By Gigi Yellen-Kohn, JTNews Correspondent
Doron Raphaely wanted to create a Seattle jazz and blues club that would not be about food or a fashionable location, but strictly about the music. So he named it About The Music. Tucked away near Boeing Field in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood, in the historic 1905 Rainier Ice Building, ATM is an oasis for weekend night owls. Raphaely, a transplanted Israeli whose love of jazz coexists with his practice of psychiatry, has weathered a rocky start for his new club, which appears to be coming together now as a unique addition to the city’s music scene.
Raphaely fell in love with jazz as a young guitar player in Ramat Gan, the Tel Aviv suburb where he grew up. His dream of opening a jazz club waited while he did his Israeli army service, moved to the U.S. for music school in Boston and changed his career to medicine, where he specialized in psychiatry. A resident of the Seattle area since 1989, Dr. Raphaely was intensively involved in the work of the Center for Patient Education, delivering what he describes as college-level courses to psychiatric patients about their own conditions. Though Raphaely has no synagogue affiliation, his publicist Ilana Balint was raised in Seattle and is active in the local Jewish community.
Now married and the father of three, with a private Capitol Hill psychiatry practice, Raphaely has invested great amounts of time and money in the club he says he started “scheming” four years ago. The club opened last November, closed at the end of December, and re-opened a month later.
Is it hard to run a jazz club?
“It’s not nearly as hard as running in the desert,” says the former soldier.
In Raphaely’s opinion, patient education and music presentation have a lot in common. “Music is a form of connectedness among people,” he intones in a barely accented baritone as rich and deep as the building’s mahogany trim. “It’s hard to be a jazz musician. I treat the musicians with respect. They need to feel appreciated as artists rather than merchants.”
Then it’s the psychiatrist’s turn on the couch, back in his office at ATM.
“As children we are told to follow our dreams. That’s what I’m doing!” he explains. In dream-following, as in jazz, “The scariest forms are those that make you improvise. That’s scary!”
Indeed, running this club requires improvisation. A musical purist, Raphaely opened the club aiming to minimize distraction from the performances: he offered only beer and soft drinks, coffee and packaged snacks. He insists that “jazz is an interesting and deep enough phenomenon not to be limited to sharing a place with food and alcohol and shmoozing and being seen.”
But the sparse crowds and significant financial drain of the first couple of months made Raphaely reassess his strict approach. A two-month lineup of expensive talent had to be scrapped after particularly heavy losses on the booking of saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, son of jazz legend John.
So Raphaely has been improvising and making changes — including modifying his original idea about food and drink service. Still, he will continue to focus upon the music first.
Starting in May, ATM will welcome high school and college jazz students to take the stage on Sunday afternoons for a jazz matinee, and to join in jam sessions with the house band, the Roban-Vaughn Quartet, which comes on at 7:00 every Sunday. Guitarist Roban, incidentally, was Raphaely’s roommate when they served in the Israeli army together.
Any student arriving with an instrument will get free admission on Sundays. The first student group scheduled is the Olympic College Jazz Group from Bremerton, on Sunday afternoon, May 4.
Raphaely is also applying for nonprofit status for ATM, which would make the club eligible for grant money.
Seattle may not be a city that never sleeps, but most Saturdays, and occasional Fridays, ATM is open for after-hours music: house band Reminisce starts playing at 1:30 in the morning, and goes until whenever. This way, says Raphaely, ATM, without a liquor license, can pick up the after-hours crowd from clubs that have to stop serving drinks at two. As ATM becomes better known, he hopes that performers from other nightspots around town will consider showing up at his place to jam after their own shows are over. Meanwhile, organized blues fans have been flocking to ATM’s monthly Blues Night, on the last Saturday night of each month.
Is there room for success for a new jazz club here? Seattle’s long-established Jazz Alley books the big names, and charges big prices to hear them. The famously well-funded Experience Music Project also draws crowds to high-profile jazz events. Even the Seattle Art Museum regularly gets into the act.
Pulling audiences from Downtown or the Central District or Capitol Hill south to Georgetown has never been easy, but with its large parking lot, historic space, and unusual hours, Doron Raphaely’s dream club just may be able to do it. The reasonable cover charge doesn’t hurt either: it’s just $6, or $10 for Blues Night. The scrawny crowds in the early weeks of ATM may have been partly due to the original cover of 25 bucks.
It’s a beautiful building: a second-floor balcony looks down on a casual arrangement of café chairs and tables within handshake range of the stage. The 20-foot vaulted ceiling, immense arched windows, and finely finished woods all contribute to the acoustics of the room, which on a crowded night can hold over 200 people.
Raphaely hopes that, in addition to the bands he’s booked for every weekend, he’ll attract private parties, meetings or even recording sessions to rent out this unique venue otherwise known as the Georgetown Music Hall.
For more information on About the Music, located at 6010 Airport Way South, in Seattle, visit their Web site at www.aboutthemusic.net, or call the club at 206-762-5518.