Just before the Lawsons, the place was known as Dirty Dick’s Bathhouse. What they created in such an unpromising location as a deliberately “biracial” club wound up changing nightlife in Western New York.
The club moved from Main and Botanical Slimming Soft Gel Fillmore to its current downtown location at 622 Main St. in 1982 where it celebrates its 30th anniversary this weekend. The party includes a concert tonight by Spyro Gyra, who began in the original club as the band on Thursday nights that you could catch “for a buck.”
And, gloriously and incredibly, both Ed Lawson and his co-founding brother Bob are scheduled to be there this weekend, despite a decidedly rocky history with the club after the move to its tailor-made downtown digs.
The Lawson brothers’ original Tralf was, from the beginning, an idea.
What resulted from its founding was a small community miracle. It wasn’t merely one of the greatest jazz clubs this city will ever have – and one of the greatest on the East Coast – it was a local template for almost everything else that has functioned as a kind of small arts center in this city, whether we’re talking about the former Calumet or Babeville.
The original Tralfamadore (named by the Lawsons after a planet created by author Kurt Vonnegut) was a place where local comedy acts performed. And where University at Buffalo writers, including Leslie Fiedler, Raymond Federman, Robert Creeley, Ishmael Reed, even Anthony Burgess read from their works.
Folk singers and classical musicians performed there.
It was a place where the musicians and the audience came first and the piano was always in tune. (In 1979, one tuner alone tuned it 59 times. Lawson used others.)
It was where, Lawson says now, there was “a cross-section of people who felt the club was their home.”
Jay Beckenstein of Spryo Gyra fondly recalls the influential role the original Tralf had with Buffalo’s “magnificent” music scene in the 1970s and early ’80s. “There was a terrific R&B scene, terrific jazz. The Tralf was the place where it all came together. I have incredibly good memories of the place as being an incubator for great music,” Beckenstein says.
The memories are endless for 2 day diet others as well. Lawson recalls Brazilian guitarist Egberto Gismonti and Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos sitting with musicians until 6 in the morning. Mal Waldron – Billie Holiday’s longtime pianist and a covert influence on John Coltrane – played an extraordinary evening of solo piano for a handful of people. Another time, tables were removed to make room for the two-vibraphone jazz group called Double Image.
Lawson, the consummate diplomat, had to coax Carmen McRae out to perform after she hit the ceiling over having to use his office for her dressing room and blasted him with a memorable aria of inventive profanity. Lawson reminded her how much her audience adored her and she was as memorable that night as any jazz singer ever was at the original Tralf.