This new downtown club will serve as a home for jazz in Tucson

Hotel Congress is opening Tucson’s only jazz club in a space that has been home to everything from a bank to a bookstore.

The Century Room borderlands jazz club and mezcal tasting lounge opens Friday, Feb. 4, in the former Copper Hall banquet space at 311 E. Congress St.

Retired Tucson Symphony Orchestra principal percussionist Homero Cerón and his Latin Jazz Quartet will inaugurate the new stage in the first of several events booked into the 2,200-square-foot space over the next month. One of the highlights: a Jon Batiste afterparty March 4 following Batiste’s Centennial Hall concert, which is a makeup date for his missed Jan. 21 Arizona Arts Live/HSL Properties Tucson Jazz Festival concert.

“I’m very excited to present this to the community,” said Shana Oseran, who owns Hotel Congress with her husband, Richard. “It’s pretty spectacular. I think the musicians are going to be so happy.”

The Century Room at Hotel Congress occupies the space on the corner of South Fifth Avenue and East Congress, which Oseran refers to as the “power corner.” When it was a banquet hall, patrons entered through the hotel; that entry now is where the small stage is set up and only musicians will be able to enter there. Patrons will enter from the street.

After closing Copper Hall during the pandemic, Oseran said she was mulling over ideas for the space last April with Tucson native and jazz drummer Arthur Vint. Vint, who was playing a show on the Hotel Congress Plaza stage, suggested she create a jazz club. Aside from some restaurants and clubs hosting jazz nights and jams, there is no club in Tucson focused solely on the genre.

“The Tucson Jazz Festival proves it every year that there is a love and a demand for jazz,” said Vint, who recently moved back to Tucson after living and working in New York’s jazz scene for 15 years. “The turnout this year, despite it being in the middle of the omicron surge, was really great. “

Vint, who is teaching jazz drumming at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music, will program the live music, which initially will draw from regional and statewide artists. Vint, whose career in New York included working 10 years at the famed Village Vanguard, said by spring he hopes to draw from more national touring acts who have historically bypassed Tucson for Phoenix because “there wasn’t a venue for them,” he said.

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“The great thing about Congress is that since they already are a successful concert venue with (Club Congress and the plaza), there already is this infrastructure,” said Vint, who will work alongside Hotel Congress Music Director David Slutes, who books acts at the club and plaza.

The Century Room, with its small stage tucked into a nook in the far end of the room, was modeled after the Village Vanguard, including the bench seating lining the walls from the entrance to the stage, Vint said. From the moment you enter off Congress and Fifth and push through the vestibule’s repurposed wooden doors that were once used to separate the kitchen from the main room, you will feel a little like you’ve stepped into the Blue Note or any number of New York City’s storied jazz clubs.

Vint said it was the ambience he and Oseran imagined when they were first discussing the plans last spring. Century Room will offer a place for people to come hear jazz as a destination, from live concerts to late-night events similar to those you would find in New York jazz clubs.

“We hope to attract both existing jazz fans and gain new fans by presenting jazz in such a beautiful setting with great drinks,” Vint said. “People will want to come have a unique experience at the Century Room.”

“I’m thrilled and excited and exhausted and all those things,” Oseran said. “Changing that into this new venue is unbelievable.”

Creating the Century Room — whose name is a nod to the hotel’s 100th anniversary, which it marked in November 2018 — was part of $750,000 in renovations at the historic downtown hotel that started last summer and included expanding the Hotel Congress Plaza stage and upgrading the hotel’s plumbing. Rio Nuevo kicked in $600,000 toward the project and Hotel Congress is now asking the board for an additional $300,000 to cover unexpected COVID-related expenses for the Century Room, Oseran said.

Rio Nuevo officials this week agreed to consider the request at a later date.