Dave Roberts
March 2001

Part 1
Part 2

"That’s what’s important, not only for Yoshi’s but for every presenting organization in the country. And we consider ourselves a presenting organization that has sushi, that makes Japanese food. And I think that’s what’s important, that’s what the future holds, is that people have to take more of an active interest in local music and in supporting their local venues, regardless of the genre. You have to not only buy CDs but you have to go out and support the music."

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2 0 0 1 Fred Hersch Randall Kline Marshall Lamm Bobo Stenson Soul Sauce March Calendar March CD Reviews 2 0 0 0 Eddie Marshall The Hot Club Joshua Redman June 2000 February 2000

By Dave Roberts

For many years Yoshi’s has been a jazz oasis in the Bay Area. While one club after another closed in San Francisco, a club across the Bay continued bringing in many of the greatest artists for week-long stays.

Marshall Lamm has been Yoshi’s PR man for the past four years. Just 29, he’s already had a remarkable career as a publicist first at Verve Records, then at GRP Records, after which he started his own label, putting out nine records, including The Latin Side of John Coltrane.

In the following interview he, of course, waxes poetic about all that Yoshi’s offers, but he also has interesting things to say concerning the fees paid today’s leading jazz artists, the precarious nature of the jazz club business, the need to nurture today’s up-and-coming artists to become the legends of tomorrow, and the necessity for folks to attend live jazz performances in order for the music to survive.

AAJ: Tell me about Yoshi’s. How long has it been around?

ML: Yoshi’s has been around for 27 years. It’s owned by three Japanese folks. They started in north Berkeley 27 years ago as a small, little Sushi bar that organically grew into presenting a piano player or an acoustic guitar player. And then when time went by they started having national acts. At the Claremont location in Oakland they for 15, 16 years put on national and international artists. Four years ago we moved to downtown Oakland here in Jack London Square in the Port of Oakland area.

It’s amazing to me as someone who’s a jazz fan to see how consistently busy it is. And the types of people, the complete scope of the demographics. Our matinee programs that we have here on Sunday afternoons, we get 5-year-olds to 95-year-olds, every color, race, religion, everything. Everybody comes. It’s an amazing phenomenon.

When people talk about the industry hurting, or there being some negative aspects to it – the whole Ken Burns thing – I haven’t seen any decrease in the attendance, decrease in the amount of people that come to shows at all. I see it increasing, and it has been over the last year.

AAJ: That’s great.

ML: I think it has a lot to do with the fact that Yoshi’s is one-stop shopping, it’s like an entertainment complex in one. We have a “Top 100 Bay Area” restaurant, we have a great bar, and then we have one of the best jazz clubs in the world – all in one place. And you can park upstairs. So you don’t have to go to three different places – you can just come to one place. And I think that has a lot to do with it.

I think it also has a lot to do with the fact that we’ve marketed Yoshi’s in a way, not as a kind of high-phalutin jazz club, but as one where it’s a great introduction to the music. It’s a very easy way to get involved with jazz and Japanese food and those sorts of things. So, we’re very fortunate.

AAJ: Who is Yoshi?

ML: She is a Japanese woman, Yoshi Akiba. And she’s a dancer and a Buddhist priestess. And she and Kazuo Kajimura, and Hiroyuki Hori have owned Yoshi’s for 27 years. If you come down on a Friday night or a Saturday night, you’ll see her at the hostess stand – she’ll seat you. And then you might see her dancing around. When the music’s going on she’ll go in there and dance. She hangs out.

AAJ: How many seats do you have? How much was this place to build? Did they buy it?

ML: No, they’re a tenant of the Port of Oakland. The city of Oakland and Port of Oakland allowed Yoshi’s to build this place six years ago. And then two years later we moved in.

First of all, I think what needs to be stated about Yoshi’s is that we’re one of a kind. It’s not a concept restaurant really. There’s no place I’ve ever heard of where you can have top Japanese food and McCoy Tyner in one. It’s a pretty amazing hybrid location.

The Yoshi’s Jazz House is a start-of-the-art room that was designed by Meyer Sound. And it’s acoustically and sonically perfect pretty much. We do two sets a night every night of the year except Sunday when we do a 2 o’clock in the afternoon and an 8 o’clock show. We seat 320 people. It’s a start-of-the-art room, the lighting, sound system.

And it’s also a room within a room. You can see the railroad tracks [just outside Yoshi’s front door]. You have trains going by, freight trains, Amtrak trains. The walls are insulated to keep the sound of the trains out from inside the room. And it works perfectly.

AAJ: How much did it cost?

ML: $6 million is what the whole deal was.

AAJ: How have you guys been able to do it? In this crazy jazz world, you guys have been about it in the Bay Area in terms of name artists in a club environment. How do you do it?

ML: If you’ve got the money you can have these guys come play at your house pretty much. That’s one way to look at it. I think the other way, more importantly, to look at it is that the artists have been treated so well by the people at Yoshi’s, the staff, over the years, that it’s not a hard sell. It’s like, “Hey, come play at Yoshi’s.” And nine times out ten everybody wants to come play here.

I think the reputation internationally has really put Yoshi’s on the map to where people want to play here. I think it’s not a question of we have to go after people and beg them and plead and pay them exhorbitant money to come play here. I think the reputation of the hospitality, the food, the hotels, the transportation, there’s no other place that rivals it really. And we make it easy for the artist to come and feel comfortable and perform.

I think on the other side we offer a service that you can’t find anywhere else. Either you come and eat in the restaurant and not go to the show, or you do the whole experience. And you do the dinner, the sushi, and then you go into the club, where you can also eat Japanese food and sushi, appetizers and such. And I think those two things have really combined to make Yoshi’s successful over the years.

Frankly, the jazz business, like you just said, is a very difficult one. And if for, say, six weeks or two months in a row we lose considerable amounts of money on the shows, we will go out of business. It’s not something where we’re making money and people are getting rich. It’s not that at all. It’s a very precarious business. The shows we book, if people didn’t come, we would close, period. Just like any other business. But I think this one would close much faster because of the amount of money that’s being spent on the artists and the overhead.

AAJ: Can you give me an idea of the amount of money? I know you don’t want to talk about specific contracts, but what’s a ballpark for a Tuesday-through-Sunday engagement for a name artist?

ML: It varies considerably.

One of the ways Yoshi’s in the past was able to attract Milt Jackson, Cedar Walton, all those artists to come play there is that most clubs – and this isn’t just jazz clubs particularly – in general clubs don’t offer ground transportation. They say, “Here’s $10,000, show starts at 8, sound check’s at 3. Show up.” What we do here is we have a group of volunteers, we have two vans, and we pick people up at the airport. So that really helped booking agents in the past route their artists through Yoshi’s, because we would do all the dirty work. We’d pick them up, we’d drive them to the airport and back, we’d take them to the hotel, etc. So that was a very helpful thing for Yoshi’s in the past.

When we book our artists we pay a fee. But we also fly them in, put them up in the hotels, we provide ground transportation, we feed them each night, and our hospitality includes a lot of things that other clubs don’t offer. That has all combined, like I said earlier, to make people want to come play here. This is the spot. In the Bay Area you can sell a lot of CDs, you can do a lot of interviews, you can do a lot of press, you can do a lot of retail stuff.

So it makes a lot of sense for artists who normally wouldn’t play here. Like, Bruce Hornsby was not a hard sell here, loves sushi. Pat Metheny called us up and said personally “I want to play there.” You get guys like the Mingus Big Band, who’s playing [March 2-4], they don’t do clubs outside of New York. But they’re doing ours because they’ve heard such good things from other musicians over the last several years. “This is the spot, you’ll love it, it’s great – plus they’ll pick you up at the airport.” So that’s really helped.

I think, ballpark, on an average show without naming names, some artists we’ll pay 30 grand a week. We pride ourselves on the fact that we do a lot of exclusive bands. Peter Williams will put quartets together that never played together before, that you’ve never seen anywhere else, that aren’t on record. Like our McCoy Tyner two-week residency that we do each year, McCoy says, “Hey, you put the band together, I’ll show up and play.” So, we’ll pay McCoy separately, we’ll pay all the other artists separately.

The Afro-Cuban All-Star show, that Telarc recently recorded, got started here. The Michael Brecker/McCoy Tyner Trio, that was an Impulse record that won a Grammy, was created here. So there’s a lot of those exclusive shows. We just had Dr. Lonnie Smith and Jimmy McGriff with Red Holloway. That was a band that we put together. Jimmy McGriff and Lonnie Smith have played together, but never in a club. They had done record dates together. So, we really like to do different bands, things you won’t see anywhere else. As long as people keep showing up, we’ll keep doing it.

AAJ: Do you record each show?

ML: No, we do not. We do a lot of broadcasts on radio stations, KPFA, KFOG, and KCSM. We do live recordings for labels. Blue Note just recorded Pat Martino. Dee Dee Bridgewater’s Live at Yoshi’s was just nominated for a Grammy. So there’s those types of recordings. But we don’t tape the shows.

AAJ: What about videotaping?

ML: We sometimes have companies that come in, like Jazz Online, and record shows. That’s all through record companies. We have closed-circuit video here internally to show the shows. But no, we don’t do that stuff. We’re very anti-bootlegging, unless there’s certain things said upfront where we can. But we don’t really do that. And we think that adds a lot to the “You gotta come see the show. Because it’s not gonna happen that way again ever.”

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