Joe Lester usually brings dates with him to the VFW, but on this June night he's ordering drinks for one. With his hair slicked back and salted with gray, his Hawaiian shirt, white shorts and loafers, Lester looks like he should be sailing or strolling a time-share beach. Instead, he's perched at the bar, one foot crossed over the other, wagging to the music.
Susan Jordan
Lady J belts it out on a recent Sunday night at Virgil Bell.
Susan Jordan
Irvin Tate and Carolyn Clark welcome the crowd inside the Virgil Bell VFW Post 1710 like it's their living room.
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Clearly, he's enjoying himself tonight, just like every Sunday here, he says. Since January, he adds, when a musician at the Rhythm Room told him about the VFW, each jazz night has been better than the last.
"This is unique, very unique," Lester says, comparing the VFW to jazz clubs in Chicago, where the 61-year-old man was a firefighter before he retired and moved to Scottsdale. But with fewer jam session sit-ins and a growing frequency of Marvin Gaye tunes, blues songs and other musical departures from traditional swing and bebop coming from the house's alternating groups, the VFW has lost some of the hard-core jazz flavor that drew Lester there in the first place.
And yet, for him, it's still a "real jazz club," complete with an intimate, nothing fancy crowd, home-style soul food and, of course, black music. And there's an added bonus after the night's over. "When I go home, my clothes smell of cooking oil and smoke," he says.
Jason Wilson, meanwhile, the ASU student who stumbled onto the scene and then clued in a small group of other college invaders, appears nervous when he realizes that a newspaper story on Virgil Bell is imminent. Like an explorer who has discovered an unspoiled paradise, he dreads what will happen if word about the VFW gets out.
"I don't want it to be a club kind of thing where you just get a bunch of people, trendy people, down there thinking that, Oh, this is cool, the jazz and the blues, man. Let's go hang out,'" he says. "That would piss me off."
But word already seems to be getting out. A month ago, the VFW was packed with one of its largest crowds ever, many of them newcomers to the scene.
Wilson says the room was filled with an energy he hasn't experienced since Dave Cook left. "There weren't very many people doing much of anything in the beginning, like the first half-hour or 45 minutes," he says. "But I tell you what, man, around eight o'clock, I don't know what happened, but [the band] must have realized that we need to start playing our music.'" And that's when the crowd got into it, he says. "You had people dancing, you had people clapping their hands, and they were doing the old classic yelling thing . . . someone would solo and everyone would be like, Yeah! Woo!'"
Last summer, Wilson says, the audience responded in much the same way to the improvisations coming from Dave Cook's trio and his many guest musicians, filling the dance floor, egging on the soloists and clapping along. But after Cook left, it just wasn't the same, Wilson complains.
"That's how it was every Sunday night -- the energy, I mean." But now, he says, that feeling is back. "It was like someone took a soda pop can and shook it 'til it exploded."
Most of the night, the dance floor was packed with people moving to a mix of blues, Motown and soul.
It wasn't old-school jazz, but few seemed to care. Having survived its rancorous shakeup, Virgil Bell seems to be hopping.
