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Over its three decades of life, Camden’s Jazz Café has grown into one of London’s leading live music venues. As well as platforming rising stars in the genres, the 440-capacity space has played host to countless jazz and soul legends, from Amy Winehouse, Jamiroquai and D’Angelo to Pharoah Sanders, Bobby Womack and Don Cherry. Now, it has ambitions grow even bigger (literally).
The Columbo Group, proprietors of other London nighttime venues like Blues Kitchen, Phonox and the Old Queen’s Head, has owned the venue since 2016. Earlier this year, it got its hands on neighbouring building 9 Parkway, formerly Malaysian restaurant Mamak Don, ‘with the intention of refurbishing and expanding the Jazz Café and its associated functions’. Then in July, Columbo Group submitted a planning application to Camden Council, revealing its vision for the future of the venue.
The proposals will create more storage space for the venue. They include internal walls being built inside the restaurant at ground floor and basement level, which will make the space shallower and allowing the Jazz Café to extend into the back of the shop. Those new spaces would then be turned into toilets and a cloakroom, making space for larger artist green rooms in the main venue as well as more storage and back of house facilities that Columbo Group says will ‘improve the visitor experience’. The upper floors of No.9 Parkway, currently used as office space, and the front of house shop will stay as they are.
In the summary of the application, Columbo Group said: ‘The Columbo Group are committed to preserving the life of the Jazz Café and its status as a cultural asset to not just Camden, but London and the UK. To preserve and ensure venues are viable and self sustaining it has meant that many venues have diversified to survive. The Jazz Café remains a vibrant and busy destination venue, but requires investment and adaptation to retain its status.
‘While Columbo and their design team are developing proposals for the development of No.9 Parkway, they are keen to ensure the building can be occupied and provide some much needed ancillary space for the Jazz Cafe to help with the day to day operations at the venue.’
The Jazz Café’s proposed expansion is just one of several big moves happening right now for the legendary venue. The application comes just after Columbo Group put on the second edition of its spectacular Jazz Café Festival and few months after it announced that it would be turning an old art-deco theatre in east London into a new venue named Jazz Café East.
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