A couple weeks back, Nitzan Gavrieli — red-bearded, wearing a black suit with no tie — did as he does each Sunday night and sat down at the Fender Rhodes keyboard at Birds. On this night, he was playing with bassist Sam Weber and drummer Dan Pugach (both Grammy winners), and the set included bebop throwbacks such as Dizzy Gillespie’s staccato-sprightly “Groovin’ High” mixed with experimental originals, including a number inspired by a drive along a Michigan highway. The crowd offered a mix of both downtown 30-somethings and grays while the cocktails were designed by Steve Schneider of nearby cocktail bars Sip & Guzzle.
“ There’s just a real authenticity to the music,” says Jack Smith, the club’s general manager. “Today we’re so faced with technology and social media and just so much sound in our everyday life — there’s something about jazz and being a top-level musician; to play the music you have to be good. You can’t really fake it.”
Within walking distance of jazz hubs like the Village Vanguard, Smalls, and the Blue Note, Birds opened on Downing Street in September. Sister-and-brother duo Naama and Assaf Tamir, who have run the Williamsburg staple Lighthouse for the last 14 years, built out a technically excellent space with a low stage so that the audience is on nearly the same level as the band. Schneider assembled a cocktail list filled with classics (martinis, an old-fashioned). As a package, it’s meant to feel timeless, but Birds is part of a group of new spots, opened in the past year or so, that are offering a fresh take on the “New York jazz club” concept and have become real showcases for the abundance of musical talent in this city.
The club is blocks away from Little Branch, where saxophonist Vito Dieterle has booked the nightly set for 20 years. He’s also the music director at Midnight Blue in Gramercy. It’s owned by Jae Yang and bartender Takuma Watanabe of Martiny’s, the high-end cocktail bar two blocks away, and maintains the same emphasis on well-made drinks, like a lapsang souchong–infused old-fashioned and a textbook example of a whiskey highball. Midnight Blue’s long bar runs down one side of the black-and-white-tiled room, leading to small tables and the inset bar.
On the stage is a drum set from Japanese company Canopus, a 1940s Baldwin grand piano, and a now-rare Hammond A-100 organ. “They used to be a real big part of the scene, especially in Harlem and in Bed-Stuy back in the ’60s and ’70s, but they’re kind of all gone now,” says Dieterle, a self-confessed bebop guy who thinks Midnight Blue’s space is particularly well suited to established musicians like Willerm Delisfort and Fuku Tainaka.
The acts at Close Up on the Lower East Side have also included longtime and well-established musicians, like drummer Andrew Cyrille, as well as more experimental musicians like trumpeter Peter Evans, who recently played what co-owner Daniel Gaynor describes as a “doom-metal set.”
Gaynor, a filmmaker, opened Close Up in June 2024 with his business partner, Solomon Gottfried (the two met in high school at Michigan’s Interlochen Arts Academy), and the vibe can at times feel like an impromptu get-together — which is at least somewhat intentional. “Some of my favorite shows have been in friends’ basements or just at some studio with a bunch of musicians, which is cool, but it feels kind of culturally gate-kept,” Gaynor says. “I’m like, Well, why don’t I just do it so that the rest of the world can come and hang and see it?”
Whereas in some jazz clubs the music primarily serves as ambient sound for the bar, Close Up is undeniably music-forward with a bar space up front and separate room (with another bar) for the bands where the lights are dimmed and voices hushed as sets are played so that the music gets its deserved attention. This year alone, Gaynor and Gottfried have seen more than 550 performances in the space, with two one-hour sets, a late-night set, and a jam session six nights a week.
“I take what I do here as sort of like the responsibility of my lifetime,” Gottfried says. “I’m really thinking about it as not trying to create a sense of what jazz was or a replication of jazz from 1960, but jazz as this living, breathing art form of today.”
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