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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/

Riverwest Jazz Fest postscript: Man, it was a hundred-proof happening!

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The Erotic Adventures of the Static Chicken, performing in Madison. isthmus.com

It was small and compact, but the first Riverwest Jazz Fest delivered a blow — a wake-up call — that should leave the city’s consciousness slightly dazed, and asking for more, if it has a cultural backbone.

Apologies if that lead exceeds an acceptable testosterone limit, but sometimes such associations seem more apt than others. Of course, it’s really too early to tell what sort of impact this event will have on the neighborhood or city, but you can begin to imagine by realizing that it was planned to be twice as big, and strives to be just that in the future.

As it was, the event, tucked neatly in a slightly two block-plus parameter of Center Street right off of Humboldt Blvd., allowed patrons easy access to all three bubbling venues: The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, Bar Centro, and Company Brewing. Plus, there was at least one band jamming in the storefront studios of Riverwest Radio, located between JGCA and Centro.

Talk about concentrated. Let’s say you couldn’t do much better even if you were a jazz-aholic who needs to down a row of hundred-proof musical shots.

Yes, I know, Wisconsin “has a drinking problem.” Maybe I’m better off retreating into comfy cliché-land for the faint-hearted. This was “the little fest that could.” * 

Three other venues were all originally solicited to be pioneering fest participants. Each had some reason to decline.

Their loss, of course, but hopefully herein lies a lesson or two about smart marketing, especially in your own neighborhood, the lifeblood of such small venues. Each venue did have to pony up pay for the musicians, as the whole event was free admission, donations and tips aside. But that sort of commitment is the first step in smart collaborative marketing. An organized event like a jazz fest pretty much assures a built-in audience and revenue boost.

Although none of the crowds were literally shoulder-to-shoulder, everywhere on Center, people either milled and chilled in the Harvest Moon nocturne, or strolled to another venue.

Kudos to JGCA president Mark Lawson, reportedly whose brainchild this was. I suspect Lawson might’ve sensed this was an urgent moment to give the neighborhood a cultural jolt, as his space had foundered somewhat in terms of consistent recent musical activity. That’s hardly to diminish the place as a consistently and successfully operated art gallery.

And yet, as is fairly well known, the venue has a tremendous music legacy to maintain, that of the historic Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, whose inspired grotto of a ghost it inhabits.

The venue now has the cultural audacity to be a grants-dependent, community-oriented “arts center.” Though sans the original venue’s bar, it remains the sort of thing this neighborhood should embrace gladly. So, JGCA is an ever-colorful listening space, and still boasts the now-vintage checkerboard stage that hosted many famous jazz names in the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery days, and a respectable Yamaha baby grand house piano, and new sound system. The space’s success as a visual art gallery derives from the owning entity, the Riverwest Artists Association, strongly oriented to visual artists, and its president, Lawson, is a professional gallery curator.

Drummer Victor DeLorenzo, formerly of The Violent Femmes and currently in the chamber rock duo Nineteen Thirteen, guest performs at the long-standing “Seeds Sounds” free jazz series at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts. riverwest.org.

His musical tastes lean toward more experimental and offbeat music than straight-ahead jazz, so “ya-never-know-what-you’re-gonna-get,” as a chocolate-loving pop philosopher once declared. Friday night strongly reinforced that reputation. The headline act proved as provocative and engrossing as its name, The Erotic Adventures of the Static Chicken (pictured at top) sports one of the most hilariously mock-bildungsroman monikers for a jazz band I’ve encountered.

The trio is led by ace and, yes, adventurous saxophonist Aaron Van Oudenallen (a.k.a. Aaron Gardner), who might be the second coming of electric-saxophone pioneer Eddie Harris; or what we hope Eddie would be doing today, if alive and pushing the hip envelope hard. Their set was a kaleidoscope of electronica, from slyly lyrical big-sky starbursts to Ab-Ex grunge, almost invariably underpinned by powerful currents of funk and driving rhythm. Van Oudenallen often plays with one hand twiddling an electronic effects box — as if an expose’ of the man behind the curtain, The Wizard of Odds.

Fender electric bassist Matt Turner regales the audience with his potent, pulsing virtuosity, and his eccentric affability. Drummer Jeremy Kunziar delivers multidirectional piston-like power.

This electronically deep-diving band has been around for a number of years and evidently has a decent (or indecent, as their name might suggest) following, at least slightly beneath “the lower frequencies,” where they speak to you, to paraphrase the great Invisible Man novelist Ralph Ellison.

The Chicken’s set included a boiling jam with trumpeter Jamie Breiwick sitting in, which climaxed with the band scorching Harris’s masterpiece “Freedom Jazz Dance,” a propulsive, shaman’s-shake of chord changes.

If you’re on Facebook, here’s a clip of The Chicken in full flight at the fest, during “Freedom,” courtesy of Tami Williams: https://www.facebook.com/fiilm/videos/3616003828679078

Meanwhile, over at the street’s straight-ahead jazz refuge, Bar Centro, a surprise waited in unknown-to-me bandleader and pianist Tael Estremera, He was possibly the youngest performer in the fest, yet also the most modern trad-oriented, as I heard them covering small masterpieces from John Coltrane’s classic album Giant Steps, including the title tune and the exquisitely modulated “Naima.” The quartet’s guitarist, Ben Dameron, whose own band Heirloom did the opening set, seems to be everywhere these days, and is a flash-firing virtuoso, slightly reminiscent of John McLaughlin. You should him check out ASAP.

The stylishly curvaceous bar at Bar Centro is a strong feature of this fast-rising Riverwest jazz venue. visitmilwaukee.com.

Finally, a happy hubbub brimmed at a nearly packed house at Company Brewing. Trumpeter Eric Jacobson, best known for his bristling hard-bop, was delivering an appealingly relaxed set of modern jazz with a primo quartet of local vets, reflective of his excellent recent album Discover.

Jazz trumpeter Eric Jacobson. foxcitiesmagazine. com

Just about then, the festival’s headliner, double Grammy-winning trumpeter Brian Lynch, sauntered into Company and the table was set for the climax of the festival.

Alas, I had to depart just before Lynch’s set, but I have no doubt it was a compelling and bracing topper to an auspiciously-debuted event we hope becomes annual.

As for newborn Riverwest Jazz Fest, here’s a toast:

Let your garden grow,

in our pastures of cultural plenty,

as in, plenty mo’ music,

every which way you go.

________________

1. However, the arts center has consistently hosted a weekly “free jazz” workshop and, more recently, the Milwaukee Jazz Institute’s weekly educational jam sessions, and other community gatherings.

  • who says Riverwesters don’t have a politically incorrect sense of humor? I just took this snapshot of by back-alley Riverwest neighbor’s handsome new wooden security fence with the following sign. (Apologies for my impertinence).