Club Legato Puts Santa Fe on the Jazz Map

Alex Murzyn's Band Lifts the Roof on Thursday Nites

I’ve mentioned “Club Legato” several times in previous posts. It’s Santa Fe’s most swingin’ and notable jazz club inside the historic Casa Sena courtyard on East Palace Avenue, just across from the golden-lit St. Francis Cathedral. The room is sophisticatedly and Southwesternly bedecked in crystal chandeliers and old wooden, Spanish ceiling vigas, architecturally unique to adobe-styled Santa Fe, and on Thursday nights, in particular, with saxophone titan, Alex Murzyn, at the helm of his own seasoned quartet or quintet, the music compares favorably to any jazz club in New Yawk. Believe me, I should know. I’ve seen Trane and Monk at the Village Vanguard, Herbie Mann and Cannonball Adderley at the Half Note, and Charlie Mingus and Lee Morgan at Slug’s in the Far East in 1967, where I got trapped on a bar stool next to Miles Davis, Prince of Darkness, for the highlight of my young jazz life.

The beautifully appointed room which is now Club Legato, with its uniquely-rich, fabulous jazz portraits gracing its walls of Miles, Max Roach, Wynton Marsalis, Dizzy Gillespie, Wayne Shorter, and other jazz legends by photographer, William Coupon, wasn’t always a jazz club at all. In fact, as recently as March 2020, when the room shut down due to Covid, it was called “La Casa Sena Cantina”, and from 1995 to 2020, it presented entirely Broadway show fare from classics like “Oklahoma” and “South Pacific” by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and “My Fair Lady” by Alan Jay Lerner. I know this because Robert (Bob) Fox, the Berklee School of Music-trained pianist, and the current tickler of the ivories for Alex Murzyn’s glorious Thursday night band, told me so. Also because it was he, Bob Fox, who sat at the solo piano and accompanied those Broadway-style singers, for those same twenty-five years.

As I also mentioned in an earlier post, Casa Sena and its old adobe and brick courtyard of modern-day shops is one of the oldest buildings in Santa Fe. Originally built by Major José D. Sena for his blushing bride, Doña Isabel Cabeza de Baca, in 1831, at which time Santa Fe belonged to Mexico, the building is typical of the old Spanish homes of this period, rectangular with a court, or garden, in the middle. The house organically just grew with the family: as the children started new families, more rooms were built (eventually thirty-three in all!), and now those same family bedrooms are tobacco and wine shops, men’s booteries, and Southwest boutiques of all kinds.

Today Casa Sena is owned by prominent Santa Fe and New York art gallery owner, Gerald Peters, and according to Bob Fox, it was Peters, himself, who was responsible for “the rebranding of the room as a jazz club”. Club Legato opened in October 2021 with staple, Bob Fox, at solo piano, soon adding a bass player to create a duo, then drummer, John Trentacosta, to make a trio, then Alex Murzyn on sax to form a quartet by January 2022. The fine-dining restaurant, “Casa Sena” opened in 1983, and one of the best things about “Legato” is that although it has its own bar (and the bartender on Thursday nights pours one hellova stiff drink), the food comes straight from the delicious Casa Sena kitchen itself. (Try the “truffle fries”.)

Back to the music. The jazz, daddios! And mommios!

Alex Murzyn is a modest man. But not while he’s whalin’ on his horn on Thursday nights. Bob Fox says “all the great ones are”. I don’t know about that, but between each set, Alex lays his sax down on the nearest empty polished wood table (if there is an empty one), and he goes around to each table and thanks each patron for coming to see him and the band. Of course, Club Legato is small and intimate enough to do that, but I sort of doubt that Miles, Trane, or Sonny Rollins would do the same.

Blowing in San Francisco for thirty years before moving to Santa Fe in 2018 to be closer to his daughter, Murzyn’s eclectic style covers everything from traditional to contemporary jazz, soul, rock, funk, and Latin. As a sideman, he’s played with The Stan Kenton Legacy Orchestra, Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, Bobby Hutcherson, Arturo Sandoval, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Williams, and even Sammy Davis Jr. At Legato, he never chooses a set “playlist” before showing up on Thursday nights, He says,

I don’t like to have any preconceived ideas. I’d rather read the room. See its size. Whether it’s small and quiet. Or it’s maybe boisterous and loud? I pick something from the music stack on Bob’s piano that we’ve already rehearsed that I feel is right for the moment.

His jazz standards include “Tenderly”, “Body and Soul”, “Love for Sale”, “Have You Met Miss Jones”, “In Your Own Sweet Way” by Dave Brubeck and “Soul Eyes” by Mal Waldron. He also loves the Brazilian rhythms of “Rio Amazonas” and Jobim’s “Favela”. One of my personal favorites is the band’s version of Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You”, which you can immediately recognize by Bob Fox’s bluesy intro, perfectly capturing “Brother Ray’s” heart-breaking tickling of the 88s, followed by Murzyn’s crushing improvisation at the center of the ballad, and finally again with Fox’s rococo blues outro on the soulful keyboard.

How do you literarily describe the sound and nature of brilliant jazz improvisation? Obviously, you don’t. That’s why you go out to hear jazz - live. Or for a far lesser and second choice, you listen to it - recorded. But when you’re in the presence of a jazz titan blowing his horn, or ok, another titan, soaring on his own “axe”, his own instrument, Oscar Peterson, McCoy Tyner on piano, Miles/Dizzy/Bird on trumpet, your choice… you’re “lifted” by their music. Their music “transcends” time and space, the seat you’re sitting in, the life you’re leading, your troubles and woes; their music, the moment they find, the moment/the sound they reach “takes you beyond”. It spirals up, reaches, merges with, and “becomes one with the cosmos”.

They say that John Coltrane’s music was “spiritual”. His album, “A Love Supreme” was reaching for, reaching beyond… for that “transcendent” moment, and maybe… quite possibly… the recording of the album on December 9, 1964, actually did reach that transcendent/religious moment that was so recognized by other musicians, that the music has almost never been “covered” since. Perhaps on that day, Trane, really did, “reach God”.

Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, other far-reaching jazz musicians throughout the genre’s brief, just more than a century, American history, have similarly reached for, and perhaps transcended, the moments they’ve played, sang, and recorded. Louis Armstrong, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, the aforementioned Miles, Dizzy, Bird, today’s giants and innovators, and so many more.

But then, there are the local jazz titans, the ones you have never, and will never, heard of. The ones who weren’t well-recorded, the ones who didn’t make the jazz history books, the vinyl recordings, tapes, CDs or DVDs.

In LA, there’s Azar Lawrence. He’s still blowing. I call him a Trane protege. A big round giant of a man, I presented him once at a downtown jazz club in Chinatown called the Grand Star Jazz Club. Azar is well-known, if only in Los Angeles, for playing in South Central at the World Stage in Leimert Park, but on this night he showed up in a little green Corvair with just 2 bandmates, and I swear, Azar was already blowing his horn in the back seat. Somehow, we got the band set up, but I also can testify that Azar never stopped blowing his horn for a single moment the entire night. Not in between sets, not while he was out in the alley behind the club, and for all I know, not even on the way home with the check in his pocket, all the way back to Leimert Park in South Central. To me, Azar was living in transcendence. And the sound that came out of his horn was living proof. A gift to all of us in its presence.

And while Alex Murzyn is quite the “ordinary” fellow while he’s not blowing his axe on Thursday nights, what can I say? For at least this one irreverent jazz buff in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that is, yours Trulesly, I get the same spiral, uplifting effect of transcendence whenever “The Murz’” is blowing his horn and improvising on Thursday nights at Club Legato. I know for sure - because I notice that - the roof is at least - twelve inches higher than when I came in!

Other members of the Alex Murzyn Quintet are:

Robert Fox on piano, as mentioned and pictured, above.

John Trentacosta, on drums, a native New Yorker, founder of the jazz quintet Straight Up, who brought his collective big band and small group experience to New Mexico in 1992.

Keenan McDonald, on vibraphones, born and raised in Santa Fe, who studies jazz performance at Lawrence University Conservatory of Music with pianist Bill Carrothers.

And Cyrus Campbell, on bass.

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Club Legato is open for jazz on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights as well.

Wed: The Robert Fox trio hosts an instrumental Jazz Jam.

Fri/Sat: Robert Fox Trio.

All, including the Alex Murzyn Quartet (or Quintet) on Thursdays, from 6-9 pm.

And especially COOL, NO COVER!

Black and white PHOTOS of the Alex Murzyn Quintet, above, by M. Scott Reid. Many thanks.

And a SHOUT OUT to jazz aficionado, audiophile, and great Santa Fe friend, Brett Hussey, for introducing me to Club Legato in early Fall, 2022.

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