PAUL PINES

jazz: Tin Palace

The landmark establishments of the Bowery, including the Tin Palace, have been commemorated by the Bowery Alliance of Neighbor's excellent project about 400 years on NYC's oldest street, Windows On the Bowery, with a listing in the National Register of Historic Places.  The Villager's Placards ballyhoo Bowery as birthplace, nexus tells all. 

Scroll on down and go here for even more on the renowned East Village jazz club, a "lost jazz shrine" Paul started.

Check out Outside the Tin Palace: A photograph, 1976, a remembrance by nationally recognized poet, playwright and cultural activistPatricia Spears Jones, for more on this photograph.

BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center's annual
Lost Jazz Shrines Celebrates Tin Palace 2005 Excerpt

 "This year, the annual celebration will focus on Tin Palace, bringing yet another legendary NYC venue temporarily back into the consciousness of the jazz world with a thorough remembrance and examination. This year's Jazz Shrines Series will encompass three concerts (Fridays, May 18, June 1 and June 15) featuring Oliver Lake, Reggie Workman, Andrew Cyrille, The Luciana Souza Trio, Giacomo Gates, George V. Johnson, Jr. and many others, performing some of the legendary music that was performed at Tin Palace during that unforgettable offbeat, post-hippy, pre-punk era of the East Village. In addition, all three concerts will be proceeded by a FREE Humanities Program with live interviews and films that showcase some of the celebrated figures associated with the venue, including Paul Pines, former owner and music booker.

BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center's annual “Lost Jazz Shrines" series is an exciting rediscovery of the hottest, hippest and legendary jazz venues in the Big Apple. This year's series celebrates Tin Palace, which opened in the fall of 1970 at Bowery and Second Street. Owner Paul Pines, presented an array of jazz, from classics and standards to fusion, and a series of Brazilian percussionists, some of whom used silverware and salt shakers as musical instruments. The club became recognized by the media and music industry as a serious venue and soon the seedy East Village backstreet was lined by limousines and Japanese tourists.

Paul Pines wanted to open a jazz club that captured the high energy of old downtown jazz clubs but not the hard drugs and doomed history set by Charlie Parker and Lee Morgan. Pines stated, “I knew I wanted a jazz room with the energy of Slugg's, but not the pathology--the doomed gestalt of hard drugs and raw emotion that had so deeply attached itself to the music since Charlie Parker, the poet maudit of jazz. I believed it was possible to turn that around, that a music which reached for transcendence as often as for a soul could find a more conducive setting." He opened The Tin Palace at 325 Bowery Street @ 2nd Street, New York in the fall of 1970. The first six months catered to the Bowery/Soho crowd, which included painters in the lofts, such as Mike Goldberg and Robert Indiana. The club opened with Murray Shapinski Quartet, Charlie Turyn, saxophonist, Vinnie Giangreco, guitarist.

Tin Palace experienced a new owner's gift by getting the same telephone number as the defunct Slugg's Saloon. Callers were invited to the new Tin Palace. With Murray Shapinski, flautist Lloyd McNeill, and guitarist, Allen Gittler as the featured artists for the first flurry of calls, looking for Slugg's the place started up smoothly. Lloyd McNeill assisted with the booking by bringing in Brazilian ensembles featuring Amaury Tristao, Dom Salvador, and Portinio. These Brazilian musicians kept the club packed with Brazilian percussionists using silverware and saltshakers as musical instruments. Soon the club was listed in the New Yorker and Village Voice and other players were calling and dropping by. The club became a tourist attraction, limousines were lining the streets and groups of Japanese tourists ventured into the seedy west village backstreet.

In 1973, Stanley Crouch and his protg David Murray moved into an apartment above Tin Palace. There Paul Pine and Stanley Crouch developed a friendship beyond music and shared ideas and opinions. Topics of discussion covered the book of Job, Fats Navarro, Proust, Spengler, and Aime Cesar. Stanley Crouch had proposed opening an avant-garde Sunday afternoon series, which was very successful. He brought in “Air"-the trio of Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins & Steve McCall, David Murray, James Blood Ulmer, Oliver Lake and many others. Paul Pine booked the musicians until he sold it in 1976, and the club continued for another three years, with Stanley Crouch booking the room. Although several artists appeared at the Tin Palace, Paul Pine notes Eddie Jefferson, Richie Cole, Jimmy Giuffre, Paul Bley and Steve Swallow as memorable for him. He also fondly notes the establishment of the World Saxophone Quartet which started at the Tin Palace. "

*For more on the Tin Palace check out Paul's novel, poems and opera based on it.

(Marvel at 325 Bowery today, aka Joey Ramone Place.)

Lost Music Venues of Manhattan 
by Andy Schwartz , Perfect Sound Forever, excerpt

"The new wave era in New York was also a boom time for palatial discos such as Studio 54, and for corporate concert venues up to and including Madison Square Garden. But in terms of musical innovation and building an audience from the ground floor, the real action was in smaller independent rooms like the Tribeca new-wave rock club Tier 3, the Bowery jazz haven Tin Palace, and the genre-spanning Hell's Kitchen loft SoundScape.

In contrast to Max's Kansas City or the Village Vanguard, none of these venues is much noted in the official rock and jazz histories; the people who created them didn't go on to found a chain of franchise restaurants, design a line of t-shirts, or promote a Rod Stewart world tour. Paul Pines, Verna Gillis, and Hillary Jaeger weren't in business to lose money, but music came first--and not just any music (such as the "tribute" acts and "rock & roll karaoke" defacing the New York scene today) but the music that they themselves wanted to hear and to expose to a wider audience."

Lost Music Venues of Manhattan PART II :
The Tin Palace Excerpt

"In 1975, at 315 Bowery, Hilly Kristal was opening up C.B.G.B. to the advance guard of New York rock: Television, Ramones, Blondie, and the rest. But just up the street, Brooklyn native Paul Pines had been running a successful jazz club called The Tin Palace for five years, offering much-needed exposure to American artists ranging from bop vocalist Eddie Jefferson to AACM stalwarts Roscoe Mitchell and Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre. An aspiring writer and poet as well as a jazz fan, Pines traveled to San Francisco to meet the Beats, then returned to New York to take up residence in the East Village."
 

MORE FROM PAUL ON JAZZ (& POETS) with Jon Curley
over at The Conversant  May 1, 2014 EXCERPT

“Coming of age in the ’50s and ’60s on the Lower East Side of New York, I found poets everywhere. One couldn’t walk down the street without running into them. The ghost of Black Mountain haunted Max’s Kansas City, where I sat at the bar between Fee Dawson and Donald Phelps. I listened to jazz with Paul Blackburn, who also introduced me to Octavio Paz when the Mexican poet and his wife gave a talk in Paul’s apartment above McSorley’s. Paul warned me against the siren song of translation—not to get caught in it as he had. But I read his The Journals as they appeared, and learned to view poetry that way, to read the landscape as an oracle.”
 

The Jazz Session Podcast with Jason Crane:
interview with Paul Pines, 5/10/10

"Paul Pines is a poet with deep roots in the jazz world. In the 1970s he opened
And ran The Tin Palace, a bar in the Bowery where he booked…"
 

-  For more jazz with paul check out the Lake George Jazz Festival, a free upsate new york jazz weekend that he started 33 years ago.