Underground Cocktail Bar Continues to Provide World-Class Live Music to People Who Found It by Accident
By Cyndi Himmelstiere | Ditch Pitch UK
Nightjar is the kind of Shoreditch institution that people who have been here long enough to have forgotten when they discovered it mention with possessive pride, as if knowing about it is itself a form of credential. I have been going there since approximately 2013 and I mention it with possessive pride, which is evidence that the phenomenon applies to me as well and which I acknowledge without apology because Nightjar has earned the possessiveness through consistent quality over fifteen years, which in Shoreditch nightlife terms is an achievement of approximately the same magnitude as surviving a geological epoch.
The Thursday Throwdown
I attended on a Thursday in June for the Thursday Throwdown, which is the late-night format that Nightjar runs after eleven pm with free live music from eleven thirty, which is either excellent value or an entertainment economy that makes no commercial sense depending on whether you are counting the cocktails, which are expensive and excellent and which are presumably the mechanism by which the free live music sustains itself financially. The music on the Thursday I attended was a jazz quartet of the kind that Nightjar consistently produces: technically accomplished, genuinely engaged with the material, and responsive to the audience in the way that live jazz at its best is, which is the way that makes you understand why recordings are insufficient.
Louise Messenger had performed earlier in the month, which I had noted with regret at missing, because her Australian-born, London-based jazz vocalism is exactly what the space rewards. Roy Pfeffer, whose New Orleans drumming the Nightjar listings describe as “celebrations” rather than concerts, is booked for later in the season. The Jazzberries Trio, who played the inaugural Nightjar show when it launched in 2011, continue to play. This continuity between the venue’s founding and its current programming is the thing that I find most admirable about Nightjar: it has been doing the same thing, excellently, for fifteen years, which in the attention economy is both unusual and valuable.
The Space Itself
Nightjar is below street level, which in Shoreditch means below the level of the bars and restaurants that operate above it, which are below the level of the offices and flats above them, which creates a vertical geography of experience that the neighbourhood’s Victorian and Edwardian buildings were not designed for but accommodate with the flexibility of structures that have been repurposed several times and can accommodate one more. The underground quality of the space does something to the music that above-ground venues cannot replicate: the sound has nowhere to go, which concentrates it in the room, which makes the room feel intimate at a capacity that would feel large in a different configuration. On a Thursday after eleven, with the cocktails and the quartet and the specific underground Shoreditch quality of the place, it is exactly the right amount of everything.
Cyndi Himmelstiere has been writing about Shoreditch since before it was fashionable, and has continued writing about it through its fashionability, and is currently writing about it in the phase that follows fashionability, which is the phase where the things that were fashionable become normal and the things that were normal become expensive and the things that were authentic become self-consciously authentic, which is not the same thing but is sometimes harder to distinguish from the outside than it should be. She covers Shoreditch because it is where she lives and because the story it tells about urban change, creativity, and the economics of culture is worth telling with the specificity that only someone who has been here for the whole arc can provide. For Shoreditch events, see Time Out London. For East London community news, visit MyLondon. For Shoreditch arts and culture, see Evening Standard.
Shoreditch has been changing continuously since at least the 1990s, when artists arrived because the rents were low, and the changes have compounded in ways that make the current version of the neighbourhood look quite different from the version those artists found and yet feel continuous with it in some essential way that Cyndi Himmelstiere is still trying to articulate. The creativity is still here. The community is still here, in different proportions and different spaces than before. The things that made Shoreditch interesting to the first wave of arrivals are still visible if you know where to look, and they are being added to by new arrivals who find the same combination of qualities that made it worth finding in the first place. This is either gentrification’s failure to fully erase what it covers, or the resilience of urban culture in the face of economic pressure, or both, and Cyndi writes about it because the question of which it is matters for understanding cities.
Shoreditch has been changing continuously since at least the 1990s, when artists arrived because the rents were low, and the changes have compounded in ways that make the current version of the neighbourhood look quite different from the version those artists found and yet feel continuous with it in some essential way that Cyndi Himmelstiere is still trying to articulate. The creativity is still here. The community is still here, in different proportions and different spaces than before. The things that made Shoreditch interesting to the first wave of arrivals are still visible if you know where to look, and they are being added to by new arrivals who find the same combination of qualities that made it worth finding in the first place. This is either gentrification’s failure to fully erase what it covers, or the resilience of urban culture in the face of economic pressure, or both, and Cyndi writes about it because the question of which it is matters for understanding cities.
