Please welcome today’s guest blogger Celebrating Themeless Discontinuity…

The light drizzle steams off the warm blacktop, the only reminder that only hours ago it had been a summer day. It is cold now, humid in that way only the Midwest can master, a chill-to-the-bone fog, despite the 60 degrees of warmth. Lights flicker here and there, through dusty curtains in dreary alleyways, but the only real light to be had through the rain and night is the eerie green flush that barely illuminated the weary doors of the building across the street.
The glow means that despite the decrepit exterior of the old-style Bohemian building, windows boarded, stones crumbling, walls covered in graffiti, there was breath inside. We reach the door, shake out hair and jackets, and push through the peeling planks of wood into Schwartz’s Point.

The often-overlooked jazz club in Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, Ohio may not have big names every night of the week like some of its competitors, but it has a dark, sultry, speak-easy atmosphere that out-competes anything in its weight class. The lights are low, the fabrics are rich and red and tired. The musicians get into the music, closing their eyes and swaying their bodies and improvising as only true artists feel how. They each have stories to tell, too, if you ask, of the disillusioned, of boozers and bootleggers, of subcultures and countercultures.

Ed once got lost in Wyoming, he says. “I was at a jazz workshop in Colorado. It was a bunch of kids; they didn’t know how to groove, ya know? They didn’t dig it.” He smokes a cigar despite city regulations. “So I drove north, ya know? Kept goin’. Met these guys in Cody,  and we drove out together. Didn’t know where to, just goin’. Ended up in the middle of nowhere Wyoming pulling a jazz concert at some party. It was real heavy.”

Ed is a true performer. “I love filling my living room with people I don’t know” he says, gesturing his cigar smoke toward the door of his establishment. He lives just upstairs. “It makes me feel like I’ve done something today.”

Schwartz’s Point is a fantastic little “underground” jazz joint located at the oddly triangular intersection of Vine Street and East McMicken in Cincinnati. Tuesdays are the big nights, where revelers can enjoy a home-cooked buffet dinner and an entire jazz orchestra for $25. Fridays and Saturdays are more intimate, with a crooner, Pam, a jazz singer with a day job, and one or two other musicians.

Though the neighborhood, the historic Over-the-Rhine just north of Downtown Cincinnati, has a reputation for being a bit dodgy (most tourist brochures recommend that visitors do not wander north of Liberty Street at night), those who live and work there swear they’ve never had any trouble. There is plenty of on-street parking nearby. For more information, visit http://schwartzspoint.com/.