Jazz Hits Sweet Notes for Once-Struggling Cafe

As people kept coming through the door of the Overland Cafe in Palms on an early Friday evening not too long ago, co-owner Mark Sands looked, as they used to say, pleased as punch.

“If there are this many people here now,” he said, waving his arm around his three-quarters-full establishment, “then it’s going to be packed later.”

Weekend nights weren’t always booming at the restaurant, a cozy and comfortable three-room eatery that seats a tad more than a hundred people (an additional 36 on the patio) in the midst of a semi-residential district on Overland Avenue between Palms and Venice boulevards.

“It used to be a morgue in here,” Sands, 36, said.

“About five years ago, weekend nights were the slowest,” he said. “We had a loyal business clientele during weekday lunches; weeknights were OK, but the weekends were dismal around here.”

Then jazz came to the room’s rescue.

On Labor Day, 1983, Sands and Gwen Hanks, his weekend night manager and music coordinator, booked bassist Joel Ector’s band, on a lark.

“It was the first time we had live music, and everybody dug it, so Mark and I decided we should do it on a regular basis,” said Hanks, who has been with the Overland for 10 years. “We kicked it off about six months later, on the room’s anniversary, February 10, 1984, and the response has been phenomenal.”

“Jazz has been good, tripling or quadrupling our business,” Sands said. So good that Sands plans to expand his operation to seven nights come 1990.

He now offers bands from 8 p.m. to midnight Thursday through Saturday, with solo pianists working the Saturday and Sunday brunches from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. “In January, I want to establish a house band that will work Sunday through Thursday, and then feature different bands Friday and Saturday,” he said.

The Overland, which serves a good selection of beer, and house wine in carafes, charges no cover, but there is a $5 minimum. “I’m convinced people don’t want to pay a cover at this end of town,” Sands said. “And that’s kind of a problem, because without the cover, I can’t book the bigger name artists.”

At present the room features lesser-name, but still very musical, jazz/fusion players, with an occasional mainstream player, such as guitarist Ron Affif, who worked this particular Friday. “Jazz/fusion is what the customers seem to want,” Hanks said. “I find that bands like David Patterson and Airplay, Pocketwatch and saxophonist Bruce Escovitz get the strongest response, but there are hard-core listeners who will come out for mainstream players. We’re also starting to get more Latin bands, like Shades of Jade, with percussionist Bill Lassiter and violinist Karen Briggs.”

Hanks said she’s deluged with tapes from bands that want to play the Overland, all of which she listens to. Not too many stand out. “A lot of what I hear is very similar,” she said. “Only a few are exceptional.”

Judging a band from its tape can be deceptive, she has found. “I’ve made many mistakes,” she admitted, smiling shyly. “I hear a band on tape, they sound great. So I book them in and they’re awful. But I’m getting better. I go out a lot and listen.”

As much as Sands and Hanks enthuse about their music policy, it’s food that keeps the Overland Cafe going.

“The food is 90% of our business,” said Sands, who opened the restaurant with his father in 1973.

Originally known as the Pacific Sandwich and Savings Company, which Sands described as “a little sandwich shop where you ordered at the counter and took your own food to the table,” the Overland Cafe was born in 1981.

“The business wasn’t growing the way we wanted so we needed a name change, went to table service, expanded the menu, and it’s been growing ever since,” Sands said. “The public’s been real good to us in this location, which, frankly, is not the greatest.

“Still, I think the place has identity problems. People come here for breakfast who have no idea we do jazz, and I have other customers come in here at night who don’t know we serve breakfast. That’s one of my goals, to let people know we are a breakfast, lunch and dinner house.”

For lunch and dinner, Sands offers typical California cuisine, or, as he puts it, “things that are in the public consciousness right now.” Featured are pastas, fresh fish, charbroiled meats and small custom pizzas. Nightly specials might include blackened Cajun steak, broiled ahi tuna with a chili lime pineapple butter or pizza with roasted fresh garlic and eggplant.

The breakfast fare is well above standard, with such dishes as eggs Benedict, eggs Florentine and huevos rancheros available as well as an assortment of egg and meat combos, omeletes, pancakes, etc. You get the picture.

A little after the conversation with Sands and Hanks, Ron Affif’s band, with Brian O’Rourke, piano, and Dick Berk, drums, kicked into gear. They cooked hard from the start, going from a dancing “I Hear a Rhapsody” to a steaming “Softly as in a Morning’s Sunrise” and an even hotter “I Love You.” Affif and company handled these torrid tempos deftly, playing nicely developed ideas that swung with snap.

The music at the Overland seems to draw all types of fans.

“I like the fact that I can hear an eclectic assortment of the best local jazz bands,” said Bill Standen, a material control manager from Westwood who regularly visits the Overland.

“I’ve watched it grow from a place with sawdust on the floor to a club where people have the opportunity to hear really good jazz,” said Shirley Birnbaum, a consultant/agent from Palms who books musicians, among them Ron Affif.

Berk, a hard-driving drummer who has played with such notables as Billie Holiday, Cal Tjader and Richie Coil, said the Overland “feels like a real jazz club, not like a place where people come to be seen. That makes you really want to play.”

Glancing around the club as the band played, one noticed few, if any, vacant seats. Looks like Mark Sands knew what he was talking about.

The Overland Cafe, 3601 Overland Ave., Palms. Open 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday to Wednesday, 7 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. Thursday and Friday, 8 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. Saturday, and 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday. (213) 559-9999.