Cafe CODA

Jazz: the uninvited guest everyone hopes shows up. As unexpected as it is welcome. I enjoy the small amount of jazz I’ve been exposed to, but I’ve never seen it live—never had a chance to feel it shape a room. That’s why Hanah Jon Taylor created the jazz club Cafe CODA: to be “so intimate that if you sat close enough you could feel the sweat and the steam coming off the horns.”

Hanah is a 75-year-old jazzman from Chicago who’s been playing flute and saxophone for 50 years and has lived in Madison for 30. He’s played in Europe, Scandinavia, the West Indies, parts of South America, Anatolia, and across the United States. It was only eight years ago when he opened Cafe CODA, but his wealth of experience—and experience is what he’s all about—was the driving force that led him to recognize and address the need for Madison to house a jazz club.

“Transplanting myself here furthered the notion that perhaps there was something here that did not exist that I could contribute to cultivating and actualize,” says Hanah. “There are no televisions, ping-pong tables, pool, dart boards, and that’s for a reason. This is a listening room. That idea is in contrast to the stereotypical Wisconsin bar. We have had to cultivate the idea that one can come and listen and appreciate music that he or she may have not heard in Madison and would have to go to Chicago to experience live.

“As Madison hubs itself to Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and my hometown, we have had the opportunity to draw from musicians who have come through those municipalities and come here. I would like to think I can attribute a lot of that to the fact that I know a lot of these cats from being on the road and meeting them at different festivals and such, and them knowing that I have this place.”

There is one notable limitation. Cafe CODA only has the capacity for 99 persons. To get some big-name players, the venue just isn’t large enough, but that’s also the magic of Cafe CODA. To Hanah, jazz is fundamentally meant to be an experience, and if the experience is good enough, people will seek it out.

“I remember when I was a kid, my uncle and father used to take me and my cousins to Tommy Bartlett’s water show in our station wagon,” says Hanah. “Back then, it was a five-hour drive to Wisconsin Dells, and what was so deep about that is none of us could swim. None of us. We were city kids. We’d do this every year, and it finally dawned on me why they were doing this. They were trying to give us an experience outside the south side of Chicago. They were trying to show us something as far as they could afford to take us in their station wagon; they wanted to show us something outside of what we were living through. And we weren’t living that bad, but it was an experience. It became a destination point. And I still don’t know how to swim.”

Aside from using the space to attract visitors, Hanah has also used Cafe CODA to embrace the needs of the community. The original vision didn’t include tango, bachata lessons, karaoke, swing dance, and kirtan meditation, but COVID wasn’t kind to a lot of venues. Cafe CODA was fortunate enough to survive the pandemic, and Hanah felt compelled to address the returning need for these types of spaces. He says, “What would we look like not accommodating a community that had that kind of need, you dig?”

With a little money from the Small Business Administration, Hanah was able to clean up the garage in the back of his jazz club and create a studio space. This addition has allowed for multiple recurring events. Tuesdays are dance classes, with tango at the front of house and bachata in the back. Wednesdays, there’s karaoke in the front and jump swing dance in the back.

Hanah also started the Cool School, a free-of-charge Saturday morning and early afternoon event. The first session is for 8- to 12-year-olds from 10:00 to 11:30 a.m., and the second is for 12- to 18-year-olds from 11:30 to 1:00 p.m. “Any young person can come,” says Hanah. “We discuss and experiment with sound and the whole idea of improvisation, which is something they don’t get a chance to do a lot in school. A lot of kids we find are not involved in school music programs for one of three reasons: either they can’t afford an instrument, and we cool that out because we have instruments for them in the back; they can’t read music, and we don’t worry about that because we’re not asking them to read; or their behavior is so that the music teachers can’t deal with them, and we don’t worry about that because I’m a music therapist by degree.”

With all these things going on, it’s difficult to imagine Hanah still finds time to go on the road and play. He admits it’s difficult to travel while running Cafe CODA, but appreciates the balance he’s found between being a musician and a grandfather. That said, he hasn’t retired from the road yet.

As for what visitors gain, it’s that experience that Hanah has worked so hard to create. People often tell him that being at Cafe CODA is like being transported someplace else. When they walk out, it almost surprises them that they’re still in Madison. “We’re going for the cathartic moment,” says Hanah. “If you have one of those a week, maybe you can survive the madness that’s on the other side of the door. Leave that back there, and hopefully people will be able to rely upon this experience to offer that to them.”

It’s clear that the future of Cafe CODA isn’t restricted to the space it is now. Owning a business, for Hanah, has involved the awareness of jazz. He has an evolving vision shaped around serving his community. “Maybe there’s another challenge ahead of us that we have to prepare for in the next couple years, but we’ll probably give out before we give up.”

CAFE CODA
1224 Williamson Street
Madison, WI
(608) 298-7831
cafecoda.club