in L.A., there were nightclubs,” Herb Jeffries said, leaning over a table as Chez Siam was about to close. “There were places like Ciro’s, Mocambo and The Crescendo. Very big and successful nightclubs. But these places closed . . . the rising union scales. Las Vegas got hot. It became difficult. I want a club like one of these clubs.”