Tag Archives: The Estate

Jazz is back full-fledged at The Estate, Milwaukee’s oldest jazz club

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The Milwaukee jazz quartet Heirloom performed an album release concert at The Estate recently. Photo by Kevin Lynch

For a jazz club to survive since 1977, especially in Milwaukee, you’d
have to think it just might be haunted by cats, as in a place of nine lives,
where a tail may sway or wiggle, but typically swings and sometimes
even forms an S curve, akin to Miles Davis’s famous posture while
soloing.

The Estate (a.k.a The Jazz Estate) has never been blessed with Miles
in person. But jazz, America’s indigenous art form, is now a long, strong
international language spoken by many practitioners, including such
famous Estate performers as Joe Henderson, Tom Harrell, The Bad
Plus, Harry Connick Jr., Cedar Walton, Eddie Gomez and Little Jimmy
Scott, and Milwaukee-bred stars like Brian Lynch, Lynne Arriale, and
David Hazeltine, among others.

Cat ‘tails are a serious theme here, as current owner John Dye has
transformed the joint into one the city’s most sophisticated cocktail
hangouts, befitting hip culture, jazz or no jazz.
So the music has faded into the club’s ether several times over the
years. But give this city some props for helping to revive venue’s music.
There are reasons why local jazz singer Jerry Grillo has made
Milwaukee his own in a celebrated recorded anthem titled “My
Hometown, Milwaukee” just as he’s made The Estate his artistic and
cocktailed home away from home. The song won a 2023 WAMI Award
for “Most Unique Song” and a mayoral proclamation for “Milwaukee
Day” in May of 2022. The mayor helped cement the venue’s reputation
in Milwaukee lore, at least obliquely, like the proverbial cat standing slyly
in the bandstand shadows. Grillo’s song is colorfully celebratory and
self-deprecating, again, pure Milwaukee.

Jazz singer Jerry Grillo adds drama to one of his many performances over the years at his “home” club, The Estate. The singer will perform a Christmas show at The Estate on December 5. Photo courtesy jerrygrillo.com

In other words, this town has a still-underapprecated modern legacy of
jazz performance and radio. Think of the indomitable and peripatetic dejay Ron Cuzner, WHAD’s Michael Hanson, or WMSE’s Jim
Glynn and Dr. Sushi, or Howard Austin and WYMS programming in the
1980s and ’90s. They all helped sustain jazz consciousness and
lifebood for the sake of live events, which Cuzner frequently emceed
during his many years as the city’s pied piper of airwaves jazz. The
community of jazz that has sustained the local culture over those years
has included, along with The Estate, The Wisconsin Conservatory of
Music, The Milwaukee Jazz Gallery and its offspring, the JGCA, The
Pfister Hotel’s Blu nightclub and Mason Street Grill, Caroline’s Jazz Club, Bar Centro, Transfer Pizzeria Cafe and The Milwaukee Jazz Institute, an exemplary recent education and concertizing organization.

This is all to put one uber-cozy and eccentrically-configured East Side
club in its rightful historical context. The Estate endured nearly
devastating losses during COVID. A small miracle of persistence?
The intimacy and modest size has seemingly put it beyond the
perceived employment of many regional jazz artists who might have
ostensibly outgrown such neighborhood venues, such as renowed
cutting-edge Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark, as Dave Cornils
expained recently in an east side coffeeshop. “He told me a lot of
venues don’t invite us,” Cornil relates.

Who’s Dave Cornils? A new cat in town? He’s a 40-ish gatekeeper of
the music, the latest Estate manager and music booker. He’s actually
been a Dye right-hand man, a barkeeper par excellence who had to
memorize the five-to-six hundred drink recipes Dye requires for
Byrant’s, his showcase cocktail lounge. There’s no menu there, so
Cornils had to ask a customer what she likes, read her response and
whirl up a wizard’s brew. Doubtless his improbable acumen at this
weighty task helped Dye decide Cornils had the chops to book good
jazz and related music.

Those duties might actually be easier than all the esoteric mixology, with
some artist website assistance. “It’s been fun, a challenge for a nerdy,
encyclopedic brain,” he says with measured self-regard. How did he get
into jazz? “My parents were not a jazz family. So this was an offshoot of
rebellion. Whatever they didn’t like must be cool. I learned from records
and listening to WMSE, which was like going down a rabbit’s hole. Jazz
there is a bottomless pit, but it also keeps you humble.” Jazz guitarist
Andrew Trim enhanced Cornil’s education when he became a fellow
bartender.

The manager’s formal education and professional background is in
graphic design. “I’ve built up the club’s calender with a rotation of local
performers, a young crop of comers with drive,” he says. Those include
the sparkling quartet Heirloom, which just played the Estate for a
release event for their excellent debut album Familiar Beginnings.

Others include The Erotic Adventures of the Static Chicken and vocalist-
pianist Faith Hatch. Maybe the essence of the place’s straight-ahead

jazz legacy is exemplified currently by virtuoso Milwaukee trumpeter
Eric Jacobson, who performed “Joyspring”: The Music of Clifford Brown”
in early October, inflaming the the historic post-bop fire for the present.

Among compelling out-of-towners on deck include Chicagoans guitarist
and Blue Note recording artist Fareed Haque who returns October 18,

and cornetist Josh Berman on October 10, then acclaimed East Coast saxophonist-
composer Caroline Davis on November 7.

“Berman is aways interesting including the way he moves his body to his music. You can be deaf and know what he’s playing,” Cornils quips.

A stylistic wild card will be Victor DeLorenzo and Friends, on October 25. Milwaukeean DeLorenzo is best known as the original drummer for the renowned jazz-influenced folk-punk band The Violent Femmes.

Even local artists are getting their financial due. A new policy has each
set being a separate show and cover charge. “It’s the only way to to
make enough money for the musicians, given that the place seats 60
maximum.”

The Estate stage and some of its distinctive seating layout.

About a dozen choice seats are ultra-intimate with the stage
— a couple feet away. The majority of audience seating extends in two long wings on each side of the stage, one including the bar. Right behind the close-up seats is a narrow walkway and wall shelf for drinks of standing listeners, and then the
restrooms. So, improbable as it seems, a seat on one of these two
enclosed thrones can provide some of the best music acoustics you’ll
find in town.

If such musical and mixological magic can happen at the Estate, may it
live on forever.

____________

The Estate website, including detailed information on all upcoming music performances, is here:  https://www.estatemke.com/

This article was originally published in The Shepherd Express: https://shepherdexpress.com/music/local-music/jazz-is-back-at-the-estate/

Restless searcher Jamie Breiwick knows jazz history also shines forward

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The Jamie Breiwick Quartet performs, “Spirits: Live at The Jazz Estate,” Thursday Dec. 5. 7 p.m. $10-$15.
Album released May 4, 2013. Recorded live at The Jazz Estate, Milwaukee, WI — Nov 30th, 2012
Tickets: 
Restless searcher Jamie Breiwick wisely knows jazz history also shines forward. He leads a hip-hop jazz group, KASE, but also another dedicated to bop genius Thelonious Monk’s repertoire. Another is the fluid “book” of innovative trumpeter/pioneering world musician Don Cherry.
Several other performance projects ebb and flow through his prolific talents, including recently the daring paired-solo-sets at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts with powerhouse East Coast trombonist Joe Fielder. He’s even written a tune that is a luminous soundtrack point for an adventure/thriller film, Deep Woods.
That suggests some of the range of his interests. But also how the horn player/conceptualist understands that American music’s lineage casts profoundly forward. Or, you might call it the ever-flowing nourishment of “culture currents,” especially those where vernaculars, musical and literary, “speak” to audiences of the past, present and future.
Reviving the album live — Breiwick’s artistic breakthrough project — will take place this Thursday, Dec. 5. It was recorded in this very hallowed Milwaukee jazz space, known for decades as the Jazz Estate (which can apparently now be rented out for musical events, though no longer a regular jazz joint).
I was honored to write the album liner notes (included a few paragraphs below) based on the recording. Spirits: Live at the Jazz Estate was the first jazz album I’ve heard to cover Taylor Swift, back in 2012, before she became a Beatle-esque four-artists-in-one phenomenon (comparable talent is another story).
There’s also a Death Cab for Cutie cover, as well as one by Wayne Shorter, jazz master of visionary obliquity who, after Monk, might be the most-covered modern jazz composer. Also you’ll find a tune by Breiwick’s Wisconsin-born contemporary, trumpeter Philip Dizak (a Milwaukeean now East Coast-based), plus originals by Breiwick and two band members.
The album closes perfectly with the incomparably timeless Duke Ellington, the apt and poetically titled “Sunset and the Mockingbird.”
Jamie Breiwick. Photo by Leonardo Moscaro
What’s more, Breiwick may be as gifted a graphic artist as he is a musician. His daringly stylish album covers, which boldly extend the Blue Note design tradition, adorn scores of albums and have been used by such notable jazz labels as Verve, Palmetto, Sunnyside, Candid and Mack Avenue.
In this case, he honored the club’s  legacy by originally displaying the red door entrance to The Estate on his original retro-Blue Note typeface cover (see below). Later he decided to capture the spirit of the album by re-imagining the cover into one of his most inspired visual creations (at top).
Here, Spirits soars into the stratosphere. The highly stylized title typeface, to me, suggests aeronautic striving, as a gaggle of birds frolic through the sky buoyed by a painterly cloud floor. The whole effect carries a faintly mystical aura — the space between humanity’s striving to transcend gravity and the bird’s natural gift to do so.
The new cover is so elegantly striking I might’ve found a different cast for the liner notes I wrote for the album. Kind of like, all his knowledge shines forward in time, as far as the light can reach.
The quartet Thursday is the same as the recording except, instead of Tony Barba, acclaimed Chicago-based tenor saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi will perform (his own musical unearthing includes a recording reviving “The Music of Moondog”). Laurenzi has also recently toured with Grammy-winning indie-rock artist Bon Iver.
 There’s no guarantee though that, like most jazz musicians, Breiwick doesn’t stray from the implied script of the album’s tunes.
As it is, here are those original notes to give you a sense of the music to be played:
Jamie Breiwick – Spirits: Live at the Jazz Estate (BluJazz). 

Open the door on the album cover and you enter the Jazz Estate, a Milwaukee club that exemplifies a venue that nurtures modern straight-ahead jazz and makes money at it. This recording was made there one night, even if the program has the well-considered sense of purpose of a studio recording.

The melody of the opening “Gig Shirt” has a slightly skewed trumpet-saxophone harmony, recalling Ornette Coleman’s classic/radical quartet, which certainly influenced the album’s piano-less instrumentation. The theme bodes well for a musical departure, especially in its expansive rising last notes.

This journey’s departure mean’s arrival at many musical ports, including some adapted pop-rock. “I Will Follow You into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, is a mournful yet oddly resolute melody. Breiwick’s muted trumpet sounds playful, as if he’s wooing a young woman with a joke. The rhythm players burble along in the same coy spirit, lifting the interpretation’s insouciance and the band ends with an exquisite exhalation.

“Safe and Sound,” by country-pop artist Taylor Swift, is another strong and pliable melody that tenor saxophonist Tony Barba builds from close, pinprick-sharp variations until he unfurls some Joe Henderson-like flag-waving. Breiwick’s own “Little Bill” is a funky, amiable tune that honors the memory of his Grandfather Bill and also refers to the cartoon of the same name, which Breiwick’s children love to watch. “Dad” adopts a slightly gruff tone and Barba is almost flippantly offhanded, befitting the sit-com mood.

This band has a svelte-but-sure grip on the harmonic and rhythmic tension of “Capricorn,” a Wayne Shorter theme that seems to move in two directions at once while flowing as a seamless melody — characteristic of Shorter’s ineffable compositional genius. If that sounds like a chops-busting practice-room etude, “Capricorn” rises like an indelibly hummable melody. The band swings hard out of the gate, as Barba plunges in with pithy Shorterisms — slanting shards, open-throated exhortations and quotes of the sorcerer-like theme. Breiwick shifts gears, then creeps into a softly growling, splattered tone that recalls Don Cherry. He’s clearly finding his own forward-pushing place in the trumpet tradition. Bassist Tim Ipsen steps in like a heady middleweight contender, with a sly combination of punchy harmonic intervals.

The aphoristically titled “Walk through Daydreams, Sleep through Nightmares” reflects Breiwick’s magnanimous depth as a member of the jazz community. He leads two jazz bands, including a more pop rock-oriented one called Choir Fight. He’s also an educator, organizer and all-around go-getter, having co-founded Milwaukee Jazz Vision, a musician-run organization that promotes the local jazz scene, especially with an excellent website: mkejazzvision.org. This tune is by one of Breiwick’s own former students, Philip Dizack, a fast-rising young trumpeter of uncommon lyrical strength and compositional maturity. Breiwick acknowledges that crafting a songfully expressive melodic line is a primary concern of his. “I believe the album’s aesthetic intent points to a depth of feeling in the music,” he says. “Beyond technique, which is obviously hugely important, emotional communication is a priority.”

“Walk” opens with swelling mallet rolls and cymbals. The two horns resound like one voice, or mind, experiencing a revelation. Then everyone pulls back, as if in a slight state of awe, to contemplate the implications of the eureka moment. One imagines a lightning bolt having struck the narrative consciousness right at its precipitous leap from daydream to nightmare. It recalls John Coltrane’s more pensive lyrical moments in his late years, when he pushed the spiritual-empowerment envelope like the shaman Dr. King might have met on that windswept mountaintop.

The program follows appropriately with Barba’s title tune “Spirits.” A simple rising interval, extrapolated and harmonized, seems like a wisp of a theme, yet these men plumb its modality as if climbing the branches of a majestic tree. It stands like a spirit, inviting as it is inherently challenging for the earthbound.

Consequently the closing tune, “Sunset and the Mockingbird,” is also apt, from the pen of Duke Ellington, a timeless jazz presence. This is Duke’s indigo mood, and Barba proves he can fabricate a short story whole cloth from textured whole notes, while Breiwick is a mockingbird with genuine feelings. He evokes Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams’ muted sorrow, as an elegy to whatever the sunset bade farewell, something to cherish, and live up to.

Spirits demonstrates extraordinary range and vision from this new jazz generation, and delivers on promise as if tapped into a musical wellspring flowing through their veins.

— Kevin Lynch

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Lynch has written for Down Beat, The Village Voice, CODA, American Record Guide, The Chicago Tribune, The Milwaukee Journal, The Cap Times, and other publications, and blogs at Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak).

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The Jazz Estate is now history, an historic loss.

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An air of inevitability hovered over Milwaukee’s venerable Jazz Estate, after it ceased regular live music.– especially when owner John Dye stripped the word “jazz” from the night club’s name. “Rebranding” is the fashionable euphemism these days. There’s even a faint foul whiff in the last show — the popular “A Charlie Brown Christmas” — being performed by a band called the Commercialists. Now the doors of the reimagined high-end cocktail bar are shuttered, for good or worse, except for “special events.”
What of those once-beloved loyal neighbors, like jazz singer Jerry Grillo?
There’s some controversy about whether the jazz club’s demise was something the community failed, or the club itself.
For the record, the Commercialists include excellent players: keyboardist Anthony Deutsch, Bassist Clay Schaub and drummer Patrick Morrow.
For more on this story — as it unfolded — see my past coverage below: