The Carlye Room, the vintage-minded venue that moved to downtown D.C. from Alexandria two years ago, and quickly became one of the most consistent homes for straight-ahead jazz in the nation’s capital, has closed. 

The space ceased all operations on Tuesday, according to Kris Ross, the venue’s booker. By Wednesday, all shows that had been listed on the Carlyle Room’s Instaseats page were labeled either “canceled” or “off sale.”“As far as my knowledge, [the] business is done,” Ross told CapitalBop.

The Carlye Room was originally founded at its Virginia location as the Carlyle Club, and modeled itself after the United States’ iconic art deco jazz clubs of the pre-war swing era. While it was situated across the Potomac, the venue’s business model focused more heavily on the twin pillars of booking tribute acts and renting the space out as a destination for wedding receptions, with “jazz” being more a prop than a feature. After operations shuttered during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Carlyle found a new home merely four blocks from the White House, in a building on the south side of Franklin Park in 2022. 

After rebranding itself as the Carlyle Room, the club moved away from its previous business model, ceasing wedding bookings and opening its bandstand to nationally touring jazz acts like Arturo Sandoval in early 2023. When Ross arrived last summer, after a long tenure as the chief booker at Blues Alley, the venue began regularly hosting some of the area’s top jazz musicians, like saxophonist Tedd Baker, drummer Lenny Robinson and vocalist Integriti Reeves. It gave the Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra — which had been without a regular home since the closing of its namesake club in 2016 — a regular gig for a few months. The Carlyle Room also increased its cachet with shows featuring top national talent, including the SF Jazz Collective, Lizz Wright and others. 

Ross said that attempts to build up the club’s reputation among such artists seemed to be paying off, as he was getting more calls from established artists wanting to play there. Though such acts weren’t necessarily big “money makers” for the venue, Ross said, “I didn’t book them to make money. I booked them to bring a new audience to the club. And it worked. Sixty-five to 70 percent of the audience, I mean anecdotally, were saying: ‘This is our first time here.’ And most everybody that walked in the club could see the potential immediately, with the [availability of] parking, the upscale environment, the beautiful bathrooms. The food was good, the sound was amazing.”

Many in the D.C. jazz world first learned of the Carlyle Room’s closure from pianist Chris Grasso, who posted on social media Wednesday that the club would be ceasing operations. “I’ve experienced some great nights performing there over the years, in both their locations, with some of my favorite musicians,” he said.

Ross had felt confident that the venue was approaching a tipping point toward surefire profitability — “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said — as attendance became more reliable. He said that was exemplified by what would become the club’s final show, featuring Etienne Charles and Creole Soul, on July 26. The 160-seat space had 100 people in attendance for “straight-ahead jazz on a Friday night,” Ross said. But “the light did not arrive soon enough,”  he said, explaining that the club’s management found itself unable to sustain its costs.

Comments

comments