Club Café

The Club Café , for those who don’t live in Pittsburgh, is a small room (150 capacity) that acts like a big room: excellent sound system, pretty good lights, sound man, booked by a promoter (Opus One Productions) who took over that function when the owner, former restaurateur Marco Cardamone, apparently decided it was too much for him. The room schedules national touring bands and songwriters as well as regional acts. For regional acts, most of the door goes to the artist, after a promotional fee that covers the sound man and some useful listings legwork. For national acts, the promoter sometimes risks a guarantee if they know both the touring act and the local audience—it’s a tightrope. On many nights there are early shows tending toward acoustic or solo acts, while late shows can be anything from punk to jazz.

I put together a mixed group of Pittsburgh (Mark Weakland, drums, Jim Spears, bass and Jack Bowen, piano from Uptown Combo) and Lexington family (Karen Jones, fiddle, Bev Futrell, mandolin/harmonica, Jeff Jones, guitar + cousin Dave Gillespie from Detroit on lead) musicians for the Heartland Variations CD release at Club Café. A great crowd of family, friends and fans both local and far-flung (José and Evangelina from Portugal won the distance prize), a big party afterwards… A nice step forward, and part of the equation in terms of figuring out how to make music work for me again not just one night but frequently enough to keep momentum going, have musicians to work with who remember the tunes, and bring in enough income to pay them something. The Club Café is one of the venue profiles that keeps live music alive, with the promoter working overtime to fill it (and the Brillo Box and Mr. Smalls theater in Pittsburgh) with viable artists who can generate enough income to keep the whole think working. The other two venue profiles are community-based organizations and individuals/couples running events in their homes. More on these later, but to get a flavor of the event and the venue, there's a short video on my web site by Bill Wade of the Post-Gazette , who was at the event as a friend.