Mikell's
New York, United States · built 1969
Mikell's was a jazz club on the corner of 97th Street and Columbus Avenue, in New York City. Run by Mike Mikell and Pat Mikell, from 1969 to 1991 it was a regular venue for New York's top studio and session musicians, who would turn up for jam sessions with major soul, funk and jazz artists visiting the city. Paul Shaffer, bandleader for CBS's Late Show with David Letterman, called Mikell's "soul heaven". Among the performers and bands associated with Mikell's are Stuff, originally called The Encyclopedia of Soul, the alliance of studio musicians that played almost weekly at Mikell's in the 1970s. Writer James Baldwin's brother David worked as a bartender at the club in the 1970s and 1980s, thereby attracting patronage from Baldwin as well as other authors, including Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Maya Angelou, and musician friends such as Art Blakey, Roy Ayres and Wynton Marsalis.
Venue data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).