12 December 1959: Michael Frayn visits the New York club on its tenth anniversary and discovers ‘the city is pretty well shaking with jazz’
Birdland is ten years old this month. The news makes me feel the way I did when I heard that Minou Drouet was writing poetry when she was eight, or that Pitt became prime minister when he was 24 – old and haggard.
Birdland, which boasts in its brash, youthful way that it is the oldest jazz club on Broadway, figures so prominently in the learned texts on the jackets of modern records, that I pictured it as an enormous glass palace on some island in the Hudson filled with the offbeat minor chords of a dozen different cool combos. In fact, you approach it down a flight of stairs from the Broadway sidewalk, and it looks much like any other night club.
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