If you walk east from Frederick Douglass Boulevard on West 132nd Street, you’ll pass a handsome brownstone that’s home to American Legion Post 398.  Take a few steps down from the street and through an inconspicuous door and you’ll find yourself in the bar and social club, a small, slightly shabby basement room. For nearly twenty years this modest setting has been the place where, every Sunday evening, one of Harlem’s last truly authentic jazz clubs has thrived.

There’s no charge to get in.  Just sign the book.  Grab a table if you’re early enough.  If not, take a spot near the bar.  Ten dollars gets you dinner: fried chicken, collard greens and potato salad served on Styrofoam plates. Beer – or liquor served in those tiny bottles you get on airplanes – is dangerously cheap by New York standards.  Then sit back , relax, and wait for the show to begin.  And what a show it was on the cold, January night I was there.  Live music rarely comes with this immediacy or intimacy.  This is how jazz should be made and heard,  in a tiny room with no stage to speak of and the small audience, mostly locals, veterans, or blow-ins like us, in touching distance of the musicians.