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The New PizzaExpress Jazz Club tempts diners with music, dough balls
PizzaExpress Jazz Club and the three other “live” venues in London and Birmingham host about 2,000 shows every year, seven nights a week, along with live music played on Thursdays in dozens of other locations.
Thanks to PizzaExpress, every town in the UK is now familiar with the concept of greasy garlic butter-dipped dough balls, not to mention Napoli-style slices washed down with Italian Peroni beer.
Since the 1960s, generations of Brits have ordered from the stodgy but satisfying menu and eaten a pepperoni-topped American Hot pizza at some point.
The “middle brow carb chain,” as restaurant critic Giles Coren memorably described it, is part of Britain’s furniture. No one objects to going, but few particularly love the experience.
Unless you visit the chain’s flagship restaurant in London’s Soho, which has just reopened as part of the brand’s plan to spend almost £60 million ($73 million) on renovations in the UK this year and next, according to the credit research company Fitch Ratings.
PizzaExpress Jazz Club and the three other “live” venues in London and Birmingham host about 2,000 shows every year, seven nights a week, along with live music played on Thursdays in dozens of other locations.
The idea of playing live music while serving pizza was born out of founder Peter Boizot’s love of jazz. In 1969, he turned the basement of the restaurant’s second location on Dean Street in Soho into a venue which has hosted such world-class musicians as Norah Jones, Jamie Cullum, and Gregory Porter.
Even on a Sunday night—thanks, in part, to modest expectations about the brand—it’s one of the most enjoyable nights out in London.
The updated venue has comfortable leather seats that have that new-car smell, a revamped bar, and padded red booths—a subtle nod to Soho’s sleazy past. But it’s really all about the shiny £85,000 Steinway piano that dominates the stage and the acts sitting behind it. The place is about half the size of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club down the road; from the front row seats, you can lean over to touch the piano and player. 'I always felt like I was going to drip spittle from my trombone onto people’s pizza,' says David Lalljee, jazz trombonist and bandleader of New Orleans-style group Doolally Tap.
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'People pay extra for that,” says PizzaExpress Music Manager Ross Dines. “They say, 'Please put me on the front row.''
The challenge for Dines, who’s managed the club for 14 years, is changing its reputation from one of London’s “best kept secrets” to that of a must-visit venue for visitors around the country. The club’s genesis may have been the founder’s love of jazz, but PizzaExpress hasn’t survived for more than 40 years by ignoring the bottom line.
Fixing up the jazz club and the other branches is “core to enabling PizzaExpress to maintain its competitiveness,” says Fitch Ratings. And, as Boizot told Bloomberg in 1993, “customers do tend to drink more and spend more while they are sitting listening to jazz.”
I went on Sunday to see piano-playing wunderkind Christian Sands and his trio, which includes his drumming brother Ryan, whom he says has the skills of a samurai with the sticks. Although we didn’t get spat upon, bassist Yasushi Nakamura played his bass like a fiddle, and bandleader Sands brought a smile to my face with passionate, creative work on the piano.
This was a top performance in the spirit and style of piano-playing great Thelonious Monk. The brothers and bassist deftly improvised their way through their repertoire of tunes such as Sonar and Be Water, a reference to martial art great Bruce Lee, Monk’s Light Blue, and Steve Winwood’s Can't Find My Way Home. At one point, Sands played so fast his fingers started to blur; Bruce Lee would have been impressed.
Nonstop pizza orders don’t detract from the scene. In fact, PizzaExpress’s approachable, affordable brand helps minimize the pretension that can inhabit jazz clubs. It’s impossible to be a snob while eating mozzarella-topped garlic bread. It helps that tickets are available for £17 to £35 per person, about half what Ronnie Scott’s typically charges.
That unpretentiousness is part of the appeal for the jazz and music greats who play here. Cullum first started playing PizzaExpress for £50 a gig in Swindon in 2002, when he was 23, with free pizza and a beer thrown in. His first album launch, at the Soho venue, was packed with eager record label talent scouts.
Before he was a household name, Porter headlined a barely full £15 ticket gig at the venue; he still pops in when in town. Ed Sheeran played a 2010 gig at the Holborn branch, and took Taylor Swift to a PizzaExpress before the Brit Awards in 2015. The venue has hosted Amy Winehouse, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, John Williams, Sting, and jazz saxophonist Scott Hamilton, who plays here regularly with his quartet.
Spontaneity is a big aspect of the club. You go in expecting a pizza and an enjoyable performance, and you get a “magical moment,” says Dines. “Jools Holland got up on stage a few years ago—Sam Smith, the same.” He claims that the venue has employed “tens of thousands of musicians over the years.” The late Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts was a regular performer. “He didn't need to do it for money, but he just loved the club.'
Dines adds, “everybody should know about the club. Even some of my friends don’t really know, and then once they walk in the room they get it. You just have to see it to believe it.”
