Dec. 9, 1977 Nightlife: Remodeling the Tralfamadore Cafe

 

The first of what turned out to be many cosmic shifts at Buffalo’s best-ever music venue.

Dec. 9, 1977 Nightlife

The Tralfamadore Café

          “Pardon our dust,” Ed Lawson quips as he holds up the edge of a burlap covering that’s being glued to the ceiling above the bar. The Tralfamadore Café is being remodeled for the first time since it was opened more than two years ago and the new look underlines the fact that the jazz club is entering a new era.

          The change that touches the Tralfamadore deepest, though, is the departure of Lawson’s older brother, Bob, who has shared management of the club since the beginning. The weather has gotten to him, so he’s going to Miami to check out the prospects for jazz there.

          Bob’s exit comes as the Tralfamadore is staging its boldest series of shows to date. The December Jazz Festival began last weekend with the avant-garde trio of Leroy Jenkins, Andrew Cyrille and Muhal Richard Abrams, whose atonal inventions served to clear the air for what will follow.

          As the festival hits full stride next week, the focus will be a bit more traditional. Renowned blues singer Mose Allison visits for a total of four performances Tuesday and Wednesday. Following him will be a superstar septet of contemporary jazzmen led by Eddie Henderson, David Liebman and Julian Priester, who will hold forth from Thursday to Dec. 17. On Dec. 18, the 10 members of the Willem Brueker Kollektief from Amsterdam, Holland, demonstrate the improvisational talents that have earned them international acclaim.

          “Among all these acts, there’s a wide variety of music,” Lawson says, “but we’re now trying to move into other things also. The Buffalo Comedy Workshop planted the idea that we should be doing other kinds of entertainment. Their shows on Tuesday nights were drawing from a whole segment of the population that ordinarily doesn’t come to the club.”

          The remodeling job will allow about 20 more people to find places in the Tralfamadore’s classic jazz-cellar intimacy, giving the club at Main and Fillmore a capacity of about 150.

          Main point of the renovation, however, is to insure that there isn’t a bad seat in the house. The primary table area in front of the stage has been expanded, the space around the bar has been condensed and the tables in the far rear corner have been placed on an elevated section, giving them a view of the entire room. Nobody, Lawson maintains, is more than 45 feet away from the action.

          Lawson hadn’t thought seriously about piloting his own jazz club until 1970, when he met pianist Randy Weston in Morocco and hung with him for a couple weeks. Up to that point, he’d prepared for an academic life. He and his brother had grown up in New Castle, moved to Rochester for high school and were working on their respective degrees at the University of Buffalo.

          The brothers began their careers as educators, but soon found themselves dissatisfied. Ed was teaching English to Spanish-speaking people in Rochester and Bob was teaching philosophy as a graduate student at UB when they decided to pool their collective frustration and get into jazz.

          “We felt that what Buffalo needed was not a jazz club in the traditional sense or a bar in the traditional sense,” Lawson says. “What it needed was a place that was biracial where people could relax and enjoy good music.”

          They chose a place which once had been a rock bar called Dirty Dick’s Bathhouse because it was close enough to UB to draw students and wretched enough to be cheap. With a little fixing up, they figured, it had potential for great atmosphere.

          When it came time to call it something, they look to Kurt Vonnegut and borrowed the name of the imaginary planet in his novels “The Sirens of Titan” and “Slaughterhouse Five.”

          “It used to be a three-person operation,” Lawson says. “My brother was the maitre d’, I was the bartender and my wife was the waitress. It was bizarre. We had no idea what we were getting into.

          “Bob went and spent two days in New York with Max Gordon, who owns the Village Vanguard. Max said to my brother, ‘If I can give you one piece of advice, it’s this – get out while you’re still young.’”

          But they didn’t. Instead they went on to chalk up some particularly marvelous small-club jazz successes. Saxophonist Dexter Gordon made it one of his last stops before he stepped up into concert halls. Anthony Braxton’s weekend at the Tralfamadore last winter convinced the avant-gardist that his music could succeed in a club setting. Before that, he’d never done more than one night in one place.

          These kinds of things have given the club a tall reputation in jazz circles. Meanwhile, what started out as a nuclear family of three has become an extended family of 20, all of them former customers who liked it so much they come to work there.

          The employees work on an honor system and Lawson wouldn’t have it any other way. Everyone, he notes, has their own rhythm for doing things and when the rhythms come together, the whole place clicks. The cooks schedule their own hours. If someone isn’t doing a job properly, then peer pressure tends to remind them about it.

          “What it gives the employees is flexibility, freedom and dignity, the feeling that no one’s looking over their shoulders,” Lawson says. “As a result, they can spend more time thinking about the job than about what they can get away with. Everyone is concerned with the image the Tralfamadore gives off. Ultimately, the whole concept of the thing is that it should be fun.”

          Now that Lawson’s brother is leaving, he’s taken on a couple of operations managers, Mike Borins and Steve Munn, freeing himself for planning, talent scouting and an occasional night home. He’s also vice president of the businessmen’s association in the area and will help supervise a $52,000 neighborhood grant to improve things around what is now the busiest intersection in the city.

          One thing he doesn’t expect to do is get rich. He outlines the economics of the septet engagement next weekend and it’s painfully evident that nobody’s making much from it.

          The musicians wind up splitting less than $300 seven ways after airfare, food, lodging and booking fees are subtracted. As for the Tralf, it has to maintain an 80% capacity each night just to break even at the door and pay the piano tuner.

          “What it comes down to,” Lawson says, “is that it’s not a business, it’s a lifestyle. My wife and I don’t have separate jobs we go to in the morning. This has been a 24-hour-a-day thing for us. When I take a day off, it’s not because I don’t have something to do, but because I decided to let something slide.

          “What it does give you is a feeling of satisfaction,” he continues. “You have almost complete control over success or failure. But in a small situation, no matter how well it does, nobody’s going to get rich. What it turns you into is a manic-depressive. By profession.

          “What you sit down with a pencil and paper and go over figures, you get depressed,” he observes. “But when you have a great night and people love it and you make a little money, you’re on top of the world. Sonny Fortune did a 35-minute solo here one Sunday night that made the whole weekend for me. If it ever got to the point of no return and I had the choice of going for a straight job, I’d probably be crazy enough to look for another jazz club some place.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Ed Lawson in 1977.

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FOOTNOTE: The basement version of the Tralfamadore Café closed at the end of February 1980 to await the construction of a grander home downtown. A jewel of a club on the second floor of Theatre Place, next door to the movie palace formerly known as Shea’s Buffalo, it finally opened in February 1982. It was the finest showroom east of the Mississippi.

Ed Lawson, however, resigned as entertainment director of the new club in mid 1983 after his partners in the new operation wouldn’t let him book Gato Barbieri. A note in Gusto in January 1985 observed that he had moved to Tampa, Fla., to work as a nightclub and entertainment consultant. He’s still there and is still immersed in jazz. The Tralf, sadly, suffered from chronic financial problems, closed and reopened a few times, and came to the end of its long, bumpy ride in May 2021.