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- 5C Café
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68 Avenue C, 212-477-5993
5ccc.comJazz-heads’ favorite haunts help determine their conception of the city grid. Uptown? Smoke. Downtown? Detour. It’s unlikely that even the most dedicated fans, though, have this remote spot plotted on their mental maps. Situated on a run-down block in Alphabet City, 5C looks more like the health-food eatery it doubles as (blenders and fresh vegetables line the windows) than like a jazz club. In fact, it brings in a number of avant-jazz’s hottest players, including Charles Gayle, Matthew Shipp, and Charles Eubanks. And in keeping with 5C’s very Loisada locale, cover is kept low (never more than eight bucks). Best of all, 5C is a potent reminder of Avenue C’s past at a time when many of its more homespun businesses are giving way to overpriced bars. Well worth amending one’s internal gazetteer for.
Best Cheap Jazz
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PrintFrom the 2004 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine
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Our mission this year: to hunt down not just the best but the best values in the eating, shopping, drinking, and general-consuming universe of New York. It’s quite the process, this, requiring eating and shopping and drinking (all in the name of research), followed by heated but civil discussion, and heated but less-civil discussion, until a winner emerges in each category.
