Get to Know…The Jazz Café

Newcastle has always had a strong jazz scene, going back at least to the sixties trad boom, and right now there’s a lot of jazz in the city. The genre is having one of its sporadic bursts of frenzied activity, with UK artists like Shabaka Hutchings, Xhosa Cole and Zara McFarlane all getting a lot of well-deserved attention, and excellent young Newcastle-based acts like Archipelago, Knats and Dilutey Juice are all filling venues across town. So with Jazz Appreciation Month upon us, we thought we’d take a look at Newcastle’s vital Jazz Café.

The Jazz Café has been one of the hubs of the scene for decades, existing in various forms since 1990, when colourful local character Keith Crombie – aka The Geordie Jazz Man - turned his Pink Lane French restaurant into a jazz venue. When Crombie died in 2012, the acclaimed venue was passed back to leaseholders Newcastle Arts Centre, based round the corner on Westgate Road. It was refurbished and run along the same lines as Crombie’s venue by the centre until 2018.

The bar was eventually taken over by Prohibition Cabaret Bar, but The Jazz Café found a new lease of life as a long-running events programme at the arts centre itself, using the Black Swan Bar and venue and the mezzanine café. As Newcastle Arts Centre director Mike Tilley explained, the jazz café fitted well into an arts complex that - pre-pandemic - had dozens of organisations based there.

Tilley founded the arts centre in 1981 but has been involved with jazz even longer, back to his days with Spectro Arts Workshop in Whitley Bay in the seventies, promoting big names like Lol Coxhill and Last Exit (featuring a young, pre-Sting Gordon Sumner). As he explains, there are strong jazz roots to a lot of Newcastle bands. “These days, we’re really in the business of supporting regional llve music making, and the scene is fairly healthy at the moment… there are great young bands like Bold Big Band, who we’ve got playing in April.”

Like a lot of the arts organisations in the city, the Jazz Café is focusing on consolidating itself after the pandemic, with no big plans for the near future beyond the reopening of the Mezzanine Café, which closed for lockdown and has yet to reappear. But he’s feeling optimistic. “I have to say that from the town’s viewpoint, and ours, we’re recovering a bit every month.”

And while its ongoing programme of jazz music rolls ever on, it will once again be hosting some of the events at the Newcastle Jazz Festival in August. We’d recommend catching the aforementioned Bold Big Band on April 25th for an excellent 17-piece swing band playing dancefloor-friendly jazz, or local hero Lindsay Hannon, who performs her excellent Tom Waits For No Man show on May 23rd.

IMAGE: LINDSAY HANNON

While The Jazz Cafe exists more as a programme of events than a brick-and-mortar venue these days, it's heartening that the iconic joint has found a new home within Newcastle Arts Centre - a fact that founder Keith Crombie would no doubt be proud of. So, whether you're a jazz aficionado or a music maven looking for a fun night out, make sure to check out The Jazz Cafe's upcoming events and get yourself down for gig sharpish!