If venerable Jazz club the Blue Wisp leaves Cincinnati, the local Jazz scene will have a hole in its heart

Downtown Cincinnati is hemorrhaging like a chicken with its head cut off. While city officials are hovering their wings protectively over Saks Fifth Avenue, they’re about to possibly lose the Blue Wisp, and with it, the Blue Wisp Big Band.

I’m guessing a Jazz bar is not even on anybody’s radar screen, but there are several reasons why it should be. While Saks has stores in 50 cities or more, the Blue Wisp Big Band is as an important piece of Cincinnati culture as its more Eurocentric symphony, ballet and opera. The Big Band has won so many awards that co-leader Joe Gaudio’s den probably has as many trophies as Tiger Wood’s. The Big Band has traveled to the West Coast to record a live album at Carmello’s, in the heyday of their old record label, MoPro. Their new CD has a four-star rating from critics. Their work has attracted major league arrangers to write charts for them. And drummer (and therefore boss), John Von Ohlen’s in demand all over the world and has been since the years he put in with Stan Kenton.

Then there’s the Wisp itself, which is known to every major Jazz player in the United States.

Al Cohn, the late tenor saxophone player who was a contemporary of Stan Getz, told me once in the back room of the old Blue Wisp (in Madisonville) that the club was well known in New York, “a joint like the ‘Five Spot’ or the ‘Blue Note,’ I believe he said. “The Wisp is one of the only Jazz clubs with the cachet to attract the major players.”

In those days musicians like Al Cohn, Red Rodney, Scott Hamilton, Warren Vache and Cal Collins made frequent stops there while they crisscrossed the United States on tour. Nowadays, musicians are staying busy in New York and Nashville and L.A. If you can get them to play your club, it’s going to be, expense-wise, a major loss-leader. Club owners are willing to take a loss sometimes for the big acts in hopes of repeat business.

Such is the influence of the Wisp and its “home team,” the Phil DeGreg Trio, that, not long ago, a music lover at the Cincinnati Country Club was able to foot the bill for Scott Hamilton to return to town for a week. Hamilton, the last of the great lyrical players, did one night for the members of the Country Club (they also housed and fed him while he was in town). DeGreg was able to get him a teaching clinic at CCM’s Jazz studies department at the University of Cincinnati, so that the young students there could have the opportunity to hear him and ask questions.

The Blue Wisp booked him for the weekend, and the Hamilton Jazz Society brought him on Sunday night. It was a perfect gift to the city: it enriched students at CCM and customers of the Blue Wisp. It was a perfect partnership of the patron, the arts educators and the customer. I paid $20 per night, and I paid it gladly to hear him in the intimate atmosphere of the Wisp. It has perfect acoustics for Jazz.

Musicians in general like the Wisp because it has a good piano kept perfectly in tune, an ideal stage and a minimal sound system for them to fuss with -­ just enough for soloists and singers. No food is served — the Blue Wisp is not a restaurant ­ and nothing distracts from the music. You might say the Blue Wisp Big Band Wednesdays are a lot like Saturday night at the symphony. In fact, the conductor Paavo Jarvi, dropped by the Wisp after his CSO concerts two nights in a row to listen to Gordon Brisker last October. The reverence is still there. It’s just not going to be in Cincinnati anymore.

Someone bought part of the building where the Blue Wisp has been located on Garfield Place, and they insist on the Wisp space. So owner Marjean Wisby is rumored to be moving the club — possibly to Newport — in hopes of finding a wider audience and cashing in on the Jazz wave that seems to be washing ashore in Northern Kentucky. On the Mainstrasse in Covington at Dee Felice’s, you can hear one of the best Dixieland bands anywhere. Or walk across the street and listen to a little more mainstream Jazz at Chez Nora’s rooftop, one of the nicest music rooms around right now. In a few months you might be able to round off an evening’s entertainment with an edgy New York trumpeter guesting with the Phil DeGreg Trio just across the way in Newport.

They should be so lucky. Their gain would be Cincinnati’s loss.

This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2002.