Musicians 1st at Sam First

News, From the Magazine, Various Artists

By Gary Fukushima I Jan. 16, 2024

Seeking to create a vibe similar to New York’s Village Vanguard, Paul Solomon (left) and David Robaire have made L.A.-based Sam First an artist-friendly club with its own record label.
(Photo: Nick Calapine)

The back entrance opens into a cozy, darkened room, leather-cushioned benches snaking around the irregular, rounded perimeter walls. The furniture and decor are elegantly crafted, as if it were a featured dwelling in Architectural Digest. The bandstand is tucked next to the bar, where a grand piano snuggles against a wall that is the same color as the golden-stained wood vertical paneling on the side of the bar and back corner of the stage, but closer scrutiny reveals the wood seamlessly morphs into unusual industrial hoses that line the rest of the walls and ceiling, like the inside of some futuristic spaceship.

Behold Sam First, this concept of a modern jazz club, an apt representation of the music that came of age in mid-20th century and continues to evolve into the 21st. Its creator, Paul Solomon, is a real estate developer who cultivated a love for jazz in college and enjoyed going to clubs in places he lived and visited in the U.S. and around the world. He decided to open his own club on a property he owned, literally steps from the entrance to Los Angeles International Airport. He named the place after his grandfather, Sam First, a tailor from Poland who emigrated with his family to L.A.

Mr. First probably did not foresee his grandson one day owning a jazz establishment, just as Solomon couldn’t have predicted his little spot would become, inexplicably, one of the last remaining bonafide jazz clubs in the entire greater Los Angeles area. Further beyond the realm of envisioning would be the expansion of this venture to not only house but capture, produce and release that music on his own fledgling label, Sam First Records.

“I never wanted to be in the bar business at all, but I started drinking more, I suppose,” Solomon joked, over video from his office above his club. He thought about leasing the space, “But I didn’t want the hassle of somebody running a bar on the ground floor and doing who knows what with what kind of crowd at night, so I decided to do it.” Midway through construction, he realized he wanted to have music in the bar, so he directed his contractors to hire an acoustical engineer to help accommodate the sound of a live band.

Solomon needed to find musicians to play there. His neighbor had a son who was a jazz bassist, who had studied at the prestigious Thelonious Monk (now Herbie Hancock) Institute of Jazz at UCLA. Years earlier, they had gone to see him play. “Dave, I forget, do you remember who you were playing with?” Solomon asked the other face on the screen.

Dave Robaire replied, “I think I was there with Josh Nelson and Mark Ferber … it’s just funny to think about now, because you know those guys so well.” Coincidentally, Nelson, one of the most highly regarded jazz pianists in Los Angeles, would perform at Sam First two days after this video chat, with bassist Luca Allemano and Ferber, the former New York drummer who still plays there as much as he does in California. “Oh, my gosh, I didn’t know that was the catalyst,” said Nelson right after his show. Regarding the club itself, Nelson said, “I just get this welcoming energy [here]. There’s some charm in that it’s not a big club, it kind of reminds me of some of the older clubs that we used to have. I really love this room.”

Solomon not only tapped Robaire to play at Sam First (which he still does on occasion), he hired him as its manager and now producer for the new label. “I definitely work for Paul,” Robaire said, “but in a lot of ways I also consider myself an employee of the L.A. jazz scene. It’s kind of this marriage of making sure all the pieces are in the right place. When you think about great recordings or great performances, it’s because of all these elements that came together. We’re trying to enable people to engage their creativity, to give you the most comfortable space so you can go do your thing.”

“[It’s] very welcoming, feels like you’re playing in your living room,” said pianist Kris Davis following her own brilliant performance there with bassist Eric Revis and drummer Johnathan Blake. Davis was just featured on the cover of the September issue of DownBeat, highlighting her band’s live recording at the Village Vanguard. Acknowledging some similarities between the two clubs, she explained, “This goes back to that intimacy … being very close to the audience, and I feel the audience is really listening. They’re both kind of dry rooms.”

Aside from riffing about the quality of the libations at the Vanguard (“It’s probably not the best Manhattan in Manhattan”), Solomon has only aspirational admiration for that most famous jazz club.

“It’s the one place we mentioned [as a model], really. I mean, it’s the lodestar,” he said. After all, the dry, welcoming sound of the Village Vanguard has been immortalized in countless recordings from the hallowed history of jazz.

But the Vanguard doesn’t have a label through which to disseminate the recordings that are made there. Solomon and Robaire believe Sam First has a unique sound and musician-friendly experience that results in striking music they have learned to capture in electronically pristine form for their live records. It’s like bottling fine lightning to sell and savor later.

Josh Nelson was among the first of five artists to be approached by Robaire to record for the label. Keyboardists Jeff Babko and Rachel Eckroth also signed on, as did pianist Justin Kauflin, whose bonding with Clark Terry over their shared condition of blindness was elucidated in the 2014 documentary Keep On Keepin’ On.

The final artist in this group of five is Joe LaBarbera, who first recorded at the Vanguard in 1974 with Chuck Mangione, and who later joined what would be Bill Evans’ last trio, recording with the pianist during Evans’ 1980 swan song run on Turn Out the Stars: The Final Village Vanguard Recordings (Warner Bros.). Did LaBarbera see any similarities between that iconic club and this newer one out West?

“That’s a fantastic question, because there is an absolute direct link between both of those clubs, and between all of the great jazz clubs that that I’ve played in my life,” LaBarbera asserted by phone from his Woodland Hills, California, home, “and that is that the owner of the club or the manager that ran the club loved the music, and so the music was primary in terms of what was being presented.”

LaBarbera continued, “There’s no interference between the audience and the music — you can’t get any closer to the music than at Sam First, and the same at the Vanguard — people were right on top of you. I have to say that Paul Solomon’s passion for the music is the same as was [the late Village Vanguard owner] Max Gordon’s. He was devoted to presenting the best music around and giving deserving newcomers a shot at greater exposure.”

Nelson echoed LaBarbera’s sentiments. “His is the closest thing to a Vanguard,” he offered. “This is definitely our Vanguard.”

And they make a great Manhattan, too. DB