Before Jazz Had Festival Stages, It Had Coffeehouses

Long before jazz had festival stages, it had the small, smoky rooms of basement clubs, neighbourhood cafés, and corner bars. These were the clandestine addresses where anyone with an opinion and a few coins could pull up a stool, take an espresso, and stay a while to listen in, argue, and think out loud.

As Italian-style espresso bars began spreading through North American cities in the 1950s, they carried something the local bar or dance hall couldn't offer: conversation and contemplation. That was the perfect setting for shifting attitudes in jazz at the time, as it moved away from the Swing and Big Band players of the dance floor and towards Bebop you’d sooner sit with and ponder.

A group at the artist café L'Échouerie in November 1954. | Photograph: Robert Millet / Archives de la Ville de Montréal / P179-Y-01-02-D003-P151

It wasn't accidental that these rooms tended to appear first in neighbourhoods with Italian immigrant communities, whether that was in Greenwich Village, Boston's North End, San Francisco's North Beach—and it’s no coincidence that fixtures of Italian bars and homes at the time, like the Turin-born coffee company Lavazza, travelled with that culture from across the Atlantic. Founded in 1895, Lavazza had spent decades becoming the de facto coffee found in Italian cups. By the 1950s, it was the country's most widely consumed brand, part of the daily rhythm of a culture that was now reshaping how the world listened to music as it fueled fast tempos, complex chord progressions, and heady talk.

Few cities took to that culture more readily than Montreal. The city had been a North American jazz hub since the 1920s, when Prohibition sent American musicians north to a city with no interest in shutting its nightlife down. Little Burgundy earned the nickname the Harlem of the North. Clubs like Rockhead's Paradise and the Café St-Michel—where Louis Metcalf brought bebop to Montreal and a ten-year-old Oliver Jones first performed in 1944—hosted the likes of Armstrong, Fitzgerald, and Gillespie. Oscar Peterson grew up here. By the time the coffeehouse era arrived in the 1960s, the city had decades of jazz infrastructure to build on.

Artists and students, including painters Guido Molinari and Jean-Paul Mousseau, as well as writer and art critic Fernande Saint-Martin at the Café L'Échouerie. November 10, 1954. | Photograph: Robert Millet / Archives de la Ville de Montréal / P179-Y-01-02-D003-P056

In dimly lit rooms thick with cigarette smoke, people from all walks of life packed into converted houses and basement spaces, eating peanuts and sipping espresso while folk singers, jazz musicians, and poets shared the same makeshift stages. Venues like Le Pot Pourri on rue Stanley, the Finjan Club in Côte-des-Neiges, and The New Penelope at av. du Parc and Sherbrooke Ouest hosted folk sets, intimate jazz, and poetry readings on the same bill.

There was no backstage to retreat to, which meant musicians mingled with whoever happened to be there (and whoever happened to be there included Bob Dylan, who played his first Canadian performance at Le Pot Pourri).

The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, now in its 46th edition and the world's largest according to Guinness World Records, is the direct heir to all of it. This summer, Le Café Lavazza sets up on the festival grounds from June 25 to July 4, serving espresso, Espresso Martinis, and pastries with a space infused with the café culture that helped shape jazz listening itself.