June 10, 1977 Nightlife: Eduardo's
An iconic club owner and music promoter resurfaces in the unlikeliest of places.
June 10, 1977 Gusto
Eduardo’s
“If
I’d have had the Revilot up here, I could’ve retired by now,” Bemo
Crockett says, grinning over an ever-present cup of coffee.
Here is
“The students know what’s happening in
music,” the former owner of the Revilot says. “But they were always afraid to
come down to my old place.”
Bemo brought in big-name artists –
Herbie Hancock, George Benson and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, among others – but
bringing in the fans to
Nevertheless, the Revilot kept live
jazz coming to
Now the owners of Eduardo’s are
letting Bemo do what he did at the Revilot all over again. For the same
admission price – $3.
“You go to
Volume is one of the things Eduardo’s
has plenty of. After the diners finish their Italian entrees and the banquet
room dividers are folded open, there’s room for 600 jazz fans.
“I’d been to some one-night shows over
here – Stan Kenton, Count Basie – so they called me up and asked me if I wanted
to do it full time,” Bemo says. “They wee doing good on lunches and dinners,
but they were dying after 9 o’clock at night.”
Mr. Eduardo – Edward Tarquini –
agrees. He says nights haven’t been the same since he discontinued a six-year
run of live shows in 1973 after several high-priced flops.
“I should’ve stayed with it,” he says.
“We came back with the big menu, but then food prices went up and people
stopped coming out as much. I don’t know if I want it to be a jazz club
exclusively, though. I think it’s too tough.
“But I’m not one for concerts,” he
adds. “I like to sit down, smoke a cigarette, have a few drinks. You go to a
concert, you pay as much or more if you go to dinner before and go out after.
If you go to a club, you’ve got it all together.”
The return of live entertainment to
Eduardo’s has had its ups and downs. There was a disastrous week with drummer
Elvin Jones, who became ill and collapsed just before the weekend, but then the
next week saw a sell-out crowd for dinner and a show by trumpeter Maynard
Ferguson.
Honky-tonk organist Bill Doggett is
there now. Count Basie is due in Sunday. Leading rock and disco band Sabata is
on next week. Future attractions include Woody Herman June 26 and jazzman
Charles Earland.
Jazz fans aren’t scared of this
neighborhood, but sometimes they’re put off by the garish stucco exterior. They
shouldn’t be. Inside, the gift of overstatement continues, but it’s a relaxed
kind of luxury and it’s often delightful.
Mr. Eduardo says the restaurant, which
he opened in 1954, was done by the late Oley Nils Benson, the decorator who did
the old Town Casino. Benson also coined Mr. Eduardo’s name.
“He told me we’ve got to have a Latin
flavor if we’re going to be running an Italian-American restaurant,” he says.
Bemo calls attention to a fascinating
collection of antique items about the place – ranging from a cast-iron penny
balance scale (that works) to a 50-year-old metal washing machine with its
guarantee proudly standing on top of it.
“I think this is the most beautiful
room in the city,” he says. “Not for a disco, but for live music.”
Bemo bids a hearty farewell at the
door and offers his new home phone number. It’s in the 691 exchange. The
suburbs.
“Right,” he says. “I’ve moved out of
the inner city. I even got myself a lawnmower.”
* *
* * *
IN
THE PHOTO: Eduardo’s in the 1970s.
* *
* * *
FOOTNOTE:
Mr. Eduardo, who at one time had seven restaurants, retired in 1980 and passed
away in 1999. The site on
When Bemo Crockett died in 1992, Jeff Simon wrote
this tribute to him in The News:
You had to know Bemo Crockett a long time before he'd tell you that his real name was Clyde.
We were sitting at the bar one night at his Revilot Club when he told me. We were waiting for the musicians to arrive – an uneasy vigil any time for Bemo, but doubly so on this night, when the extraordinary jazz musicians who would soon be playing were more than usually pawky and fretful.
So I asked about his name. Surely his mother didn't look down at an itty-bitty baby and say, "He sure looks like a Bemo to me." No, she didn't, he said. Then he made me promise not to bandy his real name about. OK, I promised. Then came the answer – Clyde. That was in the early '70s, long before Clyde "The Glide" Drexler of the Portland Trail Blazers came to virtually define grace in the NBA. Clyde, Bemo thought, was a name for a guy in overalls on a tractor.
No one I've ever met was less like a hick than Bemo Crockett. He died at 71 on May 19 after some years of hard times, then illness. We had lost touch.
When I knew him, he was the proprietor of what I still consider the second-greatest jazz club in this city's history. (The first was and always will be the Royal Arms, on West Utica Street, the place I heard Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Horace Silver.)
Bemo was not the sort of man anyone would ever nominate as an outstanding citizen. He used to run the most successful after-hours joint on the East Side. He got into the jazz club business only because he was married and had a baby (our daughters are the same age) and wanted to get to know the daytime world.
Fat chance. He was the most nocturnal human being I've ever known. I saw him in the daytime only twice, and it was a shock both times. He looked very uncomfortable.
He had a raspy, booming voice unlike any other I've encountered – like a foghorn heard through radio static – and a large stomach that clearly came from a deep fondness for the pleasures of the table. He wasn't complete without a cigarette in his hand, which meant that any walk of more than 20 paces would trigger emphysema.
If ever a man was in his element standing in a smoke-filled room in a dark music club, it was Bemo Crockett.
It was my colleague Dale Anderson who first heard the rumblings of something big happening at the Revilot, on East Ferry Street near Jefferson Avenue. By the time Bemo Crockett had finished, he had – in the worst jazz era ever – brought to Buffalo McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Elvin Jones, Yusef Lateef, Leon Thomas, Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal, Freddie Hubbard, Pharoah Sanders and Roy Haynes.
What was so wonderful about the Revilot (and the Royal Arms) is that the audience was always completely integrated. Blacks, in fact, outnumbered whites, something that usually isn't true now that jazz has been yuppified all over America.
Proprietors of such integrated clubs always had the same expression on their faces – a mixture of melancholy, wariness and worry, one that you'd find on the face of someone taking a long trip in a very old car that could break down at any moment. Bemo didn't want trouble, and it was an era full of racial trouble. He didn't want unhappiness in his club, either, which is why he was always the unhappiest-looking man in the place. He just wanted full glasses, a full cash register and ears full of good music.
So he worried. Constantly.
And when he found himself, inadvertently, on a hero's pedestal, that seemed to worry him even more. He was too hip to the way life so often works in the Black community. Triumphs are short-lived. Novelty fades. You're on your own and it's never wise to forget it. Fame is a storefront. It moves in and then it moves out. Something else takes its place – or nothing.
That's what happened to Bemo. He had to move from the Revilot. In the meantime, some of the magnificent musicians he'd presented had become hit-makers, of all things. Herbie Hancock turned into an electric funk-dripper, made an LP called "Headhunters" that sold zillions. At least he was honest when Bemo called to book him again. "I'm sorry, Bemo," he said. "I don't need you anymore."
And then along came the Statler Hilton Downtown Room and the original Tralf, and Buffalo didn't need Bemo anymore, either. That didn't mean that it forgot him. Some of us never will.
It was a tense period, especially for white journalists in Black neighborhoods in the wee small hours with nothing but note pads. Bemo always kept a close watch on me as I left his club. At first, it was because he had a vested interest in my getting out of his neighborhood happy and unharmed. After a while, though, it was just to make sure a friend was getting off safely.
He's dead now. I wish I'd returned the favor.
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