A jazz temple, a little mandir for Black American Music: my first night I heard great jazz-salsa by Kike Serrano's quintet, with the exciting Jonathan Suazo on alto. World class stuff. These cats blow all over the continual US and come back home to play for family, friends and jazz lovers like you and me. The second night was all funk by Rafael Rosa's trio. They got off to a late start and cut the set at the scheduled time, so I felt like I missed 20 minutes of great music, but it was super nice to be able to meet Rafael, make a new friend, and support him by buying a vinyl album of a show he played in Florida with B3 master Gianni Bianchini. The service was friendly but inadequate: the first night no waitress never came to take an order, so I had to go downstairs and get my own drinks (I bought two at a time because I suspected I'd still get no service upstairs, and I was right).
The second night a waitress came up to me and my wife 45 minutes into the set. So I again ordered two drinks, and then as I anticipated, she came by with the tab at the end of the show. The sound guy is nice, and understands his board, but he doesn't understand acoustics, yet. First of all, he put the board to the side of the stage, behind the speakers, which means he never knows what it sounds like unless he walks the room -- which he never did. Second of all, presumably due to space constraints, he ran the bass direct into the board with one floor monitor, which means that the bass player has little control over tone.
The Yamaha speakers, though good quality , do not reproduce flat, which you can easily hear when they run pre-recorded jazz classics through them. If Ron Carter on "Mr. Clean" sounds like he's inside a cardboard shoe box, then the bassist playing live through those same speakers is likely to sound worse, because the band will be louder. And that's exactly what we had, both nights: clear highs and mids on all instruments, but a fluffy kick drum and muddy bass. If there's no bass cabinet, you can't fix the problem the usual way, which would be to pull the cabinet away from the wall, or de-couple it from the stage or floor with a chair. So you have to fiddle with the EQ, and you might get an improved sound. My feeling is that the speakers are underpowered to carry clear bass frequencies.
The room is tiny, mostly square, and boomy. The stairwell to the rooftop acts like a bass amplifier, and despite the diffusion of the extra walls in the middle, and despite the okay absorption of the audience bodies, more has to be done to improve the sound. Not bass traps, just better EQ, move the board to the back corner by the baño, where you can't see but where you can hear (this would also free up valuable table space for customers who want to see the band), and develop trained ears to really hear what's happening in all frequencies.
So, even with obstructed views for 20% of the seats, difficult ticketing via eventbrite, mediocre service (the bartender chats up the ladies at the bar too long and makes the thirsty guy standing with credit card in hand wait five minutes), the boomy muddy bass (a lot of exciting, beautiful bass solos were lost in the reverberant chaos), I give this place 4/5, because it's clean, affordable, and most importantly it supports jazz music! Yes, the owner should train his staff to constantly scan the room, never linger too long on one customer when others are queued up, and hustle more before the show starts (island time, I get it, but those first 15 minutes are when you do most of the work to get the customers situated and take initial food and drink orders). Yes the sound guy can and hopefully will get better at controlling the room (I love his enthusiasm for the music, his friendliness, his technical skills and knowledge of the gear). But still, jazz is hard to find in some parts of the world, and C Note is an oasis for the jazz-thirsty. read more
