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This Issue 01/25/2007

Also in this issue

• a-Maze-ing
• Where Have All the Desktops Gone?
• From the ed
• Friday night dispatch

Around 9:30 on a Tuesday night, the Ortlieb's jam session is up and running. It's a smaller crowd than usual, but it's still early. On stage, a quartet: Doug Hirlinger on drums, Sid Simmons on piano, Mike Boone on bass, and Pete Souders, the club's owner, on tenor sax. They play the kind of jazz that seems most fit for a crowded, smoky late-night club: a mid-tempo, shuffling drum beat, loping bass lines, a sax part more assiduous than manic.

It is, on some level, a typical Tuesday night at Ortlieb's Jazzhaus, where up-and-coming jazz musicians can join established Philadelphia talents for an informal performance. Though weekend dates attract bigger acts, the free-form session has become one of the club's unique features. And it's made the Northern Liberties space a priming ground for aspiring artists. "We started the Tuesday jam session the week I opened [in September. 1987]," Souders remembers. "We instituted the music policy almost immediately."

"It's one of those rare kinds of environments where people who want to learn how to do this could actually interact with and play with really serious musicians," reflects Tom Moon, former music critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Ortlieb's is a restaurant as much as a club, and it lacks the dark, smokey atmosphere of the typical underground jazz house. But the club is rooted in the history of the music - and it's made some history itself. The photos that line its cedar walls bear witness to the legends who have performed on its stage: Shirley Scott, Mickey Roker, Bootsie Barnes.

A mixed crowd spreads out across the room. Two college-age guys sit close to the stage, looking on with reverence; couples and some families sit nearby. At the bar, the patrons seem mostly regulars. A middle-aged black man walks gingerly out towards the door: "We good?" Joseph, the bartender on duty, returns a knowing look. "We always good, baby!"

The set continues. Souders periodically steps off stage and sits at a table close by. His eyes, vacant, shift from the door to the band. He plays Tuesday nights almost every week, but tonight the kindly, searching gaze has added, if unconscious, meaning.

This month, Pete Souders will sell the jazz house he's owned for 19 years.

Just off the corner of North Third and Poplar is the small, three-story building where Ortlieb's has made its home. A free-standing chalkboard rests a few feet from the door, advertising the upcoming schedule. The curiously blue, shingled fa‡ade lies sandwiched between the remains of the beer brewery from which it gets its name. On one side, a chain-link fence surrounds the mammoth abandoned bottling plant, its windows broken and walls scrawled with graffiti. From behind, a faded painted sign on high reads: "Henry F. Ortlieb Brewhouse." To the right sits an abandoned lot where the brewery plant once stood.