The Club Saint-Germain was a jazz club located at 13 rue Saint-Benoît in the 6e arrondissement de Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

.

History

The club was opened in 1947 by Boris Vian

Boris Vian

Boris Vian was a French polymath: writer, poet, musician, singer, translator, critic, actor, inventor and engineer. He is best remembered today for his novels. Those published under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan were bizarre parodies of criminal fiction, highly controversial at the time of their...

. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s it staged central figures in the French jazz scene such as Barney Wilen

Barney Wilen

Barney Wilen was a French tenor and soprano saxophonist and jazz composer.Wilen was born in Nice; his father was an American dentist turned inventor, and his mother was French. He began performing in clubs in Nice after being encouraged by Blaise Cendrars who was a friend of his mother...

, René Urtreger

René Urtreger

-Biography:Urtreger was born in Paris and began his piano studies at the age of four, studying privately first, and then at the Conservatory. He studied with an orientation toward jazz, playing in a small Parisian club, the "Sully d' Auteil." Conducted by Hubert Damisch, the Sully boasted an...

, Django Reinhardt

Django Reinhardt

Django Reinhardt was a pioneering virtuoso jazz guitarist and composer who invented an entirely new style of jazz guitar technique that has since become a living musical tradition within French gypsy culture...

, and Pierre Michelot

Pierre Michelot

Pierre Michelot was a French bebop and hard bop double bass player.Born in Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis, Paris, Michelot studied piano from 1936 until 1938, but switched to playing bass at the age of sixteen...

. Many Americans on tour including Miles Davis

Miles Davis

Miles Dewey Davis III was an American jazz musician, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music, including bebop, cool jazz,...

, Art Blakey

Art Blakey

Arthur "Art" Blakey , known later as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, was an American Grammy Award-winning jazz drummer and bandleader. He was a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community....

, and Kenny Dorham

Kenny Dorham

McKinley Howard Dorham was an American jazz trumpeter, singer, and composer born in Fairfield, Texas. Dorham's talent is frequently lauded by critics and other musicians, but he never received the kind of attention from the jazz establishment that many of his peers did...

 also played the club. Along with the Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen, the Club Saint-Germain was a central institution in the movement of exiling American jazz musicians in the 1950s and 1960s. Expatriates such as Bud Powell

Bud Powell

Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell was an American Jazz pianist. Powell has been described as one of "the two most significant pianists of the style of modern jazz that came to be known as bop", the other being his friend and contemporary Thelonious Monk...

 and Kenny Clarke

Kenny Clarke

Kenny Clarke , born Kenneth Spearman Clarke, nicknamed "Klook" and later known as Liaqat Ali Salaam, was a jazz drummer and an early innovator of the bebop style of drumming...

were frequent performers with other French musicians.

The building of the defunct Club Saint-Germain is now home to the supper club Bilboquet.

Live Recordings

• Barney Wilen - Barney (RCA)
• Art Blakey - Art Blakey et les Jazz-Messengers au Club St. Germain, vol. 1-2 (RCA)
• Bobby Jaspar - Modern Jazz au Club Saint Germain (Barclay)