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. Don Shoemaker, a merchant marine and would-be jazz pianist who held jam sessions in a loft above the bar, suggested the brothers buy a piano so musicians could play in the room. 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. Over the next decade the room hosted three long residencies that jazz historians still treat as turning points. 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 that opened July 4, 1957; about two weeks in he brought in the quartet anchored by John Coltrane on tenor, Wilbur Ware on bass, and Shadow Wilson on drums. The residency drew an audience well beyond the jazz press, and is reported to have brought Miles Davis, Leonard Bernstein and other figures from outside the music into the room. No commercial recording survives from that residency. Monk returned to the Five Spot the following summer with Johnny Griffin on tenor, Ahmed Abdul-Malik on bass, and Shadow Wilson's successor Roy Haynes on drums; the August 7, 1958 night produced 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, and Art Blakey 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. 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 room barely larger than its bandstand — a mix David Amram is quoted as remembering as one where '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. 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. What remains is a body of live recordings, the artists who credited the room, and the Monk–Coltrane summer of 1957.