For all the jazz-related hype and buzz Denton gets, the off-campus opportunities to listen to up-and-coming jazz musicians are as irregular, fluctuating and intermittent as the music itself—with one exception. Sure, the Denton Arts & Jazz Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, and the city is home to the first-of-its-kind Division of Jazz Studies at University of North Texas' College of Music and the Grammy-nominated One O'Clock Lab Band, but for now, the Greenhouse Restaurant & Bar is the only area club, venue or, well, restaurant that regularly features live jazz.
Every Monday and Thursday from 10 p.m. to midnight, local musicians pile into the front corner of the restaurant's bar. Playing unpaid, the restaurant offers bands a modest bar/food tab. But bands say they enjoy the respite from playing the same half-dozen jazz standards they'd be asked, or expected, to play at a paying gig in D-FW.
And, you can hear those bands while bathed in a jazz-appropriate haze of cigarette smoke in the Greenhouse's dimly lit barroom, which, admittedly, does feel a bit like an indie-Bennigan's. But, the restaurant serves great food, offers cheap drinks and there's no cover—a business-plan trifecta that's made jazz nights far from a well-kept secret. If you arrive late, the Greenhouse's parking lot will be full and seating will be sparse, but, naturally, the nights haven't always attracted large crowds.
"Early on, the audiences were typically outnumbered by members of the bands," Danny Fulgencio says.
The Greenhouse's owner Ken Currin credits (former bartender) Fulgencio, with the idea for a jazz night.
"At the time we started, there was no place off-campus for students to play jazz," Currin says. "We started having them play Monday nights, and that went well, so they asked for another night, and now, well, we've been doing this for eight years."
Greenhouse employee Anthony Pierce inherited the job of booking bands last year. A former KNTU program director and jazz student, Pierce knows plenty about jazz: "I've lived in Denton since '98, and I know it's a jazz town, with a jazz school, but before the Greenhouse, there wasn't anywhere else to hear it."
At least nowhere in the recent past. The Burning Bush, a Fry Street-area coffee shop used to feature live jazz—but that was in the '60s. Since then, places that occasionally hosted jazz shows, like Benny's, The Library and Rick's Place, have come and gone—sorta like the announced January open date for Cold Fusion Lounge, which came and went with no opening. The venue sits silent. So, eight years later, Greenhouse is still the only off-campus, after-hours Denton destination for jazz.
