from “le détroit” · the strait
Detroit's oldest continuously operating jazz club shut its doors on Livernois for a roughly month long renovation, with new bathrooms, a refreshed stage and bar, and a new patio promised for a June reopening.
Baker's Keyboard Lounge has gone dark for a few weeks. When the room on Livernois, just south of 8 Mile, comes back, it is set to have new bathrooms, a refreshed stage, an updated bar, and a new sidewalk patio.
The club has co-owners Hugh W. Smith and Eric Whitaker, who bought it in 2011, and the day to day work of the relaunch has been led by Jackie Vaughn Whitaker. The renovation ran close to $100,000 and reworked the bar and outdoor seating along Livernois, with cosmetic updates throughout and a refreshed menu, per CBS Detroit. Whitaker told the outlet the only way to do the work right was to clear the room first. "Everybody was so sad. They didn't want to close down," she said. "But I insisted there's no way to do the things that we wanted to do and still have customers in and out."
The building itself is the reason the closure reads as a pause rather than a loss. Baker's opened on this spot in 1933 as a Baker family sandwich shop, and the family began booking pianists a year later, which is the thread the club traces to call itself the oldest continuously operating jazz club in Detroit. The Michigan State Historic Preservation Office recognized it in 1986 as Detroit's oldest jazz club in continuous operation, and its long run has earned it a wider reputation as one of the oldest operating jazz rooms anywhere.
It is also small. The listening room seats only about 99 people, and the 1952 remodel left it with the Art Deco look it still carries, down to the tilted mirrors angled so patrons can watch the pianist's hands. The bar is painted to resemble a piano keyboard, a flourish that, by the club's own telling and several histories of the place, is said to have inspired Liberace's piano shaped pool in Beverly Hills. The black Steinway grand on the stage was selected by Art Tatum in the 1950s and, by the venue's account, still gets tuned every week.
The list of musicians who passed through is long. Histories of the club name Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk among them. The intimacy was always part of the point. Close quarters, the piano filling the room, nobody talking over it.
That history is now protected on paper. In March 2016, Detroit City Council approved an ordinance establishing the Baker's Keyboard Lounge Historic District, which bars demolition or major exterior change without sign off from the city's Historic District Commission. The bones of the place are spoken for.
No exact reopening date beyond June has been set. The marquee on Livernois will be back.
One dispatch a week. No tracking, no filler. Free, always.