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During an over three-decade run, this birthplace of bebop played host to Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Parker, to name a scant few. After it closed in the early seventies, Robert De Niro and Drew Nieporent conspired to reopen it. (No go.) Cut to May 2006. Nearly as many years have passed as the club had spent open when new owner Earl Spain slaps on a fresh coat of burnt-orange paint, nails up a poster of one-time house pianist Thelonious Monk, and re-electrifies the original neon sign. His actions have drawn in an international crowd of discerning listeners who sit at mahogany-colored tables while that night’s house band regales them with three consecutive sets. As to the mural over the stage in which a sultry woman and a bottle of port go ignored in the face of a jam session, time will tell whether or not that music-first attitude prevails at the reinstituted (and once historic) Monday night free-forms. — Lucy Cohen

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