The Colored Musicians Club

The story

Buffalo's Musicians' Local 533 formed on February 3, 1917, because the white local would not admit Black members; any Black musician who wanted to work the area paid a fee to it anyway. The following year members opened a social club upstairs from the union office at 145 Broadway, a building a shoemaker named Charles Zifle had put up around the turn of the century, previously a cigar shop and a pool hall. On May 14, 1935 the club incorporated separately from the union, which looked like paperwork and turned out to be a firewall.

It held. In 1969, after the Civil Rights Act, Local 533 was ordered to merge with the white local into Local 92, and the merged union favored its white members — but the club was a separate corporation and kept booking, becoming the room where musicians of every color jammed after their paying gigs. That second floor is the one Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald turned up in after hours, mingling with the audience rather than performing at it. The club calls itself the only continuously running all-Black-owned music venue in the United States. In 2018 it entered the National Register and a first-floor jazz museum by Hadley Exhibits opened: a multimedia archive of who played here, and buttons that make instruments sound.

Then, on June 15, 2023, the whole building closed — club, bar, stage and museum — for a $2.95 million renovation and expansion by Stieglitz Snyder Architecture with Kanaka Construction Management. The addition brings over 2,000 square feet: a barrier-free main entrance with reception and lobby, an elevator the walk-up clubroom never had, and a glass-walled rehearsal and event space upstairs joined to the original building by an enclosed bridge. The programming did not pause; it went on tour across its own city.