Water music

That's right, Axis, the rock club formerly known as Spit, the upstairs room formerly known as DV8. And the crowd isn't what you'd expect either. Yes, there's a gray-haired man with a bleached blonde at the bar, a couple of Berklee musicians hanging out. But look around. There's a homey at a bandside table, sweatshirt hood pulled over his head, leaning forward, arms on knees, nodding to the beat. Elsewhere it's kids decked out in Beck baggies, another with a greatcoat draped over his shoulders and a scarf around his neck, boho style. With the band placed at floor level at the center of the room, with cocktail tables on all sides, the effect is intimate, unintimidating. The audience is mostly 18-to-25-year-olds, a lot of them BU students who you can bet never heard of Scullers or the Regattabar, the city's two hotel-based high-end jazz lounges. In fact, for most of these kids, Monk is that fish they pass on in the cafeteria.

What's jazz doing on Lansdowne Street, heart of the Lyons Group fleet of clubs? The instigator is John Diaz, a 29-year-old promoter who created the Starlight Lounge two and a half years ago, after working as a lighting technician at Venus for a few years and helping to produce the Monday Night Jams series at the club. "I always looked at that room and that crowd and wanted to do my own music, and to try to go astray of what Lansdowne Street was used to."

The reaction? "I was told, `Jazz will never work on Lansdowne Street.' I guess that made me more determined. My natural stubbornness kicked in." It was Venus manager Jonathan Cheriff who gave Diaz his shot. "He was the one who basically let me run with it. Most of the clubs, they open big, and they hope to fill it instantly. If it doesn't work in a month, they dump it. I said, `Give me a year and I'll pack the place.' When we weren't making a lot at the bar at first, Jonathan wasn't quick to dump the night."

The club opened with live jazz in August 1994 at Venus de Milo (it moved to Axis permanently in January as Venus underwent renovation). Crowds were small at first, only 30 or so at most. Then they jumped to 100. As the club picked up business, the Lyons Group added print advertising and spots on WFNX's Sunday Jazz Brunch. Diaz and the band worked with flyers at the schools, especially those two key training grounds for young musicians in Boston, Berklee, and the New England Conservatory, but also at college-age stores and hangouts like Tower Records and Urban Outfitters. And the news spread through that age-old promotion technique: word of mouth. "The audience was asking me for flyers so they could show their friends," says Diaz. Sure enough, just about a year after he started, Diaz was looking at crowds of more than 200 -- unheard of for a Monday night in Boston with a virtually unknown jazz band. And the audience was listening.

Jamie Moore, 24, drummer with house band the Tim Luntzel Quintet, recalls the night last December when they opened for a special show by Hammond B3 organ man Larry Goldings. "I was playing with brushes. You could hear a pin drop. That was such a great feeling -- to know that everyone is paying close attention."

Moore flatters his generation's openness to new sounds -- a generation that's been as closely niche-marketed as any since the invention of the hula hoop. "People want to hear something new. When they come here, they see people their own age playing jazz, and right away that gives it some validity. And everything we do is for the music. For the most part we don't play standards, and we don't play Wynton Marsalis's kind of music. We play mostly original compositions, and we're drawing on all kinds of music -- African, Venezuelan, Balkan folk."

All five members of the band -- Luntzel, Moore, altoist Eric Rasmussen, soprano Bhob Rainey, guitarist Peter Nylander -- are products of the New England Conservatory and Berklee. Luntzel and Nylander also play in the hip-hop rock band Red Time. Moore plays with jazz outcats Matt Maneri and Nate McBride in a rock band called Ingrid and in a Balkan band called Tito's Revenge.

Following a set of acid jazz from DJ Res One (a/k/a Adam Gibbons), the band open with "Revolving Booth" by soprano Bhob. Its folkish theme soon tears apart into some free-time squalls (Moore describes the tune, accurately enough, as "a Song X kind of thing"). Rasmussen's "Lemmy Caution" gets its name from an appropriately pomo source, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 black and white sci-fi/detective flick Alphaville. It's anchored by a droning bass ostinato and skittering lines ("odd-metre funk rock," Moore calls it). Challenging stuff by any jazz fan's standards, but the band have a strong grip on this novice audience's attention.

Or at least some of the audience. At the next table, three 18-year-olds are making no-money bets with a pair of red dice. "I found out about this place at a skate shop, Hangar 18," says Ethan Costello, bespectacled, fair hair parted in the middle and hanging to his shoulders. "There was a flyer and the guy who works there is a big jazz fan." (The shop is, in fact, run by a friend of Diaz's, and Diaz himself does promotion and marketing at Underground Snowboard a couple days a week.)

Ethan grabbed his pals to visit the Starlight Lounge on an impulse. "I was listening to jazz on 'GBH, and it reminded me of the guy at Hangar 18." Then he adds, "You know, on 'GBH they talk with long pauses between sentences." He rounded up his Saugus buddies Mike Tarallo and Mark McLaughlin. "I was sleeping at my home and they came and got me," Tarallo interjects. All three like the music, though they themselves are putting together an outfit that plays "synthesized" techno and rock.

"You guys okay?" The waitress is a diminutive cutie in a Louise Brooks haircut, skin-tight emerald green midi-top, and black vinyl mini-skirt, with bee-stung lips and a deadpan manner that makes her a distant cousin of tough-girl actress Debbie Mazur. "You want some soda?" she asks.

"No thank you," they say in unison.

"Some water?"

"No thank you."

At another table, closer to the stage, three BU freshmen explain the Starlight's scheme in their social life. "On Mondays, everyone chills at the Starlight Lounge," says Heather McGuire, 18. "On Thursday night it's the Pour House," she says, naming the Boylston Street bar, "not for the music, but they have half-price Mexican food. On Friday nights it's the Loft [the South End after-hours dance club]."

And is jazz really their music? They give the typical Starlight answer: "All kinds of music." Nineteen-year-old John Choi mentions Morphine, house music, and Miles Davis's Greatest Hits.

Is that an acoustic set or a mix of Miles acoustic and electric?

"Acoustic," says McGuire.

The between-set acid jazz is deafening. A half-dozen players are working up a heated set of Foosball in the corner ("Mona, fuck you!"). What would the three BU freshmen be doing on Monday night if not chillin' at the Starlight? Another unison chorus: "Nothing."

In another corner banquette are Jim Vieiray, 25, and Wry Taylor, 24, both members of the band El Camino. What kind of music do they listen to? "All kinds." What do El Camino play? "Rock and roll."

Diaz calls the Luntzel quintet's music "rock jazz." The acid-jazz and house mixes between sets are truly a break and not the focus of the night. And he admits that as the months have passed the band have been going further and further out. "I watch to see if the band is losing the audience, and they're not. When they blast back into a tune from a free passage, the crowd just explodes. They can't believe it. On New Year's Day we had a lot of Grateful Dead and Phish fans in here. Jamie put a Cajun beat on one tune and the band smoked it. The crowd was eating it up. And this band reads the audience and plays for them. Between sets they're circulating, talking to people, having a good time, not hiding out back. Watching the people at these tables listening to music with smiles on their faces is the greatest thing."

Who knows whether the jazz that these young audiences hear at the Starlight Lounge will take hold and germinate. Already the Wonder Bar in Allston, replacement for the late-lamented Local 186 and Bunratty's, is booking live jazz. Jon Trama, another 21-year-old booker who works in the Lyons Group offices and the man who brought Larry Goldings to the Starlight, plans to bring jazz back into Venus when it reopens as Karma Club later this month. Are Diaz, Luntzel, and Lyons's young promoters grooming a new generation of jazz fans or just riding the current club trend? No matter. For now, the kids are flocking to hear aggressive live jazz at a Lansdowne Street club -- one where they can pay the $5 cover and spend the rest of the night listening and drinking water.