“God bless her for keeping that place alive. It holds the spirits. But the first time I played there, man, I was totally afraid of her.” –Roy Hargrove

Max and Lorraine Gordon, photo courtesy of Hal Leonard Books

With the recent publication of Lorraine Gordon’s autobiography (Alive at the Village Vanguard: My LIfe In and Out of Jazz Time), we now have complementary accounts of the history of the most famous jazz club in the world, the reflections of its only owners offering two unique perspectives. Max Gordon founded the club in 1935 and kept it going through financial turmoil and changes of mission until his death in 1989. From that point on, Lorraine Gordon picked up the beat and never missed a note. Go into the club on any night and note the tall gray-haired woman looking sternly at customers as they file in. That’s Lorraine. Follow Vanguard etiquette and she’ll approve.

Any jazz fan who has visited this hub of live performance remembers his or her first encounter with the Village Vanguard—the narrow stairway, the spartan décor, the no-frills ambience, the stone-hard chairs that are surely original equipment. And then the hush as the applause subsides and you realize you are in a true listening room, in the presence of serious musicians performing for serious fans of the music. Every jazz musician, it seems, lives to play and possibly record at the Vanguard. And if Lorraine likes you, you will.

The first inside look at the Vanguard was Max Gordon’s 1982 account, Live at the Village Vanguard, told from the perspective of the man who first opened the club as a Greenwich Village spot for poets, folkies, comics and soapbox orators in 1935. By the early 40s, a young Lorraine Gordon would frequent the Vanguard to catch the Sunday afternoon jazz jams, with the likes of Lester Young and Ben Webster. By 1948, Lorraine formally connected with Max, recommending that he book a curious pianist named Thelonious Monk. It was not only the beginning of Monk’s career, it was the beginning of one of the most productive jazz liaisons in the genre’s history. But this is not where Lorraine Gordon begins her story; unlike Max, Lorraine moved through many careers “in and out of jazz time” as her subtitle indicates. And neither Max Gordon nor the Village Vanguard figured much into her first 25 years.

This is a storyteller who shoots straight from the hip, taking no prisoners along the way and revealing perhaps more about Lorraine Gordon than about the Village Vanguard itself. Her story reads like a great novel as she takes the reader through her childhood in the 20s, noting “I loved jazz from the very beginning.” That love ultimately brought her first into the circle of Alfred Lion, founder of Blue Note records, for whom she worked and to whom she was married during the exciting early days of the company. But even after she divorced Lion and married Max Gordon, Lorraine was not directly involved in the Village Vanguard. Instead she followed a dizzying path, raising a family, running a poster gallery, becoming an anti-war activist in the 1960s, a merchandising manager for the Brooklyn Museum in the 80s. Her book is filled with anecdotes of each adventure, including personal accounts of relationships with such luminaries as Monk and Streisand, and with lesser known jazz giants like Ike Quebec and Jabbo Smith.

Lorraine is two hundred pages into her life story when she takes over the Vanguard upon Max’s death in 1989, something she says Max never dreamed of. The remainder of her tale brings us up to the current day, filled with the trials and tribulations of being a club owner—and specifically a jazz club owner—in a very different era from the golden days of the 50s and 60s. But gradually business improved. “The Village Vanguard had its own name and its own spirit of survival,” she notes, refusing to take any credit for its success. “People kept coming through the door just to be at the Village Vanguard. Many of them didn’t really care who was playing, and they certainly didn’t care who was running things. But some were grateful, terribly so… Such dear people, these Vanguard lovers. They gave me strength.”

Now 84, Lorraine Gordon’s routine has changed very little since her first days at the helm of the Vanguard. She’s the one who opens the door nearly every afternoon, who checks the answering machine and the day’s deliveries, who greets the musicians arriving for sound checks, who answers the phone to take reservations. Usually she sits by the door through the first set or so, noting that “the good part about being the boss is, I don’t have to stay til closing.” And Lorraine still handles the bookings. “I like what I like, so that’s what I hire. I don’t know anything else.” But indeed she knows plenty! She reads everything she can find about jazz and listens as much as possible. “Honestly, I don’t think about balance at all when I put together our booking schedule…I get who I want, when they’re available… I sometimes have four straight weeks of trumpet players. But what’s wrong with that?” And she’s tenacious, as illustrated by her story of the challenge of booking Cuban pianist Chucho Valdes, dealing with the red tape of visas and state department regulations. (And she notes with anger that Valdes can now travel anywhere in the world, “anywhere, that is, except to George Bush’s America.”)

While jazz is not afforded the commercial success of pop, Lorraine sees jazz as “very strong at the moment…I’d like people to listen to jazz more than some of the garbage they listen to. But that’s not to be. And that’s okay. Let’s have an audience that is strong, that is devoted, that is relatively knowledgeable, and open to new sounds and players.” That openness to new players has made the Village Vanguard the vital performance space that is has been for its 70 years, from Thelonious Monk to the Bad Plus.

And while she notes that she has made provisions for the Vanguard to pass on to her daughter Deborah, Lorraine Gordon has no plan to retire. “Retire? What’s the point? Life is so beautiful when you’re passionate about something, when you’re committed… I am lucky…Max left me this wonderful little club. Except he didn’t exactly leave it to me. It was there. So I took it. By the horns. And I shook it up.”

Lorraine Gordon, telling her story to Barry Singer, covers a lot of rich territory in the space of 250 pages. She offers insights into jazz, into business, into the changes of both over eight decades. Adding to the reader’s enjoyment and knowledge are a wealth of photographs and an amazing chronology of the jazz acts at the Vanguard since Lorraine took charge. Reading Alive at the Village Vanguard in tandem with Max Gordon’s Live at the Village Vanguard provides one of the most personal and fascinating stories of jazz, and illustrates how one venue has consistently elevated the music to the status of an enduring art form.

If you’re in Manhattan, just for a day or for a lifetime, you have to spend at least one night at the Village Vanguard. And it really doesn’t matter who is playing there. It will be great.

“I walk down those stairs of the Vanguard and it is like walking into an embrace of some kind. Layer upon layer upon layer of all that has happened in there. Nobody made the Village Vanguard this way. Like jazz, it just evolved…” –Lorraine Gordon