A little Paris, a lot of Vine: Friday nights at Martini’s

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Curtain Call — your front-row seat to the unique, lively, and memorable performances shaping Kalamazoo’s arts scene. Supported by the I.S. Gilmore Foundation, this series highlights the creativity and community that make each show something special. Fran Dwight took all the photos.

It’s like a Parisian cafe. A small group of acoustic jazz musicians is parked between the sidewalk and the street, between beds of Michigan wildflowers, playing sounds going back to the 1930s. A little Django Reinhardt here, a bit of bossa nova there, for your cocktails and pizza.

But it’s so Kalamazoo, very Vine, on the Martini’s patio.

Loud traffic is racing south on one-way Westnedge. Guys at a nearby table are talking about podcasts and bubonic plague. The owner of Martini’s, Rich Munda, comes to their table to talk with them about punk rock. I hear mention of the contemporary Australian band Amyl and the Sniffers. 

My table has three women. Two live in the Vine Neighborhood. I ask, what’s the deal with Vine? How do I create that sense of place for this story?

One says she’s long dealt with loud bands next door. But then there’s the “howling. The dogs!”

The other says, “The sled dog team.”

“I don’t even realize that they’re howling anymore.”

“When I first came here, I was like, ‘What the hell is that?’ Somebody says it sounds like an exorcism….”

Chatter continues about the mysterious sled dog team, and then how “Vine has the most art weirdos,” while we in Edison have a multicultural atmosphere and the most taco trucks…

In the background, The Birdseed Salesmen give off very European-before-the-war Hot Club de France vibes.

Not too loud, not too quiet. Not boisterously or dramatically calling attention to themselves. The audience pays just enough attention to applaud when a tune is done,

“Musical wallpaper”

They’ve been Martini’s house band for around a decade. They start around 7 p.m. and wrap it up around closing time. Much of the year, The Birdseed Salesmen play their Friday Martini’s gig inside, upstairs in The Pronto Room. But when the weather is nice, they’re outside.

They’ve played to rollover collisions on Westnedge, and they’ve played to random people on the sidewalk who dance to the music. 

Jay Gavan, guitarist and Birdseed organizer, tells me during a break, “Whether we’re inside or outside, I think this kind of music is not supposed to be in your face. It’s supposed to be like the musical wallpaper while you’re having dinner.”

I disagree. There’s a lot to what they’re playing. Each of the Salesmen has deep musical experience in classical, jazz, rock. They’re not simply playing background. 

But then, they’re not going to demand diners’ attention. I flash back to a restaurant in a Lake Michigan town. They had a loud folkie guitarist who decided to play all of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a long, mournful performance about a shipwreck, for diners. The Salesmen are not doing whatever that was. 

Gavan says, “Maybe it’s that it’s interesting when you’re listening. But you can also turn and eat some great food and have a conversation with whoever’s at your table. And then when there’s a lull, you go back and listen and go, ‘Oh, I recognize that (tune).'”

You don’t have to be the encyclopedic jazz head to enjoy their familiar melodies, old standards, styles from old movie soundtracks, maybe TV themes — I once heard them play the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme, “Frolic” by Italian composer Luciano Michelini originally for a 1974 film “La Bellissima Estate.” 

The core Salesmen are a string quartet with Helen Yee (violin), Nathan Tabor (lead guitar), Gavan (rhythm guitar), and Denis Shebukhov (bass). They specialize in what was termed “Gypsy jazz,” but is now called jazz Manouche, originated by Django Reinhardt (guitarist from the Manouche Romani clan) and Stéphane Grappelli (French violinist). It’s a style that survived in an era when, in Nazi-occupied Europe, jazz records were burned, and Romani sent to concentration camps. (See Reinhart and Grappelli in cooler times, 1938.)

The band expands its styles at Martini’s with Ted Hogarth (reeds) and Nathan Durham (brass). Carla De Rosa was sitting in on bass.

The group tends to expand and contract. That Friday, Tabor and Shebukhov were unable to do the gig. The group is used to the question, “Who’s available next Friday?” Gavan says. 

The previous week, Matthew Fries was on accordion, making things extra-European.

Often they’re “Frenchy,” as Gavan says. But that evening, they also got a little Brazilian with Jobim’s “Look to the Sky,” played Freddie Hubbard’s chill “Up Jumped Spring” from 1981. 

Gavan shows me an iPad with a huge catalog of scores that they dip into. At Martini’s, with a variety of Kalamazoo players sitting in, “We’re not as precious about the (Manouche) style,” Gavan says.

Rich’s “Kitchen Confidential”

“This only happens because of him,” Gavan says of Martini’s owner, Rich Munda.

Gavan was in The Brothers Kalamazov when they were Martini’s Wednesday night band in the 2000s. But it was around 1992 when Gavan and much of his rock band Mom Handy worked for Munda, mainly delivering pizza. 

Back then, the restaurant was a basic counter and a kitchen cranking out pizza and slices for delivery and takeout.

I remember living a walk away down Vine in the mid-’90s, a poor freelance writer, treating myself to a couple of $2 slices about once a week.

Munda and his wife, Suzy, were always at the counter. 

Martini’s opened in October of 1988. That counter still exists — they simply built their sit-down restaurant around it.

Inside Martini’s, there’s a lot of local art, but near the bar, there’s also a big framed Grace Jones poster looking very edgy, cosmopolitan. 

Munda’s hometown is Chicago, where, for him in the ’70s and ’80s, music and restaurant work were intertwined. He spoke to me earlier about his past, which sounded a bit like Anthony Bourdain’s memoir, “Kitchen Confidential” — intense work in the kitchen, late-night clubbing afterward.

“I’ve always been in the restaurant business as a kid. Growing up in Little Italy, I worked at the pizzerias in the neighborhood places,” Munda says.

He got hired as a bartender at the original Morton’s Steakhouse, Newberry Plaza on the corner of State and Rush, just north of the Pier, “right across from the Jazz Showcase.”

This was the late ’70s. Punk club La Mere Vipere was also in the neighborhood. He had a roommate who was a bouncer at another punk club, Tuts. “And it was crazy, and fun,” he says.

Talking Heads to T-Bone Burnett, “I can’t even name how many people I saw and how many great shows. But I was a music cat.”

It was a great time to be in a big city, when all the now-classic bands were new. Seeing a band like the Talking Heads, when they were fresh out of NYC? “Oh, that was sick. That was sick, that stuff, and the bands that used to come in, the Cabaret Metro…” He talks about basement clubs full of strobe lights, DJs playing new wave weirdness, some other place that the city may have been burned down, but we won’t go into that.

Meanwhile, Munda was working. His first big job, bartending at the Steakhouse, wasn’t his thing, he realized. “There was, like, all these people right at you, you know?” Munda moved into the kitchen. This was the era of fine dining, and he got “a good six years of working with the European chefs at really wonderful places” in downtown Chicago.

Munda says he was tempted by the musical life. He may have dabbled in the saxophone. But he stuck with food. “I found that I was good at what I did, and that I could find the art in there.”

Talking as if remembering an intense music gig, he says, “I remember working in the fine dining restaurants, and we would push, push, push, push! to get through the first seating. There’s a first seating and a second seating. And then you’d get a five-minute break, and you’d go out and shake it out, and then walk back onto the line and go to kickin’ it. And we were cooking some really great stuff.

“I remember walking back on the line and feeling like I was a rock star walking back on stage, you know.”

Munda had a growing family, and the fine dining trend seemed to be waning, so he left Chicago for Wisconsin. Munda then met a chef from Kalamazoo who was looking for help. 

After some work in kitchens around here, long story short, Munda invested in his own pizza counter in the Vine in 1988. It was to be a little neighborhood pizza place, like back home in Chicago. 

Kalamazoo wasn’t Chicago, but there was nightlife here, there were bands, and a lot of people who seemed to be making their own culture. 

Culture in Kalamazoo always seemed to happen organically, he says. It comes out of the neighborhoods. “It was always organic, but our politicians and our city leaders, they weren’t — they wanted it to be somewhere else. They wanted to be like Chicago, or they wanted to be like a larger city, and they missed the neighborhoods that were surrounding their downtown, forever! They missed them forever, and so it was organic because the people, the artists, the residents, the people going to school, everybody had to — they had to circumvent that.”

“Skylark”

Munda would like to listen, but he has to be among the customers, he says. “It’s kinda my job.”

The Birdseed Salesmen play as he’s out on the patio, carrying beers to tables, chatting with customers about punk bands. He visits a woman who’d brought her little dog.

I’m tearing into my usual, the grilled chicken sub. Spanning decades, my usuals at Martini’s have been: Pizza slices, ’90s; pork sub, ’00s to ’10, chicken sub, ’20s. 

The women at my table include Second Wave’s photographer, Fran Dwight. She talks about how she’ll never forget taking a friend to Martini’s, long ago, when it was still just the counter. 

Her friend was a picky eater who wanted a sandwich but without many of the toppings.

“‘Lady, you’re taking all the integrity out of my sandwich!'” Dwight remembers Munda saying.

As she usually does, Dwight gets up to take photos. It’s the photographers’ golden hour, when the sun is setting beyond the trees.

Local musician and host of WMUK’s “Grassroots,” Darcy Wilkin, joins us and orders a root beer. We start talking about the sled team of huskies in Vine. 

The music isn’t invasive, until it is. I’m suddenly asking, “What’s that tune? I should know this! Darcy! What’s that tune!” Wilkins responds with a shrug.

The sun is setting on the last Friday of the spring, and The Birdseed Salesmen are playing that lilting dreamy tune that you know, it was in old movies, surely, a 20th Century standard, your grandparents danced to it, you know it when you hear it….

“Skylark.”