Hundreds of musicians — from jazz greats to students of jazz — have played at the Estate on the east side of Milwaukee.
In its nearly 50-year existence, it has switched hands and has closed and reopened several times. But current owner John Dye announced in May that he was going to shutter the venue with no immediate new owner in sight. He said the cause was cost. After the pandemic, he says the Estate worked hard to adapt, but “the math caught up with us.”
Here are some recollections of people who have played or worked at the Estate over the years.
A special place
“It's always been a classic jazz club,” says pianist Mark Davis, who is also founder and artistic director of the Milwaukee Jazz Institute. “Dark — not a lot of windows, right? Just a few windows in the entranceway area.”
READ: Interested in learning jazz? The Milwaukee Jazz Institute has you covered
“So when you walk in, the bar is very, very small,” describes Steph Lippert, a pianist, trombonist and vocalist who runs the Steph Lippert Project. She used to be an employee of the Estate for a number of years. “I had the honor of running [the sound board]. I also worked the door there.”
She also occasionally cocktail waitressed, performed there and DJed there. “They've got these beautiful vintage pictures on the walls, vintage tin types of current jazz Milwaukeeans,” she describes.
For beginners and seasoned players alike
“I first went to the Estate or started playing there when I was very young, about 16 years old in the mid-80s,” notes Davis. “And that's when Sal Monreal owned the place, and he was also playing drums there.”
He says those are great memories. “Just of getting that experience to play in a real jazz club, and back then all the jazz musicians would come in after their gigs and it was definitely a real meeting place for musicians,” he says.
Jazz trumpeter Eric Jacobson had a similar experience. “It was school for me,” he says of the Estate. “That was the place that I first went to a jam session when I was in – I think I was in high school. And when I got into college, I kept going and it was, yeah, a place for me to learn how to be on stage and play and be frightened,” he laughs.
Jacobson and Davis have given countless groups of jazz students their first crack at performing in a jazz club, as combos from the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music and the Milwaukee Jazz Institute took the stage there.
And the vibes were real. “On a packed night, you know, when it was wall-to-wall, there would be those magical, those really special magical moments,” says Lippert. “There'd be moments where everybody's hanging on one breath … those concerts where nobody's talking, really hanging on every note.” She says, at the same time, when the bar was not as crowded, that could also lead to a very special musical intimacy.
Nationally renowned and uniquely Milwaukee
Local musicians rubbed elbows with national ones, who also took students under their wings.
“One of my heroes is Tom Harrell,” says Jacobson. “And when I was booking at the Jazz Estate, I was able to get Tom Harrell to come to the Jazz Estate and play. And I'll just never forget, I picked him up in Chicago, and he asked if I wanted to play that night. And I was like, ‘Yes!’ And so I got to play some of my favorite standards. One of them is ‘Invitation.’ And that memory is just gonna be with me forever because he's a hero of mine and getting to play with him was pretty amazing.”
“Sometimes people have just come in to sit in,” says Davis. “I was playing there in the really early '90s when Liza Minnelli came in. We were playing a gig. I was with a saxophone player who worked with her, so she came in, she didn't sing but she did spend the evening there. I remember a night playing there when a guy said, ‘Hey, my name's Harry, can I sit in?’ It was Harry Connick Jr. So, it's always been a place that people have known about and there have been really great notable players who have performed there like Cedar Walton — one of my jazz piano heroes, Joe Henderson — one of the all-time great saxophonists.”
“So many of us can say that that was one of our favorite spots to hang out,” concludes Lippert. “We know people who have had first dates there. If they hadn't gone to the Estate on a date, maybe they wouldn't be married, kind of thing. So many different friendships came of the Estate. There are people who got their start there many, many years ago that are still playing music today in the city, and I think that's special. I mean, there's not a lot of music venues that have that long-lasting connection to the community that the Estate has had.”
