New York's Blue Note Jazz Club to Expand to Beijing, for No Apparent Reason

New York's famous Blue Note Jazz Club will expand to Beijing in 2016, along with another location in Hawaii, The New York Times reported Thursday evening.

"Blue Note Beijing, scheduled to open in March, will occupy a 16,000-square-foot basement space [about 1,500 square meters] in a neo-Classical building near Tiananmen Square. Built in 1903 as Beijing’s first American Embassy, it was ... more recently to the upscale French restaurant Maison Boulud. The club, now undergoing a USD 5 million renovation, will present two shows a night, Tuesday through Sunday," the Times reported

Blue Note Entertainment, the company's parent group, has apparently failed to notice that with the exception of Lost Heaven, every other food and beverage or entertainment outlet in the Ch'ienmen 23 complex, formerly known as the Legation Quarter has closed/failed/moved.

Apparently Blue Note's market research also failed to notice that with the exception of a couple of clubs that barely take up 150 square meters each, the market for live jazz in Beijing is pretty limited. There's East Shore Live Jazz Cafe, which we like a lot, owned by local rock and jazz pioneer Liu Yuan. Cigar Jazz Wine, aka CJW, serves quite a bit more C and W than they do J. Centro's live music could certainly be classified as jazz, but it's not a dedicated jazz venue. A couple of other venues like Dusk Dawn Club and Modernista have jazz performances, but are not jazz destinations. Leon Lee's Yue Fu Jazz Club and Tasting Room, opened specifically for jazz, closed within months.

Blue Note also operates clubs in Milan, Tokyo, and Nagoya, along with their flagship venue in New York.

"'China is an emerging market for live Western music,' said Steven Bensusan, the president of Blue Note Entertainment, whose other properties include the Highline Ballroom and B. B. King Blues Club & Grill. “We’ll be on the forefront of helping to build that market. It’s something that we’re in a unique position to do,'" he told the Times.

Well, good luck, and don't forget to invite us to the opening party, but we'll remain skeptical until we see a live music venue a stone's throw from the country's most sensitive political site racking up a waiting list for two shows per night.

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Photo: Wikipedia