A Spot Built for Jazz

A location in Los Feliz, a room with flimsy walls covered in red velvet and a pair of guys with backgrounds in the visual arts--it doesn’t exactly seem like the right mix of ingredients for a jazz club.

But you don’t have to spend much time in the new Jazz Spot in the Los Feliz Restaurant to know that somehow it worked. The intimate performance room with huge photographs of jazz greats such as Milt Jackson and Joe Williams, the superb acoustics and the closeness of performers to the audience will satisfy most jazz fans.

This club didn’t happen overnight. In fact, the Jazz Spot wasn’t even part of the original plans for the restaurant.

“I had been threatening to open a restaurant for 10 years,” says managing director Rick Clemente, “for all the time that I was working as a director and cameraman doing commercials and advertising work. So when this location in my neighborhood became available, I decided it was time to either stop talking about it or do it.”

Clemente discovered that there was more space available than anticipated.

“I knew I didn’t want a banquet room and I didn’t want a second dining room,” he continues. “And then I realized that a fabulous use for the space would be to open a jazz room. Jim Britt is one of my oldest friends--he’s a photographer, and we’ve known each other for nearly 30 years. I knew that he had been involved in the Jazz Bakery when it originally got started and understood how to put a jazz room together. So it seemed like a natural.”

A natural idea, maybe, but not a natural space. There was a great deal of work to be done before the former Velvet Room, with its velvet-covered walls, could meet Clemente and Britt’s standards.

“We had a magical sound in the original Jazz Bakery, which was actually in my photo studio,” says Britt, who is a singer as well as a photographer. “And what I learned from that was to listen to the room first. Use your ears, and then enhance the sound only where it actually needs it.”

“But we had some other, more immediate problems,” adds Clemente. “First, we’d promised the city and the neighbors that we’d soundproof the place so that you can’t tell, even from the parking lot, if there’s anything going on inside or not. Then, while we were doing it, we consulted with some engineers, and not only soundproofed the place, but constructed it without any parallel walls. That means that there’s no standing wave resonance in the room, which gives us a very live, very natural audio environment.”

Clemente and Britt were in complete agreement about what kind of music they wanted: acoustic groups that could create a musical experience so natural that the audience can sense that sounds are emerging from musical instruments rather than loudspeakers.

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Toward that end, the club invested in a superb, 9-foot Yamaha grand piano.

“We decided to get the best piano we possibly could, so we obviously don’t want to see a guitar amp on top of it,” says Britt. “It’s tuned every other week and touched up every week by the tuner who’s tuned it for 12 years.”

“But the fact that we’re focusing on acoustic jazz doesn’t mean that a musician has to have a head of white hair to play here,” says Clemente. “We’re finding that there are plenty of younger ensembles--the Acoustic Jazz Quartet is one--who believe in this kind of music. And we’re encouraging some back and forth with the Derby, which is right across the street. Some of the hot swing bands that have been playing there have expressed interest in doing acoustic-style sets in our place.”

The Jazz Spot also draws about a third of its clientele from the other side of its business, the Los Feliz Restaurant, which is separated from the jazz area by a glass wall framed with paneling from the original Chasen’s Restaurant. The restaurant--an elegant, two-level room that features eight large booths, also from Chasen’s--offers a full menu. The Jazz Spot and the adjoining bar serve drinks and a separate menu of tapas.

“Our biggest challenge is to explain that, yes, we’re a fine dining restaurant, and, yes, we’re a jazz club too, and we also serve food in our jazz club,” says Clemente. “But we’re not quite like any other place because we make a distinction between the two areas, and we respect that one is for a fine dining experience and the other is to hear music in the best possible acoustic environment.

“I think I’m probably not all that different from most people,” concludes Clemente. “I don’t usually like to make two stops in the same night--going out to dine at one place, then going someplace else to be entertained. And then have to deal with parking at both places. So we’ve got a solution: Come to the Jazz Spot and the Los Feliz Restaurant. Park once, be entertained twice.”

BE THERE

The Los Feliz Restaurant Jazz Spot, 2138 Hillhurst Ave., Los Angeles. (323) 666-8666. Today, the L.A. Jazz Quartet at 8:30 and 10 p.m., $10 cover; Friday and Saturday, the Jeff Hamilton Trio, 8, 9:30 and 11 p.m., $15 cover.