The Birdland name dates to a basement club that opened on Broadway in December 1949, took its name from Charlie Parker's nickname "Bird," and closed in 1965; the West 44th Street club revived it and has held this address since 1996.
Birdland is run as a full table-service jazz club with assigned seating rather than an open standing-room floor, so where you're seated affects your view of the bandstand.
The name is older than the room, and the distinction matters. The Birdland that opened in December 1949 sat below the sidewalk at 1678 Broadway, near West 52nd Street, seated around five hundred, and closed in 1965 after a bankruptcy filing and a rent increase. The club on West 44th Street revived the name rather than continuing the business: a new Birdland opened uptown at Broadway and 105th Street in the mid-1980s, and moved to the Theater District in 1996. Art Blakey's A Night at Birdland, Basie at Birdland and the live portions of Coltrane's Live at Birdland were all cut in the Broadway basement, not here.
What the current club inherited is a format rather than a floor. It runs as a supper club: tables and banquettes face the bandstand, service continues through the set, and seating is assigned, so the difference between watching a pianist's hands and watching a bassist's back is decided at the door. A second, smaller room was built downstairs in 2018 and books cabaret and solo shows on its own schedule.
The programming is the argument for the place. A house big band was formed in 2006; Jim Caruso's Cast Party, a weekly open-mic variety night, has run since 2004; Toshiko Akiyoshi's jazz orchestra played its final concert here in December 2003. Bookings run to working jazz musicians on multi-night stands rather than one-off touring stops.
Against the rest of this list, Birdland is the room where sitting still is the point. There is no floor to push toward, no balcony to escape to, and the set has a beginning and an end. It is also not indestructible: the club ran a public fundraising campaign during the pandemic when its owner said he could not make rent, which is worth remembering about any small room that has survived this long.
315 W 44th St, New York, NY 10036 · Official site ↗
Birdland is a jazz club started in New York City on December 15, 1949. The original Birdland, which was located at 1678 Broadway, just north of West 52nd Street in Manhattan, was closed in 1965 due to increased rents, but it re-opened for one night in 1979. A revival began in 1986 with the opening of the second nightclub by the same name that is now located in Manhattan's Theater District, not far from the original nightclub's location. The current location is in the same building as the previous headquarters of The New York Observer.
This background summary is from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The editorial on this page is ours.