HAVING TAKEN A battering in recent years, the Macau Jazz Club is back in action at a stunning new venue and with a quiet determination to nurture the music scene from the ground up.
Taking over the cafe of the Macau Cultural Centre on Friday and Saturday nights, the club is on a mission to attract a young, new audience to revitalise the scene.
Since the handover in 1999 and the exodus of Europeans that followed, the club has been in slow decline. For Afonso Vilela, president of the Jazz Club of Macau's executive committee, the days of partying until dawn at the former Portuguese enclave's first jazz joint - a tiny, crammed venue near the Governor's Palace - are a distant memory, but one he won't let go.
Started by Portuguese drummer Miguel Campina in the early 1990s, the club was so popular it drew tourists who had read about it in the Lonely Planet travel guides from all over the world , and it quickly expanded by taking over a neighbouring shopfront. 'You had to get there early if you wanted a seat,' Vilela, 53, recalls. 'It was an incredible atmosphere with everyone from Hong Kong coming over to play or to party, which we often did until 6am.'
But being a non-profit organisation that ploughed all funds into drawing top-name musicians from Hong Kong and overseas to its stage, the club soon struck financial trouble. 'After 1999 most of the Europeans left, so not many people were coming, and it got difficult to pay the rent.'
The Urban Council of Macau came to the rescue, offering the club use of the Glasshouse on the newly developed waterfront for free, a deal which worked well for two years until council amalgamations and a change of policy came into effect in January. From then the Glasshouse was thrown open for use by all associations and social clubs on rotation.
But stalwart Campina refused to give up and used his connections with the Macau Cultural Centre to secure the club's current space.