Yudu - fRoots October 2015

root salad The Green Note

It’s now officially London’s favourite music venue. Jamie Renton salutes founders Immy & Risa.

ts official: the Green Note in Camden Parkway is London’s favourite music venue, voted as such by readers of Time Out magazine with a plaque taking pride of place over the venue’s bar to prove it.

You can’t blame the Green Note for wanting to trumpet this accolade. At a time when London’s music venues are either going under or getting corporatised to within an inch of their lives, the Green Note has bucked the trend while remaining proudly independent and championing the music that fRoots readers live for: folk, blues, world, old-timey jazz and the like.

It may be slap bang on a main road in one of London’s busiest areas, but the GN still feels like a secret hideaway. You walk in off the street to a small front area with a few tables and comfy seats. Go through a curtain at the back and you’re in the venue proper: all candlelit tables, wooden floor and exposed brickwork. There’s a tiny stage to your right (if you’ve arrived late and the band’s anything bigger than a trio, you might have to navigate your way through the musicians who’ve spilled off the stage), a well-stocked bar at the far end and enough tables, chairs and standing space to accommodate 60 people at a squeeze.

There’s a venue downstairs now too, in what used to be the kitchen before they stopped doing full meals. A speakeasy style space complete with a piano, a bar and a capacity of twenty, which is used for inti- mate jazz and blues gigs.

The Green Note was established a decade ago by two North Londoners, Immy

Anna & Elizabeth on the Green Note stage.

Doman and Risa Tabatznik, friends since school, united in their love of 1960s US folk (paintings of Dylan, Cohen, Baez et al adorn the venue’s walls) and a desire to set up the kind of coffee house-y place they wanted to hang out at but couldn’t find anywhere around town.

It was originally a vegetarian café-cum- live music venue. But, as the duo explain to me when we meet up on a summer after- noon, hours before the venue opens its doors for an open mic night (instrument tot- ing regulars are already queuing up out- side), the two functions ultimately proved incompatible. Punters were clunking their cutlery and munching their dinner when they should have been listening. Plus, as people tended to stay for the whole night, it wasn’t possible to generate the turnover of meal-buying customers needed to make the kitchen viable. So the kitchen closed down, but you can still fill up on very good veggie bar snacks if hunger pangs strike.

Since opening its doors in summer 2005, the GN has played host to all kinds of worldy, folky, bluesy acts, hosting a Latin American Festival (see fRoots 317/318) and (as report- ed on in fR 376) holding a regular Rebetico Fest, now in its third year. There have also, of course, been gigs organised by this very mag- azine – regular sessions when the Editor was London-based and more sporadically since he moved back West, the most recent featur- ing a tumultuously well-received perfor- mance from Anna & Elizabeth.

Chris Wood, Robin Williamson,

Toumani Diabaté and Martins Carthy and Simpson are amongst the myriad of fRoots-

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friendly acts who’ve graced the Green Note’s poky stage, whilst the likes of Amy Winehouse and Ed Sheeran appeared here before they hit the pop big time. But true to form, the gig Immy and Risa tell me they got the biggest thrill from was a private appearance from Leonard Cohen.

lthough they make no big deal about it, I think the fact that Risa and Immy are women running a venue in the often macho world of the music biz, does make a difference to the way they do things. They reckon that perhaps their attention to detail and focus on developing a community may be gender traits. Although, as Risa points out, having never been men, it’s hard to know!

That sense of community is evident, with a loyal coterie of regular musicians and punters returning to the venue time and time again. And while Emmy and Risa claim to have little time for the dark, hard-nosed art of self-promotion, they were able to mobilise those regulars when it came to drumming up votes for the Time Out Favourite Venue Award.

Having created their own little piece of 1960s Greenwich Village in 21st Century London, NW1, they’ve got no desire to empire build. Others have suggested that the Green Note grows to become a chain, but Risa and Immy are happy where they are. If they get an act that’s too big for this intimate space, they’ve developed a handful of (slightly) larger venues around town that they can book under the “Green Note pre- sents...” banner, Dingwalls, Bush Hall and the Old Queens Head amongst them.

www.greennote.co.uk Immy & Risa with their Time Out Award. F