Blue Note

Overview

Greenwich Village jazz supper club opened September 30, 1981 by Danny Bensusan, one of the first New York rooms to pair marquee jazz bookings with restaurant dining and a no-smoking policy, credited with anchoring the 1980s revival of high-end live jazz in the city.

The Blue Note opened on September 30, 1981, when Danny Bensusan, a Casablanca-born immigrant who had worked as a bartender in the Village and later ran a kosher restaurant in the Diamond District, leased the ground floor of 131 West 3rd Street and built a room around a simple conviction: that if he brought big-name acts into an intimate, well-appointed space with good food, he could fill the house every night. The inaugural performance featured the Nat Adderley Quintet. Bensusan quickly made two structural decisions that set the club apart: a supper-club format pairing dining with shows, and a no-smoking policy at a moment when indoor smoking was universal in New York venues. Artists whose voices had kept them out of smoke-filled clubs, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Lionel Hampton, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Stanley Turrentine, Tito Puente, began booking multi-night residencies, and the club's reputation built rapidly through the early 1980s. Ray Charles played week-long engagements annually; the Modern Jazz Quartet, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett all became regulars on the low stage set tightly against the room's ~200-seat floor. The Blue Note's model was commercial and unapologetic: cover charges and food minimums, nightly performances at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., and a late-night series on weekend mornings at 12:30 a.m. that eventually evolved into the Late Night Groove Series spotlighting emerging jazz, soul, R&B, and hip-hop artists. The venue positioned itself as a complement to (rather than a replacement for) the practitioner-run basement rooms (the Vanguard, Smalls) that anchored the city's jazz underground, offering a pathway for those rooms' artists to reach larger, more tourist-facing audiences. Steven Bensusan, Danny's son, joined the management and built out adjacent ventures: Half Note Records (founded 1998, incorporating as a label in 2001) to capture live Blue Note performances on record, releasing Grammy-nominated albums by Paquito D'Rivera, Conrad Herwig, Elvin Jones, and McCoy Tyner, and Blue Note Management Group, which signed Tyner and Cassandra Wilson as clients. International expansion began in 1988 with Blue Note Tokyo, the first overseas location, followed over the next three decades by clubs in Osaka, Nagoya, Milan, Honolulu, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Beijing, Shanghai, and Los Angeles (opened 2026). In 2011, the club launched the Blue Note Jazz Festival, a month-long June event across 15 New York venues featuring more than 80 performances, anchored by the 131 West 3rd Street flagship. The Director of Programming Alex Kurland has emphasized a multi-night residency model (artists performing 3, 4, or 6 consecutive nights to develop programs night to night) as the club's distinctive curatorial stance within the broader concert-jazz market.

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