Five Spot Café

Overview

A Bowery bar turned jazz room: Joe and Iggy Termini's low-ceilinged space at 5 Cooper Square hosted residencies by Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman's New York debut, drawing painters, Beat writers, and the downtown avant-garde onto one small stage.

The Five Spot's lineage begins in 1937, when Salvatore Termini bought what was then the Bowery Café, a working-class bar beneath the Third Avenue elevated rail at 5 Cooper Square. His sons Joe and Ignatze (Iggy) Termini took over in 1951, renaming it the No. 5 Bar. The demolition of the Third Avenue El in 1955 sent rents in the surrounding blocks tumbling, drawing sculptors, painters, and poets to loft studios above the bar. Pianist Don Shoemaker, a tenant upstairs, proposed a deal: if the brothers would buy a piano, he and his band would play. Joe Termini obtained a cabaret license on August 30, 1956, and one week later the Five Spot Café opened for business, a room of roughly 75 official seats, no serious sound system, and walls papered with art-world flyers. What followed in the next decade was unlikely: a succession of residencies that redefined jazz three times over. Cecil Taylor's quartet (with Steve Lacy, Buell Neidlinger, and Denis Charles) inaugurated the room as a jazz venue in November 1956. The following summer the Terminis helped restore Thelonious Monk's cabaret card, suspended by police for years, by testifying at his police hearing; Monk repaid the gesture with a six-month residency beginning July 18, 1957, anchored by John Coltrane on tenor, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums. Miles Davis attended nightly; Leonard Bernstein and Paul Newman appeared in the audience; Esquire ran a photo spread; the Tonight Show filmed there. Those evenings yielded the live albums Thelonious in Action and Misterioso (both Riverside, 1958). In November 1959 the Ornette Coleman Quartet (Coleman on alto, Don Cherry on cornet, Charlie Haden on bass, Billy Higgins on drums) arrived for what was billed as two weeks and ran ten, igniting the war over free jazz that David Lee later analyzed in The Battle of the Five Spot. Eric Dolphy and Booker Little co-led a quintet at the room in July 1961; Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, Randy Weston, Art Blakey, and Lester Young all performed there. Billie Holiday, unable to hold a cabaret card herself, is reported to have sung informally when Mal Waldron served as house pianist. The Five Spot's audience was as defining as its bookings. Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Larry Rivers drank cheap beer at tables shoved against the walls. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), and Frank O'Hara, whose 1959 poem 'The Day Lady Died' ends at the Five Spot's bathroom door, listening to Billie Holiday, treated the room as an extension of the Cedar Tavern and the White Horse. The cross-racial, cross-disciplinary crowd was remarkable for the era: Black avant-gardists and downtown white bohemians shared a dancefloor-sized space where, as David Amram remembered, 'everybody felt welcome.' There were no VIP sections, no dress codes; the bandstand rose barely a foot off the floor. The original Cooper Square building was demolished in 1962 to make way for senior housing. The Terminis relocated a few blocks to 2 St. Marks Place, where the club continued through 1967, when live music ceased and the brothers allowed their cabaret license to lapse as jazz's commercial moment receded. A brief revival under the name Two Saints ran from 1974 into 1975, but the city never reissued the cabaret license and the Five Spot closed permanently in January 1976. The building that housed its original address is gone; the St. Marks Place location later became a tattoo parlor. What remains is a body of live recordings, the artists who credited the room, and the Monk–Coltrane summer of 1957.

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