In an email sent to the jazz and blues artists who regularly perform at her club, Sarah Wilde, proprietor and talent booker at Club Deluxe in the Haight said that the cocktails-and-jazz nightlife spot would be closing.
“Dear Musicians, It is with sadness, and a hint of disbelief that I must let you know Deluxe will be closing,” the email, which was forwarded to The Standard, began.
Wilde, who could not be reached for comment prior to publication, did not spell out exactly why the club is closing or say when it would close, though she hinted at a number of forces behind the decision:
Please allow me to say, I have done everything I can.
We do not need a GoFundMe.
We need the multi-billion-dollar real estate company that owns our building, to allow a fraction of their portfolio to remain occupied by small businesses, artists, the unsigned musician, the carpenter, the waitress, and the single parent. Not because any of the above are pitiable, in need of charity or cannot pay fair market rent, but because we simply cannot be held to the same leases as multimillion dollar companies; we do not have real estate assets to put up as collateral or inflated tech salaries piling up in our accounts.
We need the insatiable greed of wealthy investors, to give a flapjack about the cities they are systemically draining the color out of…but they do not.
We need these investors to see us as having value in our community, but they do not, and so we vanish from the cityscapes they come into.
Public records show the building is owned by a trust controlled by Burlingame investor Sirhed Bassem.
“It’s a huge loss to the music community,” said Aki Kumar, a local blues musician who has played the club many times in the past 5 years. “It’s a very rare club.”
Kumar said that Club Deluxe’s prime location—located at the corner of the iconic intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets—meant that it constantly drew in foot traffic from tourists and others passing through the neighborhood.
In addition to being a place for patrons to take in some culture, Club Deluxe was also a vital component of the local music ecosystem—as it paid musicians to perform and kept a busy calendar. The club presented live music just about every night of the week, Kumar said, adding that before the pandemic, it often hosted two bands a day.
“I always looked forward to playing that club, it was always fun,” Kumar said. “The payment was also fair. You never felt like you were walking with less than you deserved.”
The venue’s founder, Jay Johnson, first opened Club Deluxe in 1989 and managed the spot until his death in 2015. The following year, Sarah Wilde and Chris Pankow, a couple with a passion for revitalizing old establishments including Charlie’s Smoke Shop—which they briefly ran as Wilde Brothers Coffee—in the Grand Lake neighborhood of Oakland, began managing Club Deluxe.
Under Wilde and Pankow’s management, the club continued to rank among the top jazz bars in the city (according to sites like Culture Trip and Yelp), alongside storied venues like the Boom Boom Room and Mr. Tipple’s Recording Studio.
In addition to giving Kumar a stage and a microphone to share his music with San Francisco, Club Deluxe hosted many other jazz and blues bands, including Hella Fitzgerald, The Buena Vista Jazz Band, The Alcatraz Islanders and Hipsteria.
For now, it seems that the club plans to continue hosting bands until its imminent closure. Wilde concluded her email by encouraging the club’s regular performers to “grab a set” while they can.
Many of the musicians who received the email shared it on social media with accompanying posts imploring local media to cover the news and San Francisco politicians to intervene in the matter.
“This has to do with Big Tech taking over SF and big, greedy landlords not giving a damn about culture in this city,” Cathy Lemons, a blues singer and songwriter, wrote on her Facebook page. “And I for one have had it. London Breed at what point do you stop rolling over?”
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The Haight's Club Deluxe Will Close, Owner Announces - The San Francisco Standard
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