The red awning on Seventh Avenue South, the narrow stair down, the triangular room: fourteen feet of stage, the piano, the drums, the photographs, the works between them.
Max Gordon opened the Village Vanguard in a basement at 178 Seventh Avenue South in 1935, first for poetry and folk music, then for jazz alone from the late 1950s. Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Bill Evans all recorded live albums there. Lorraine Gordon ran the club after Max died in 1989, and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra has played Monday nights since 1966.
Source · The Village Vanguard ↗
The red canopy and the steep staircase, the wedge shaped basement with the stage in the point, the red walls hung with photographs of the players, the tiny round tables and bentwood chairs, the kitchen door that never opens. Mood: second set. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.