Satchmo Boy Jazz Club
Address: 34 Stamboliiski Blvd, Sofia
Tel: 088/ 827 74 09 [www.satchmoboy.com]
Working hours: Tues-Sat 6pm-2am
Cover charge: 5 leva

As a jazz singer, I am always keen to discover a jazz club where I can meet like-minded musicians, enjoy their music, and maybe even get to make a little music with them. Naturally, then, I was pretty excited when I first heard about Satchmo Boy; after all, anyone with the audacity to name a jazz club after the legendary trumpeter Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong would (one hopes) have high standards concerning the entertainment therein. I came, I saw, and I was not disappointed.

Satchmo Boy, located in the centre of Sofia on Stamboliiski Boulevard, is easy to find – it’s about half a block from a American-style fried chicken fast-food location (whose big, recognisable red-and-white logo makes it an excellent landmark). It’s not always easy to find an unfamiliar address after dark; fortunately, the large, white, illuminated sign with the picture of Armstrong blowing his horn above the entrance makes Satchmo Boy hard to miss. After paying a 5-leva entrance fee, you cautiously descend a dark, rustic staircase – the sort that usually leads to a creepy basement. At the bottom, you’re faced with a rabbit-warren of chambers, nooks and alcoves, with no-nonsense wooden tables and chairs.

Soon your wanderings lead you to a tiny yellow room with a wooden floor, an old upright piano, and the homey aura of a neighbourhood band-practice space. Sitting in here at a table or jockeying for a place to stand near the wall puts you shoulder-to-shoulder with your fellow patrons and a mere arm’s length from the performers. It feels as though you’re part of a jam session at a private party in some friend’s basement.

The crowd is jovial and into the music, but if the idea of rubbing elbows with strangers – or getting too up-close-and-personal with musicians – gives you claustrophobic twinges, you can still view the action from certain places in the adjoining rooms. In one case, you can even look through a wall, courtesy of a strategically placed hole.

The beverage list, which is neither expensive nor extensive, features wine, whisky, vodka, gin, rakiya and beer, as well as the usual non-alcoholic options of soda, juice and water. The food menu has low-priced salads, meat items, cheeses, fried potatoes and other munchables. The staff is friendly and prompt with the drink orders, and many of them speak English.

I have yet to sample the food, but it seems that Satchmo Boy is really about the music anyway. And the customers definitely come for the music (which usually starts at 10pm, except on Sundays, when it starts at 9pm). The hard walls, lack of carpeting, and small room size provide such great acoustics that amplification, if used at all, is kept fairly low (a pleasure for those of us who still have most of our hearing). Unless an instrument (such as an electric guitar or a voice) specifically calls for it, there’s no need to plug anything into an amp here.

My first visit to Satchmo was to catch a performance by a trio consisting of piano, double-bass and drums, all “unplugged”.

The place was packed, but the band was well-balanced and perfectly audible – proof that if the music is good, people will quiet down (just as they did in the old days) to listen to it. And the performers on Satchmo’s calendar – Vasko Parmakov, Arabel Karajan, Rosen Zahariev, Georgi Donchev and the band Swing Regime, to name a few – are musically intelligent enough to understand that “loud” is not a synonym for “good”.

Satchmo Boy isn’t just a good place to hear jazz that’s much more than worth the price of admission – it’s also a place for Bulgarian-speakers to learn about jazz. Every Friday night at eight, jazz aficionado professor Stoyan Atanasov gives lectures on the history of this unique musical genre. His subjects include the blues, swing style and some of the famous musicians who have helped define and develop jazz, such as Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and (of course) Louis Armstrong. The complete schedule is listed on the club’s website.

Satchmo Boy is a fairly recent arrival; up until about a year ago, this labyrinthine basement space was occupied by an American-owned, American-themed restaurant/club called Stateside that was popular with expats. Major changes in the music, the menu and the interior decor have transformed it into a unpretentiously cool little jazz establishment that has been striking a responsive chord with a good cross-section of Sofia’s residents and visitors alike.