The Deluxe Brings Jazz Back to San Francisco’s Haight Street

As Jay Bordeleau tells the story, the resurrection of Club Deluxe was more than kismet. It was an act of will by the jazz scene itself that paved the way to the venue’s official reopening Thursday, June 18, rechristened as The Deluxe.

For more than three decades, the Haight-Ashbury club thrived as one of the city’s most welcoming jazz spots. It provided regular gigs for a disparate roster of hot-club and jump-blues bands, hard-bop outfits, swing combos and sultry singers. A messy public dispute between the landlord and Deluxe proprietor Sarah Wilde eventually led to its closure in April 2023, a loss that many musicians refused to accept.

Within months, persistent efforts by Deluxe regulars connected Bordeleau, who owns the Hayes Valley jazz supper club Mr. Tipple’s, with Christian Beaulieu, a musician and Deluxe bartender who was one of the venue’s presiding spirits during its last incarnation. After several musicians implored him to meet with Beaulieu, Bordeleau relented.

“OK, jeez, I guess I’ve got to have coffee with this guy,” he said. “These were all musicians I trusted to take care of me, so it wasn’t so much a business referral as it felt like, this might be your soulmate.”

The first date went well, followed by further discussions and more lobbying by musicians. As so often happens in San Francisco, the path to reviving Deluxe was strewn with obstacles. The reopening date was pushed back several times as they refurbished the Art Deco interior, maintaining its intimate speakeasy vibe. Beaulieu ended up managing Mr. Tipple’s for about two years, a working courtship that confirmed they were ready to take the plunge together.

Many of the musicians who perform at Mr. Tipple’s will be in the Deluxe mix, but Beaulieu wants to make sure that the former Haight cast is also well represented. He hasn’t shed his identity as a musician known for his work in raucous bands like Triclops! (“I’m writing a book about my experiences, a self-help book for artists who have lost their way,” he said), but he found that Deluxe seemed to follow him wherever he went.

“I was bartending at a few different places and I couldn’t stop hearing about Deluxe,” Beaulieu said. “Half the time people who had no idea I’d worked there brought it up randomly. Every shift I worked someone would mention that place. We all felt a profound loss when it closed but I had no way to gauge how special it was until I was working around the city.”

For at least two generations of jazz musicians, coming of age in the Bay Area meant landing a gig at Deluxe. Multi-reed player Steven Lugerner, whose band JACKNIFE plays the club June 20, was the first musician to connect Bordeleau with Beaulieu. Growing up on the Peninsula, he’d made numerous forays into the Haight and ended up loitering near to door, listening to music pouring out of the club.

He started frequenting Deluxe on trips home while studying jazz in New York City, and when he moved back to the Bay Area it was one of the first places he looked for work.

“I sent an email to Sarah and she offered me the first Wednesday of every month,” he recalled. “I immediately pitched her on the JACKNIFE band,” which focuses on music by alto sax great Jackie McLean. It was a perch that helped Lugerner become a widely influential force who launched a popular weekly jam session at Stookey’s Blue Room and helps run the Stanford Jazz Workshop as director of educational and festival programming.

Vocalist Emily Day can’t remember exactly when she made the transition from ardent patron to Deluxe headliner, but she treasured both sides of the finely calibrated equation. “As a patron, there was something transformative when you’d enter the space,” she says. “You didn’t have to look up who was playing there. No matter the type of music, the crowd was all for it.”

Bordeleau and Beaulieu have maintained the essential geography that sparks the room’s center-of-the-action feel, which contains a side for engaged, interactive listening and a convivial bar-top environment for socializing. Emily Day and the Cosmo Alleycats started playing at Deluxe around 2018, filling in at first for Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers.

“When we finally did land a regular gig, third Fridays, it quickly became our favorite,” Day said. “Not to say we made a lot of money, but we’d turn away private performances for those gigs. As a performer, one of the greatest things was the blur between the band and audience. It felt like the most amazing house party and you’re all on the same team. You want everything about this night to be a success.”

Coming amid news that some of San Francisco’s beloved venues and dive bars are closing or up for sale, including the Make Out Room and the Latin American Club, the Deluxe revival is a welcome sign that that the city hasn’t lost all its swing.

“I would not be doing it if I was not confident in the scene,” Bordeleau said. “Intimate live music with a community audience is really special and valued, and people didn’t want to let it go.”

The Deluxe’s (1511 Haight St., San Francisco) soft opening takes place June 18 with a performance by string player and vocalist Mitch Polzak. On Friday, June 19, saxophonist James Mahone performs at 6 p.m., followed by drummer Miles Turk at 8 p.m.