Five Spot Jazz Club

—5 Cooper Sq. —

The Hippest Place on Earth
Five Spot Jazz Club
5 Cooper Sq.
You are standing at the former site of the Five Spot Café, which in the 1950s and '60s was owned and operated by brothers Joe and Iggy Termini, who brought in the era's most progressive jazz artists, including Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Randy Weston and John Coltrane.
Some of Billie Holiday's last performances took place here. Because the authorities had seized her cabaret card, the engagements could not be publicized, but the club filled up by word of mouth alone.
In 1959, saxophonist Ornette Coleman's Five Spot debut introduced free improvisation to mainstream jazz discourse. Although composer Leonard Bernstein visited one night and loudly declared it "the greatest thing that has ever happened in jazz," Colman's music remains controversial to this day.
THE New York destination for bohemians and visiting intelligentsia, Five Spot regulars included painter Robert Rauschenberg, poets Ted Joans and Amiri Baraka, and novelists Jack Kerouac and James Baldwin. During the club's existence, whether as listeners or as performers, the most adventurous artists of the time came through the Five Spot's doors.
In 1963, the club moved to Two St. Mark's Place and Cooper Square, where it lasted until the early 1970's.
- David Neil Lee, author, The Battle of the Five Spot

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