What’s Dicier: Cattle Futures or Owning a Club? : Jazz: ‘Since we’ve been open, close to a thousand places have opened and closed,’ says Don Randi, owner of the longest-running club in town, the Baked Potato.

Earlier this year, Nucleus Nuance on Melrose was one of Hollywood’s jumping nightspots, offering a wide range of jazz and jazz-pop music to a devoted clientele. It wasn’t all that unusual for musical luminaries to drop by and sit in with the featured performers, as Stevie Wonder did back in February. Quite suddenly, the club is closed. No explanations have been made public, and no plans to reopen have been announced. Supporters of the Los Angeles jazz/pop scene may feel the loss of one more venue, but it’s unlikely there will be any tears shed. This is a feeling they’ve gotten used to.

Nucleus joined a long-running list of once-well-regarded, now departed jazz spots. And the list continues to grow. Nightwinds in Santa Monica suffered extensive damage in the January quake and will be hard-pressed to reopen.

“I can’t keep track of club closings anymore,” says Don Randi, owner of the two Baked Potato nightclubs. Randi’s Studio City club is in its 24th year, and has the distinction of being the longest-running jazz room in town.

“Since we’ve been open, close to a thousand places have opened and closed,” Randi says. ‘We started in the Nixon years and made it through that. We’ve been through some terrible economic times. Every time it starts getting better, something happens. Just before the riots, we were enjoying a boom, and then we got hit with all those days of curfew that completely threw us off. And things were picking up from last October to this January, and then the earthquake hit and we had to start all over again. It always takes a year to a year and a half after these type of things to get your crowd coming out again.”

The running of restaurants and nightclubs has never been an easy business. The outposts of any city’s night life are always susceptible to public whims and economic fluctuations. But the jazz spots of Los Angeles are in a unique bind. The clubs have the finest jazz talent in the world available to them continually, yet it’s a daily struggle to get listeners into the rooms. And, of course, the next temblor could put them out of business.

Myrna Daniels, editor and publisher of the music paper L.A. Jazz Scene, has been documenting the openings and closings of clubs for nearly seven years.

“Every month we report that somebody has folded, and it’s been that way since we started. That’s exactly why the paper can’t depend on club advertising. But there always seem to be new places opening, and the scene seems to balance out by the end of every year.”

Daniels says that though this town can be tough on its jazz clubs, jazz fans can still track down great music if they’re willing to look for it.

“There are always a lot of exciting things happening in Los Angeles--special events, concerts, club events. But for one club to get all the right elements together is almost impossible. The jazz audience has to be fiercely dedicated. They have to follow the performers. I don’t think it matters so much to the fans where the musicians work. The venue isn’t as important as the show.”

Some venues have weathered the shifting tides quite well. St. Mark’s in Venice has attracted a steady crowd with it’s diverse booking policy. Inn Arty’s has done the same in Pasadena. Hollywood’s Vine St. Bar & Grill remains a respected haven for serious jazz listeners. A few blocks away at Catalina Bar & Grill, patrons are so dedicated that during the week following the January earthquake, sell-out crowds sat quietly through the aftershocks while listening to saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders.

*

But even for successful club owners, there comes a time to say goodby to the scene. Al Williams has been running Birdland West in downtown Long Beach for seven years, and for nine years before that he ran the Jazz Safari in the Londontowne village next to the Queen Mary. He’s currently in the process of selling Birdland. He’s seeking an owner who will respect the club and keep it running, but he won’t miss that responsibility.

“I smoked for quite a number of years too, and I woke up one morning and just threw the pack away and quit. I hope Birdland is around forever, but it’s not going to be hard to walk away from the business. Seventeen years of running day-to-day operations in a jazz club is enough.”

Williams says that any nightclub is going to have its ups and downs, but points out that the downs for a jazz club can be particularly treacherous. “Jazz clubs are having a tough time, and so is everybody else,” he says. “But we don’t do the same kind of numbers as a rock club. If a rock joint is down 20%, we’re down 40%.”

Many clubs have attempted to lure a steady crowd by straying away from musically strict booking policies so that a wide range of sounds can be offered throughout the week. Studio City’s La Ve Lee used to specialize in Brazilian jazz, but now offers everything from honky-tonk blues to hard-grooving funk. J.P.’s Moneytree in North Hollywood and Chadney’s in Burbank offer a rich and varied mix of mainstream jazz acts. Club Brasserie at the Bel Age Hotel in West Hollywood and the Room Upstairs at Le Cafe in Sherman Oaks have become bustling haunts where club-hoppers mix with more serious jazz listeners.

For most club owners, no matter the quality and variety of the music they offer, it’s the food and drinks they serve that keep the clubs running. Jax in Glendale survived as a bar and restaurant for seven years before adding jazz music as an added attraction five years ago. ‘We’re probably one of the noisier jazz clubs,” says night manager James Colley. “There’s a lot of talking while people are having dinner. But I think we’ve also cultivated a lot of jazz fans. They come back again and again to hear the music.”

Bernard Jacoupy is a French-born restaurateur who decided to combine his passions for food and jazz when he opened Lunaria four years ago. “Making my restaurant a part of the jazz scene was a real plus,” he says. “But the club wouldn’t survive without serving food. It’s always a struggle. We opened a month before the Persian Gulf crisis. From there we moved on to the riots and the fires and the earthquake.”

Jacoupy says it’s tough for a club to stay profitable, but says the Los Angeles scene is also equally tough for the people that actually make the music.

“I really feel for the musicians. It surprises me that L.A. isn’t more supportive of its players. There are so many excellent musicians who live here, but it’s hard for them to make a living working here. They have to travel,” he says.

The Jazz Bakery in Culver City stands out as a venue that focuses on the music made there. The 2-year-old club is run as a nonprofit corporation under the guidance of Ruth Price, a veteran of the club world through her years as a vocalist. The room at the Bakery is set up theater-style, and the admission charge always includes the music, desserts, soft drinks, and parking. “No jazz club closing surprises me,” says Price. “It surprises me that they stay open. There are some owners who look at the clubs as just a business. They want to see a certain amount of profit all the time, or they close the club. If that’s the way we looked at what we’ve done down here the last 2 1/2 years, we wouldn’t be in business either.”

Price says that a jazz club’s survival often comes down to one person’s love of the music. “Jazz rooms in particular are almost totally dependent on a single person. I think of the great clubs I’ve known, and when you think of the club you think of the person behind it. When that person moves on, the club usually ends. It takes that kind of passion. Only one person can be that crazy. At the Jazz Bakery, it’s me.”