A Thursday in London Town...
When travelers make a combo trip to two European cities, they usually save the best for last. Of course, we did the reverse, hitting Paris first and then across the channel for a few nights in London Town.
In fact, we almost didn’t even make it to London, trying to figure out the day before if we could just extend our time in the city of lights and skip the UK altogether. Ultimately, it was easier (and cheaper) to just stick with the itinerary.
Don’t get me wrong—London is a great city. I’ve been fortunate enough to go there a few times and have enjoyed each trip, but what can I say…Paris is Paris.
Once we arrived in Shoreditch, a neighborhood within the East End, we were OK with our decision to keep our original plans.
The last time I was here was in my early 20s; this was a part of town you would probably want to avoid, but since then, the East End has been revitalized. It’s now teeming with restaurants, food markets, pubs, and many corporations setting up shop, bringing with them the vibrant crowds of London’s business class. I shudder at the thought of calling it something like “The Brooklyn of London.” Still, Shoreditch and the neighborhoods surrounding it have gone through a similar rebirth.
I was glad that during this latest jaunt to London, my wife and I stayed in a part of the city that was entirely new to us. Our time there hardly felt like we were seeing the same old sights, and that’s because we didn’t.
Call it serendipity, but we were also walking distance from a club on Brick Lane that hosts a weekly residency of artists from London’s burgeoning jazz scene. Every Thursday, a record label called Jazz re:freshed hosts different up-and-coming musicians from the local scene, which the label has helped to develop over the past two decades.
I’ve been a jazz fan since first hearing The Low-End Theory, that classic 1991 album from A Tribe Called Quest. The classics – Coltrane, Mingus, and Miles. But in the past decade, my ears have been blessed with scores of new jazz music. Stuff that thankfully strays away from the classic school of thought and incorporates funk, afrobeat, hip-hop, and sound system culture to bring the music form out of the niche of nostalgia and into the post-modern age. This stuff is not sleepy elevator jazz. All of it highly rhythmic and highly infectious.
London has been and continues to be the hotbed for these new forms of music and Jazz re:freshed has been a vanguard of the scene for quite some time, often pressing the first albums of unsigned artists, all of whom have moved on to major labels and international notoriety.
Since living in Austin, I’ve made it a point to see the showcases held by this label during South by Southwest (SXSW). Both times, I was rewarded with performances from 6 to 7 British acts that never tour the US due to the difficulty of getting artist visas. Those shows are always a rare treat for me, so when it came to planning the London portion of our trip, I knew that Jazz Re:freshed’s weekly residency on Brick Lane was a must.
Every Thursday, they start with a DJ playing an eclectic two-hour set of rare groove tracks before the act of the night takes the stage. The cost of admission is just over £6 or about 8 bucks for the evening at a spot where the capacity hits 250 people, leaving you close to the stage no matter where you stand, dance, or sway.
After a full day of exploring the city, we stopped back at the hotel for a quick recharge of our batteries and then a ten-minute walk through Shore Ditch to a pub near Spitalfields Market, a part of town that was terrorized by Jack the Ripper during the Victorian era and is now filled with designer shops, third wave coffee shops, and an outpost of famed restaurant St. JOHN.
We headed to a Pub across from the market to meet with an old friend who lived in Hoboken only to return to his native England at the start of the Pandemic and never make it back to the States. It was great catching up over a few pints of Fuller’s London Pride pulled straight from the cask. But our time was short as he had to catch a train home, and we needed some food before the show.
Luckily, Brick Lane was around the corner. Not only was the bar on the same street, but it’s also home to a wide array of curry houses—restaurants focusing on Indian and Bangladeshi cuisine. The only place to get food better than this is to go directly to the source.
From there, we walked around the corner to the club, Ninety-One Living Room, located in The Old Truman Brewery. The brewery was shut down long ago but converted to a market with shops like Rough Trade. (We learned during our stay that many of East London’s old industrial areas have been converted to third spaces and public markets.)
We enjoyed a few more drinks as the DJ played a selection of deep cuts, with the crowd slowly filling the venue as the 9:00 hour approached. Everything at the Jazz re:freshed weekly is scheduled to a tee. That’s because much of the nightlife in London ends before midnight.
A national law created in 1916 ordered pubs, clubs, and restaurants to close at 11pm. The ruling was developed during World War II because the British government was worried that the workforce would be spending too much time getting drunk and not keeping the production lines going. Over the past century, there has been talk about relaxing the law, but it has yet to happen. I’m shocked that it’s still in effect.
Ironically, the musician featured that night was an American keyboardist named Greg Spiro. Still, he was backed by a quartet of local British players, including an up-and-coming drummer named Lox. He was clearly the star of the night; even Spiro knew while on stage that Lox’s hammering the kit was the real stand-out of the set. The keys player let him lead the way during a majority of the second half of the show. His frenetic drumming was in the pocket the whole time. He had the crowd worked up fervently as they crowded around the intimate stage at Ninety-One.
I was finally in my element. I had been planning to come here to experience the jazz scene firsthand all the way back in March 2020, just before the entire world shut down.
It was shortly before 11pm when their set wrapped. Spero, who’s from Los Angeles, thanked the crowd and told everyone that what they had here, a weekly gathering like this, was something that you never see back in the States. That they were lucky to have something like this to come to every week. I couldn’t agree more.