Arts / Music
‘World-class’ venue will be jazz man’s gift to Brunswick
Michael Tortoni intends for new music club to be his legacy
Andra Jackson
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A purpose-built world-class concert and recording venue will soon enhance Brunswick’s reputation as a music Mecca.
Work is close to completion on the state-of-the-art venue that is the being built by Michael Tortoni who already owns Brunswick’s The JazzLab.
It will be the fourth jazz room he has built and he envisages it as his legacy. Tortoni hopes to have big name international acts such as American pianist Robert Glasper and band or bassist Esperanza Spalding performing.
The new club is to be named Bennetts Lane Jazz Club, drawing on the reputation of Tortoni’s original and smaller venue in the Melbourne CBD that was nominated “the world’s best jazz club’’ by Lonely Planet.
It is situated next door to The JazzLab which was opened in Leslie Street in 2017 after Tortoni sold Bennetts Lane to a developer. With a run of 23 years behind it, Bennetts Lane had garnered a somewhat iconic stature.
Tortoni is a bass player who has played on stages around the world as a member of the ’70s and ’80s hard rock group Taste, who began rehearsing in Brunswick West. He also plays in a jazz trio and is the artistic director of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.
But on the hot weekday afternoon when Brunswick Voice first visited the site, it was a different Tortoni who emerged from behind the cyclone fencing that cordons of the construction site of his new venue to to show off how far work has progressed.
He was wearing long shorts and work boots and a smattering of dust had settled on his hair. This is Tortoni the builder.
He proudly points out that he is the builder on this project as he has been three times before on his previous ventures – the original Bennetts Lane, its second room The JazzLab and then Brunswick-based The JazzLab – all his vision and build.
Truth be told, it still looks like a construction site, but the bones of the new venue are clearly visible.
The room where tradesmen are at work is cavernous. It is former warehouse spread over two titles that fell into neglect. Tortoni bought it with expansion in mind.
It fronts Victoria Street around the corner from The JazzLab in Leslie street. Tortoni explains its doorway will be from the courtyard that sits alongside The JazzLab entrance.
Patrons will be greeted with the words “Tortoni since 1992” which he etched into wet concrete at the building’s threshold in recognition of when he opened the original Bennetts Lane.
It will have a separate box office and its entrance will have an airlock to enhance acoustics.
Tortoni took over the premises last October and spent a month on the scrapping and demolition work. Inside the room with its half-finished flooring, a wide raised stage is complete. It is 10 metres by five metres.
A special feature are cement boxes built into its side that have a hollow centre to thread through cables and leads to specific areas of the stage. This avoids the tangles of leads that can be easily to trip over.
The JazzLab stage next door was too small to allow for this in-built feature. ABC Jazz will be able to wire in for recordings, Tortoni says.
To the right-hand side of the stage is a tech room. The set-up will allow for the expansion of the streaming and recording subscription service Oh! Jazz that offers live recordings from jazz clubs around the world including The JazzLab.
Above the tech room will be a mezzanine level with a second green room for performers. On this side of the room there will be what Tortoni likes to call `bleachers’, tiered benches that provide an unimpeded view of the stage and a feature of his other clubs.
Below the bleachers will be the control room which will double as what Tortoni describes as a world-class recording studio for both live and studio recordings.
There will be tables and chairs in the middle of the room. Along the other side will be a bar, toilets (unisex and urinals), a storeroom, and another green room by the stage. He has been buying up chrome fittings and already has acquired a bar length fridge bought from a failed restaurant. The décor will be midnight blue velvet curtains and dark stained timber furnishings.
Tortoni estimates the room’s capacity to be 300 patrons, double that of The JazzLab. Its size provides flexibility allowing for it to be divided into two rooms with a curtain run across the middle of the room for smaller concerts, he says.
The back section could be used as a holding area for patrons waiting for admittance inside instead of having to queue outside, he explains. Or another option is to have two acts in the different sections of the room playing at the same time, he said. For the international jazz acts and for the Melbourne International Jazz Festival the full room would be used.
Tortoni says he didn’t set out to establish another jazz club because of demand but more because he had a vision. He conceives the venue as “my lifetime’s work”. What he hopes it will capture with its performing and recording duality are those great music moments in a live performance that are different to a performance for a studio recording – “the astral travelling moments, that comes in a language that can only be spoken in those moments”.
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The venue is also intended as Tortoni’s legacy to his children as well as an asset to the community.
“If my children want to do it, they could spend their careers, here,” he says.
His daughter Chiara is 15 and sometimes helps out on the door and has said she would be happy to follow in her father’s footsteps. “She says she loves the vibe.”
Son Harry, 17, is more interested in tennis at the moment but is keeping an eye on what is father is up to. Without their support and that of his wife Santina, Tortoni says he wouldn’t be able to keep up the seven days a week work regime.
The cost of the project? “I’m improvising on that,” he says like a true jazzman.
For months, Tortoni has been working around the clock on the site, still heading home to get washed and changed to present local and international acts each night at The JazzLab.
All going to schedule, the new venue will be open in mid-September, just in time to host some shows for this year’s Melbourne International Jazz Festival.
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