Live in Austin: Monks Jazz Club

Austin is known as the Live Music Capital, with hundreds of venues. I thought that most of them were downtown, especially on 6th Street (Austin’s Bourbon Street). I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Monks Jazz Club is just a five-minute walk from our cottage. So of course, we had to check it out one evening after work.

Monks is a converted garage in an old brick building, and is easy to miss. (In fact, we had already walked right by it several times and had no idea it was there.) It’s a “listening room,” which is really a large recording studio with space for about a dozen tables. A concert at Monks is actually a live taping (yes, they still call them tapings) and live streaming of a musical performance, with a small audience. Ticket prices range from $20-$40, and it’s BYOB (no food). It’s a great place for a date night, as long as you plan for dinner elsewhere.

There are several shows a week, many of them improvisational jazz groups, with some big band and comedy nights mixed in. We saw the John Koozin Quartet. Their set was an eclectic mix of Koozin’s original compositions and jazzy renditions of sweet, familiar tunes like The Rainbow Connection and Feed the Birds.

It was fun having such easy access to live music in a casual and intimate setting. A thunderstorm arrived just as we left Monks, and we were grateful to have our raincoats for the short but wet walk home.