In 1962, when Vespa was the height of cool... Storyville
on Stiftstaße 8-10, about 1.5km southeast of the Farben building,
established in 1955 by Carlo Bohländer, named after Storyville in New
Orleans, and featuring live performances by famous jazz musicians and groups
including Lester Young, Chet Baker, Sonny Rollins, and the Modern Jazz
Quartet*. Since it was larger than the
Jazz
Keller, it also served as a dance club. The building still stands but
as of a
2008 Google street view, Storyville
has been replaced by a
LiDL
supermarket. The word written in stone above the Johann Handel sign is
PORZELLANWÄRE.
A different jazz club we went to more often in the early 1960s was the
Jazzhaus† (thanks to Hans Freise for disambiguating these two
places); it was (and apparently still is) at 12 Kleine Bockenheimer
Straße‡ near the Goetheplatz: a bit beyond the Opernhaus as you go
downtown and then turn left. The Jazzhaus was a tiny place, very narrow, so
the tiny chairs and tables were on multiple floors and you had to go up a
claustrophobic ironwork spiral staircase to be seated. You placed and
received your orders via a bucket on a pulley that went through holes in the
floors. The music was recorded, not live as in Storyville and the Jazz
Keller, but it was good: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, etc.
Sorry, I don't have a 1960s photo of the Jazz Haus, but I do have a recent
Google Street view screen capture‡; click
here to see it.
*
| Carlo Bohländer, "The Evolution of Jazz Culture
in Frankfurt", in Michael J. Budd,
Jazz
and the Germans, Pendragon Press, 2002, p.176.
|
†
| Ibid, p.177: "For those jazz friends who want to
associate and listen to jazz recordings, there has been since 1958 a very
small bar called the Jazzhaus, which is located in an extremely
'narrow-chested' house built centuries ago."
|
‡
| 12
Kleine Bockenheimer Straße, Google Maps, 16 August 2021.
|