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 supper-club dining (a no-smoking policy is also reported), 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 reportedly 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's structural decision was the supper-club format, pairing dining with shows in an upscale room; a no-smoking policy is also reported, though contemporaneous corroboration has not been found. Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Lionel Hampton, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, Stanley Turrentine, and Tito Puente booked multi-night engagements, and the club's reputation built through the early 1980s. Ray Charles played week-long engagements; the Modern Jazz Quartet, Chick Corea, and Keith Jarrett also appeared on the low stage set tightly against the room's roughly 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) 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 2025). 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. Steven Bensusan, as president of Blue Note Entertainment Group, runs the club, Half Note Records, and the international venue network. The Blue Note closed in March 2020 under pandemic shutdown orders and that spring launched Blue Note at Home, a free weekly livestream series, followed by ticketed streams from the stage. The main room at 131 West 3rd Street reopened for dinner shows at 25 percent capacity in late November 2020 and returned to full programming in June 2021, by which point the club had occupied the address continuously for forty years.