yesSince it opened in 2007, the small Sydney jazz club 505 has become an institution. The kind of place elite international musicians such as Chris Dave and Charlie Watts might “drop in” just to see what’s happening, and where a whole generation of musicians – including Ngaiire and Sirens Big Band – cut their teeth, playing to an audience that’s more likely to cheer loudly or yell curses than give the expected polite finger snaps.
The venue has moved across three premises in its lifetime, but to enter any feels like walking into an unusually spacious and well-decorated sharehouse living room – paying homage, perhaps, to how it began, as a weekly “board games and jazz” night in a Surry Hills rental. The furniture is a jumble – new, antique, well-loved – with humble staging and PA, and a piano that bears the signatures of musicians that have breathed life into it. Perch on one of 505’s rickety stools and you’ll be so close to the performers you can see spit and woodchips flying across the stage.
And on Friday night, the 5 Eliza Street venue became the latest casualty of Sydney’s music scene, leaving the way it entered: with no ceremony, good company and world class music.
As the skies above Newtown opened up, the Steve Barry Quartet performed the swan song of the globally recognized space – the only Australian venue to make Downbeat mag’s Top 100 jazz venues list.
There was a surprisingly jubilant atmosphere at first. “I think we’re all in a little bit of denial,” says Clare Hawley, one of the front of house staff.
Barry’s band (Ben Lerner, Tim Geldens and Thomas Botting) alternated between fragile and devastating rhythms, drawing indiscriminately from American and European jazz styles. They finished with the appropriately named Thelonious Monk tune “Bye-Ya”, their ragged swing punctuating the end of an era.
The audience was uncharacteristically quiet during the performance – and when it was over, they stood and filed out of the Edwardian ballroom as if in a daze.
The venue started with a friendship. Sydney Fringe director and theatre-maker Kerrie Glasscock and bass virtuoso Cameron Undy met in 2005, and shortly after moved into Hibernian House – the five-story, graffiti-covered assortment of studios, galleries, event spaces and apartments that’s spawned and nurtured a vibrant collection of the city’s creatives. This is where they would open the first iteration of 505, a hub of adventurous music and avant garde theater named for the address: 505/347 Elizabeth Street. A year later, they were married.
In 2010, the music program outgrew their loungeroom, and moved into a former strip club on Cleveland Street where they ran shows for ten years. Glasscock moved the theater program to 5 Eliza Street in 2015, after it too outgrew their original space, and dubbed it the Old 505 Theatre. After the Cleveland Street venue closed in 2019, the theater and music space were reunited under one roof.
Through it all, a consistent philosophy has guided the pair: if we want culture to evolve, performers need a safe place to take risks.
505 played a central role in my creative life. There, I learned live music is at its most exciting when it is precarious, dangerous; where things feel like they might fall apart at any moment.
I attended my first show at 505 in December 2010: a Drip Hards album launch that would change my philosophy on creativity for ever. I fondly recall arguing with my co-workers afterward about whether the music was serious art or if they’d just been taking the piss. I argued it was both, and that that was a good thing.
This was the first of more than 200 nights I would spend at 505 on Cleveland Street, consuming rivers of Italian coffee and Polish beer, trying to find my jogging under seasick rhythms of some of the most adventurous music I’ve ever heard.
According to Glasscock, what set 505 apart was curation, not just of its performers but its audiences too.
“When we first started 505, it was word-of-mouth only, very deliberately,” she says. “We only wanted respectful people [to come]and over time this amazing community of like minded people grew, and they were really protective of the place.”
This forged a community-minded space where artists of all levels felt supported to try new material. You were just as likely to find Sydney Conservatorium students chasing the sound in their heads as Katie Noonan, Wendy Matthews or Ian Moss starting their latest tour. It didn’t seem to matter who was on – I never saw the place less than thriving.
For Glasscock and Undy, it all came down to prioritizing trust in artists and their ideas above all else.
“We started from the premise of giving artists a place to show their work, which is a very different place to start for an entertainment venue,” Glasscock says.
“We wanted people to come to us with an idea – and it doesn’t need to be a fully fledged thing … because you’re trusting an idea as opposed to wanting to see a product.”
The combination of classic Australian talent, modern theater and new music may be another part of what made the 505 project unique. The pair have always favored new work that maintains a connection to the past.
“We’ve always been big on that at 505,” Glasscock says. “You have to honour, to respect, [the past] – to acknowledge why, how and who got you where you are.”
While closing 505 is a “personal choice,” the venue has been under increasing financial pressure.
“I’m not convinced completely independent bricks and mortar businesses are ever coming back,” Glasscock says. “The real estate market is just ridiculous, I just don’t think it’s for our sector any more.”
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Running the venue has had its challenges but they say it’s been worth it. Undy remembers fondly the time he had a steak at the club with one of his heroes from him, bass player Pino Palladino, and the time Grammy-winning Melbourne band Hiatus Kaiyote took to 505’s tiny stage, mere months before they exploded into international stardom.
Glasscock glows with pride as she speaks of what 505 has achieved for the theater community, “providing a space for experimental theater that would be otherwise impossible to stage”.
The loss to Australian culture is incalculable. Where will the ideas go?
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism