If you were in a hurry, you could miss it.
A small, dimly lighted sign no bolder that the one marking the card shop next door announces the New Haven Lounge. It's a humble setting for a serious jazz club and one of Baltimore's best-kept secrets. The kind of place that used to thrive on Manhattan's 52nd Street or Greenwich Village in the '40s and '50s, the Haven is a relaxed, racially mixed club packed with smoke, atmosphere and enthusiastic fans of modern jazz.
Tucked away in Northwood Plaza, a generic strip mall that also offers a Hechinger's and Bill's Carpet, the place is anything but mundane inside. A collage of images from jazz's past -- murals of Cab Calloway and King Oliver, cocktail waitresses in black and white suits, patrons in goatees, suits and berets -- make the place seem far from northeast Baltimore.
It's also a place not afraid to show a taste and a sensibility. "I don't want to appeal to absolutely everybody," says owner Keith Covington, with characteristic gentle defiance. He built the club out of his dream of the past, and out of the memories of older jazz fans he cultivates as friends who recall the great New York clubs of the '40s and '50s.
"I like the club scene back then. I like the look of the era," says Mr. Covington, who, at 40, admits he's too young to remember any of it. "I like the hats the women wore, the flow of the dresses, the flow of the music. Men were gentlemen, and men wore hats. The way the shadows fall when we watch the black and white clips."
Mr. Covington's taste comes across through the artists he books for Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights. They come almost exclusively from styles termed "mainstream modern" or "straight-ahead" by radio programmers. Contemporary, New Age, or fusion musicians rarely appear.
"They sell millions of records, but you're not going to hear them at the Haven," Mr. Covington says of contemporary artists.
The club's rise to prominence -- nationally if not locally -- is the result of a seven-year battle that now enlists three key players. They are: Mr. Covington, the intellectual and soft-spoken owner of the Haven; Larry Jeters, gruff and laconic owner of Dimensions in Music, a Charles Street record store devoted to black music; and Gary Ellerbe, a warm and gregarious WEAA deejay whose show gives mainstream jazz its only steady on-air exposure in Baltimore.
The turning point in the club's evolution was a sold-out December show featuring tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman. Mr. Redman, a 1991 Harvard graduate who turned down Yale Law School to play jazz in New York, earned headlines not only for his story but for his warm, informed and inspired tenor playing.
As Mr. Redman won raves and musician of the year awards all over the country, he seemed more and more like the kind of artist Baltimore couldn't draw. Mr. Covington didn't think so. He now jokes that he took enough at the door to pay the band, cover costs and down a couple beers afterward. But by bringing '93's hottest jazz player to Baltimore for a reasonable price, the club helped convince skeptics in and out of town. Many record labels and management in New York heard the club's name for the first time.
"Once he got Joshua Redman down there, that was the ball game," Mr. Jeters says. "Once you get somebody like that to play in your house, you're cool."
One of the club's best drawing cards is that musicians like to play there. Four major national artists -- Mr. Redman, Benny Green, Antonio Hart and Cyrus Chesnut -- recently played the Haven after cutting their rates. To book them at all was a coup; to book them as cheaply as the club did attests to the good will Mr. Covington and the Haven have generated.
"It's nice to have a decent place to come home and play," says Mr. Chesnut, a Baltimore native now based in New York whose rise to prominence this year nearly matches Mr. Redman's last year.
"I believe what Keith is doing is setting a great precedent for the other clubs in town," says Mr. Chesnut. "I believe the people in Baltimore have been looking for a decent place to go hear jazz. Baltimore has always been a jazz town. I think what happened was, it may have gone to sleep for a minute. Now it's waking up."
The Haven, Mr. Chesnut says, attracts an educated audience that knows his music, and he enjoys the place's informality. "I like closeness, the intimacy. You and the audience are right smack up into each other. You feel the fire, you feel the energy."
Why is the Haven succeeding where other clubs have failed?
"I think it's just a question of timing now," Mr. Chesnut says. The emergence of young players -- Mr. Redman, Mr. Hart, Roy Hargrove, the Marsalis brothers, and Mr. Chesnut himself -- has brought jazz to younger audiences and helped erode its image as "old fogey music."
Singer Ruby Glover calls the Haven "a real tribute to the old Pennsylvania Avenue clubs" that thrived in the '40s and '50s. Musicians, she says, appreciate the respect they are shown by audiences and club staffers, things as simple as not talking over the music or walking in front of a soloing performer.
Despite its success, the club, at Havenwood Road and Loch Raven Boulevard, turns only a small profit, and many jazz shows lose money. Two dance nights each week help earn back some of the money. The club's bar and the package goods store next door help, too.
Fighting for an audience comes with the territory, Mr. Covington says, but that doesn't mean it doesn't get him down sometimes -- particularly the thin Wednesday night crowds.
"This is the same level of artist you'd see in [Greenwich] Village on a Wednesday night," he says at a Wednesday show featuring drummer Phil Coniff. He gestures from behind the bar at a half-empty club. Baltimore's jazz revival is more often discussed than realized, he says.
"I've been hearing about this resurgence for years," he says. "And I hope it's true. I sure hope it's true. If the resurgence includes people coming out and supporting the music on a regular basis, it doesn't always happen that way."
The 1988 closing of Ethel's Place, an upscale club known by musicians around the world, shows how difficult it is to support a jazz club in Baltimore, says Earl Arnett, who ran the club with his wife, singer Ethel Ennis. "We had to be jam packed every night of the week to make it work."
Mr. Arnett says the Haven has been successful as a small club that occasionally books national acts. But it's hard to know whether it can move to the next level. "Historically the kind of club that's been able to survive in Baltimore has been the neighborhood club, a hangout that offers music on the weekend and has a very defined audience. The Haven, from what I hear, is making an effort to be a step above that."
"I don't think that there's a curse on Baltimore," says Mr. Jeters, referring to a history in which serious clubs have come and gone but no club has stood the test of time. Some people, he says, were spoiled by the Left Bank Jazz Society, which put on three sets of solid acoustic jazz for $5 or $10 in the '60s and '70s. Others still long for the days of "the Avenue" in the '40s and '50s, when Pennsylvania Avenue was lined with dozens of small neighborhood clubs with little or no cover.
When people are asked to put down more for less -- as jazz fans consistently do in other cities -- they're rarely willing, Mr. Jeters says.
To survive in a town that has never been kind to jazz clubs would be hard enough. But the Haven has also sought out an artistically committed, commercially precarious niche. Instead of booking the best-selling musicians, Mr. Covington stubbornly sticks with what he loves, acoustic jazz and all the styles that came out of be-bop.
Be-bop was once the cutting edge but has become a beloved anachronism. As jazz went electric at the end of the '60s, and rock began to dominate the market, acoustic jazz became the province of a loyalist coterie and few others, and depended on the efforts of purists for sustenance.
A generation of "young lions," led by sharp-dressed traditionalists like Wynton Marsalis, helped revive interest in modern jazz in the early '80s.
"You don't have to endorse everything," Mr. Covington says. He parted ways with jazz history as soon as it went electric and said goodbye to Miles Davis when he fired the first shots in the fusion revolution with the guitar-heavy and electronic "Bitches Brew" in 1969.
"For me, the golden age of jazz was when Duke Ellington was writing, moving through the early be-bop, with Diz and the boys, to when Coltrane was really out there doing his thing," Mr. Covington says.
Like most kids he knew growing up in the '60s, he listened to rock and R&B;, and gradually noticed that the new music his friends dug was rooted in old forms.
"And one day I was listening to Coltrane's 'Africa Brass' and I realized I didn't want to have nothing to do with the rock thing anymore. I said 'let's get back to where it all began.' " He was 15 at the time. "And plus I couldn't dance, so it made it easy for me to find an alternative. I couldn't get that feet thing going."
Years later, in 1987, when he was working as a computer analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank and pulling in a hearty paycheck, Mr. Covington's life changed.
"I got home from lunch one day, my family gave me a call and said, 'We just bought this bar at auction, and we'd like you to run it.' " The bar had been through numerous owners and had been both a successful black neighborhood bar and a dive with a dubious reputation. His parents weren't wealthy -- they'd owned a few corner stores -- but the place came cheap, about $9,000.
The place was dirty, had no air-conditioning, and the bar was poorly stocked. Mr. Covington decided to keep the name the club had had in all its incarnations, but to add the "New." He soon carved out a music series, gradually stocking the bar with his enormous collection of rare jazz tapes and CDs, and did his best to satisfy his patrons' requests.
"Customers would come in and say 'Keith, you're only 30-some years old, how come you know so much about this music?" They'd be requesting songs they loved in their youth. Suddenly they realized, this kid's not playing, he knows his art. And we're feeding off each other, because my ears are wide open when they're talking."
Meeting older jazz fans who remember the heyday of the great New York clubs is one of the pleasures of the job. He still meets Morgan State alums who remember marching in the early '60s to integrate the shopping mall that now houses the Haven.
Mr. Covington can be boastful when discussing his musical knowledge, bragging about his extensive collection of Louis Jordan records years before the musical "Five Guys Named Moe" refocused interest. But when he talks about his club, humility takes over.
"It's not anything I'm doing -- it's the musicians. They refuse to sell out . . . to adapt to new musical styles, and stay in the be-bop and swing. All I've been is a presenter -- I'm hosting a place where they can vent whatever's inside of them. It's hip for them, and I love it."
Great jazz needs a great audience, and the Haven can provide one. Weekend shows are packed with jazz enthusiasts who range across the ages and races. Much of the Haven crowd shares Mr. Covington's tastes.
"Contemporary jazz is OK, but there's too many short cuts and getaways," says Russell Burton, 29, of West Baltimore, a Haven regular and member of the Left Bank Jazz Society. "You throw a synthesizer in the program, and you don't have to play for about 16 bars."
Mr. Burton says he comes to the club for its sound and atmosphere. "Anywhere you sit you can hear. That's what you want. Zero harmonic distortion. It's like over in Europe -- when they play, people listen."
"You know what Art Blakey told me once?" Mr. Burton adds. "He said you know what jazz is? It's cigarette smoke, it's soft lights. That's what jazz is -- this is it. This is your true art form."
JAZZ TONIGHT
Performing tonight at the New Haven Lounge is the Bob Butta/Lenny Cuj-e Quartet, a bebop band led by Bob Butta on piano, and Lenny Cuj-e on vibraphone. Showtime is 8:30 p.m. Every Wednesday is "Dimensions in Music" night with CD, shirt and videotape giveaways. For more information, call (410) 366-7416.