Jazz up with a live band at LA’s longest running open mic night

Elliot Zwiebach was 62 years old when he sang in front of a live audience for the first time.

The retired journalist had always loved show tunes, but he had never considered singing in public before.

“I was singing for fun, and I wasn’t very happy,” he said recently.

But one night, after attending several open mic nights as an audience member at the Gardenia Supper Club in West Hollywood, he worked up the nerve to step on stage and perform a song backed by a live band.

For his first song, he chose the comic “Honey Bun” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific.” It was terrible and he didn’t sing well. And yet, the next week he came back and did it again.

Newcomer Ian Douglas, left, and longtime singer Elliott Zweibach look over a sign sheet at Gardenia’s long-running open mic night.

Sixteen years later, Zwiebach, now 78, is a core member of what longtime host Kerry Kelly calls “the family,” a group of about 25 regulars who sing jazz standards, songs from the Great American Songbook and other numbers at LA’s longest-running open mic night.

“It’s like a community,” Zweibach said on a recent evening as he prepared to sing “It Was Almost Mine,” another song from “South Pacific.” “Everybody knows everybody.”

For 25 years, the L-shaped Gardenia Room on Santa Monica Boulevard has served as a musical home for a diverse group of jazz and cabaret singers. Every Tuesday night, elementary school teachers, acting coaches, retired psychoanalysts, arts publicists and the occasional celebrity pay an $8 cover to perform in front of an audience that knows firsthand how terrifying it can be to stand in front of even a small crowd with nothing more than a microphone in your hand.

“You’re so vulnerable up there that everybody’s looking at you,” said Kelly, who has hosted open mic nights for 24 years and once had Molly Ringwald staring nervously at the stage. “But it’s also the happiest experience in the world.”

Director and acting coach Kanshaka Ali sings “Goodbye Pork Pie Hot” by Rahman Roland Kirk.

The singers are backed by a live, three-piece band led by guitarist Dory Amarillo. A rotating cast of musicians—a few of them Grammy winners—arrive not knowing what they’ll be playing that night. Some singers bring sheet music, others charts. And there are those who play only a few bars and let the musicians follow the key and melody fairly closely. Poet Judy Barratt, a regular attendee, usually gives the evening’s pianist a copy of a poem she has read and asks him to improvise with it.

“It’s completely freeing,” said Andy Langham, a jazz pianist who has toured with Natalie Cole and Christopher Cross and often plays the Gardenia. “I read poems and try to paint pictures with notes.”

Kerry Kelly, singer of “Make the Knife,” has hosted Gardenia’s open mic nights for 24 years.

The Gardenia, which opened in 1981, is one of the few venues in LA designed specifically for intimate cabaret. The small, spare room has table service seating for just over 60 patrons and the stage area is beautifully lit by lots of pendant lights. Doors open at 7pm on Tuesday nights, but those in the know line up outside the building’s unassuming exterior until 6pm to ensure a spot on the night’s list of singers. (Although there’s a one-song per person limit, the night is known to stretch until 12 midnight.) Nicole Rice, who manages Gardenia, takes food and drink orders until the show starts at 8:30 p.m., then descends into respectful silence in the room.

Pianist Andy Langham and guitarist Dory Amarillo perform live musical accompaniment for every open mic attendee at Gardenia.

“It’s a listening room,” said singer-songwriter Steve Brock, who has been attending open mic nights for over a decade. “I’ve been to other rooms where I compete with tequila or rum. Here, when someone steps up to the microphone, everyone stops.”

On the last Tuesday night, the show started as it always does with music by the band (piano, guitar and upright bass) before the opening number by Kelly. Dressed in a black leather dress and knee-high boots, she was ready to “make the knife” this time. “It might be the longest song ever,” she said. “Maybe that’s why I really like it.”

People start lining up outside the Gardenia at 6pm to get a spot for Tuesday’s open mic night.

The first singer to take the stage was Tripp Kennedy, a bearded man who performed a melodious “Rainbow Connection.” When he finished, Kelly shared that she was cast as an extra on “Muppets Take Manhattan.”

“It was pretty funny,” she said, filling in the time as the incoming singer quietly consulted with the band. “I was a college student dressed as a college student for an audition.”

Dolores Scouzzi, who sang between comedy sets at Hollywood Improv in the ’80s, performed a rousing rendition of “What Now My Love.” “This is one [chord] chart from 2011,” she told the audience before launching in. “I want to try because these guys are the best.”

Monica Dobby Davis, an elementary school teacher, sings the jazz standard “You Go to My Head” in Gardenia.

Zweibach performed two Broadway hits, “I’m Used to Her Face” (which he changed to “His Face”) and “It Was Almost Mine,” hitting all the notes with ease. Later, his young friend Ian Douglas, a relative newcomer who started attending open mic nights that spring, sang the jazz standard “You Go to My Head.” Zwiebach praised the performance.

“I know this song well and you did a great job,” he said.

Monica Dobby Davis, who once sang with ’90s R&B girl group The Brownstones and now works as an elementary school teacher, also performed “You Go to My Head.” Although she left the entertainment business decades ago, she said discovering Gardenia Open Mic Night 13 years ago “brought music back into my life.”

Tom Nobles, left, sings in Gardenia with bassist Adam Cohen, center, and pianist Andy Langham.

There were many beautiful, touching moments that night, but perhaps the best was when Tom Nobles, an actor and retired psychologist in a purple knit cap and thick plastic glasses, forgot the words to “Lost in a Masquerade” by George Benson.

He stood for a moment, a bit stunned, before turning to his friends for help.

“Whoever knows the words, say them with me,” Nobles told the crowd.

Quietly at first and then louder and louder, the whole room burst into song.

We are lost in the clown. Woohoo, Masquerade.