Blues Alley

Blues Alley at 1073 Wisconsin Avenue NW has been Washington’s premier jazz supper club since Bill and Rebecca Sherald opened the club in 1965 in the Georgetown alley that gave the club its name. The Georgetown alley behind Wisconsin Avenue, which has become one of the most recognizable addresses in the Washington cultural landscape through the fifty-plus years of the club’s operation, is reached from the Wisconsin Avenue street level through the narrow passage that the alley’s entry marks with the Blues Alley sign.

The Blues Alley format is the supper club model that was the dominant jazz venue format of the mid-twentieth century American entertainment culture: the dinner service that begins before the performance, the round tables that provide the audience with the sightlines to the small stage while the server brings the food and the drinks, and the intimacy of the small room that places the audience within a few feet of the performers who constitute the most significant roster of jazz artists that any Washington club has ever hosted. Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, and Charlie Byrd, who helped found the club, are among the hundreds of major jazz figures who have performed at Blues Alley.

The Blues Alley dinner menu, which is served through the performance, provides the supper club component of the format: the Creole and Southern American dishes that the menu features connect the jazz music tradition to the culinary tradition that the same American South produced. The Georgetown diner at Blues Alley is attending a complete evening of music and dining rather than a concert or a restaurant meal separately.

The club typically presents two shows on weekend evenings. Hours vary by performance schedule. Blues Alley at 1073 Wisconsin Avenue NW in Georgetown has maintained the performance standard that makes it one of the most significant jazz venues in the eastern United States through the decades since 1965. The Georgetown jazz listener who comes to Blues Alley for the Tuesday evening performance and the Georgetown visitor who discovers the club through the Washington cultural guide both find the same experience: the intimate club room where the distance from the nearest table to the stage is thirty feet, where the sound system is calibrated to the specific acoustic of the room, and where the performer at the most advanced level of the jazz tradition is playing the music at the level the instrument requires.

The meal at Blues Alley, which begins with the dinner service before the first show and which the supper club format maintains through the performance, provides the complete Georgetown evening that the jazz lover and the Georgetown social host who wants the distinctive occasion uses the club for. The Georgetown dinner at Blues Alley is among the most consistently satisfying evenings that the Georgetown entertainment calendar offers. Hours are set by the performance schedule.