Overview
History
Sometimes the audience sits in
By the club's own account, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennett and Quincy Jones were among those called up on stage from the audience to sit in1.
Danny Bensusan founded it in Greenwich Village in 1981, meaning to build a jazz club that would treat deserving artists with respect1. Artists who had stopped playing jazz clubs decades before, among them Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Lionel Hampton and Tito Puente, soon called the Blue Note home1.
When we listed it, we said the lines were a block long and the prices exorbitant, and that unless you knew and loved the band, there were better jazz venues all over the city. Forty-five years in, it's still at 131 West 3rd Street1, 2, with sets at 8 and 10:30 in the evening2 and more shows on the calendar2.
Sources
Researched October 2026.