1997-1999 - Jazz Cafe

Vlado Ostoich:
"Our new venue, the Jazz Cafe, outgrew its expat fame and became a truly cult Moscow club. It was here that the star of Sinesha Lazarevic rose. He joined us at the end of the "011 era", but there he couldn't show himself to full effect, and only the Jazz Cafe helped him really spread his wings.
It's no secret that in the late 90s there were very few decent places in Moscow. Where could people go? Only the "Bulgakov", perhaps. And that, essentially, was that. There were, of course, clubs of the "Titanik" format, but they played by completely different rules. So there was no real alternative to the Jazz Cafe, and every weekend a queue formed in front of the venue's doors.
The new premises were found by Dan, who rented the basement of the Jazz Academy on Tretyakovka. Essentially, the Jazz Cafe existed in the format of a disco-bar, in the same guise in which "30/7" and similar venues successfully operate today. It was hard to call it a club - there was practically no dancefloor as such, the lighting and sound were minimal.
This was 1997. By that time the club crowd had grown, and everyone was suddenly drawn "to glamour". Shops selling fashionable clothes started springing up all over Moscow, and people began scrutinising very closely what those around them were wearing. Face control in today's sense of the word started appearing in clubs. That is, a person at the door decided whether this person matched the venue's level, whether they were "one of our circle". And it made absolutely no difference whether you were Russian or a foreigner, whether you knew anyone in the club or not. Of course, no standards existed, and the entry system "for our own" was much softer. Friends were forgiven a certain carelessness in dress. But even if a person was a complete stranger, yet dressed the right way - not necessarily expensively, but definitely with flair - they got into the club easily and calmly.
It would have been silly to devise face-control rules back then. And who would we have written them for? At the entrance to the Jazz Cafe it wasn't hired staff standing there, as now, but we ourselves, and we decided which people we wanted to see as our guests.
All of us - me, Dan, Sinesha, Brana - would pull people into the Jazz Cafe, mixing the crowd to create the necessary atmosphere. There was no homogeneous mass at the club - just businessmen, say, or just artists. All sorts of very different people inhabited the Jazz Cafe, and this mix did its work. The result was the aura of a big flat where everyone knows one another and has a whale of a time, feeling shy of no one and fearing no one. Nowadays this is called an "individual approach to the client", but back then we didn't know the term, and it all came about somehow spontaneously and quite sincerely.
The Jazz Cafe gathered the avant-garde of the Moscow crowd. There was no clear social status of a "Jazz Cafe patron"; completely different people came to us - politicians, businessmen, performers. What united them was a common sense that they were ahead of everyone, living as no one before them had lived, and dictating fashion to the rest. These were, without doubt, iconic figures of the late 90s; the elite, but not the political one - the bohemian one. And they were young people, inclined to all sorts of adventures. It was precisely these people who made the venue's atmosphere and made the Jazz Cafe famous throughout the city.
The club knew different times, bad and good. The first problems arose in August 1998, when the crisis played a cruel trick on the Jazz Cafe, and in one moment there were simply no people left in the club. But the situation quickly righted itself, even though we adopted no "anti-crisis programme" and didn't lower our prices. In general I believe the level of prices doesn't affect a club's image. Expensive, cheap - it doesn't matter. There's a certain segment of the public that pays no attention to these categories. And they go to venues not because it's cheaper there, say, but because the atmosphere of the place suits them. The same was true of the Jazz Cafe: by lowering our prices we wouldn't have brought our crowd back. It came back on its own, as soon as it recovered from the shock.
Incidentally, right on the eve of the crisis the Rolling Stones relaxed at the Jazz Cafe. No one had specially invited them, it all came about somehow of its own accord. We had many friends in show business, and a mate of mine turned out to be involved in organising The Rolling Stones' Moscow concert. We got to know Mick Jagger, had a good time at "Giusto", and the day after the concert I invited him to the Jazz Cafe. It was a day off, a Wednesday or Thursday; I called close friends, and it was a great private party. Mick, it seems, was pleased...
But all good things come to an end sometime. The Jazz Cafe was no exception in this respect, and in 2001 we had to close for those same banal everyday reasons: the proximity of a church, the residents' discontent. But today, looking back, I understand how lucky we were. The clubbing Moscow of the late 90s differs greatly from today's Moscow. Back then it was a business too, but no one set out to shake money from the client's pockets, and much of it happened on a friendly wavelength. It was a time of amateurs, and no one really understood how the club business worked, but it worked splendidly. It was real magic. They say that when you understand why you love a person, you immediately stop loving them. The same thing happened with the Jazz Cafe. No one really understood why they loved this place, but everyone loved it madly."