The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

A gauntlet of black-and-white portraits of jazz luminaries lines the walls of the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant on the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. Nearly all of these musicians have appeared at the Dakota in one of its two incarnations. The trick with this sort of self-promotion-as-interior-decoration is in the execution. To do it right, a place needs to have attracted top-notch talent and established a unique rapport with artists over many years, to the point that the portraits themselves seem to address the wistful adage "If these walls could talk."

Veering left from the Dakota's entry, the first portrait you see is of Joe Williams, the Count Basie Orchestra vocalist. Back in '96, the then-seventy-eight-year-old Williams frolicked with unvarnished joy across the Dakota stage, delivering an unbelievably potent performance. Recalling that night in Richard Grudens' book The Music Men, Williams said, "I don't remember feeling that good. I think every pore in my body was open.... " The singer inscribed his Dakota portrait to the man most responsible for the club's legacy-founder, co-owner, and frontman Lowell Pickett: "Lowell, Best. Love, Joe Williams."

Next in line is a similarly signed shot of Stanley Turrentine, a man of massive physique and a tenor saxophone tone to match. Many years ago, Wynton Marsalis and his band finished their concert at the Guthrie and hurried over to catch Turrentine's final set at the Dakota, only to discover they'd arrived too late. No matter. Lowell (as he is known to most everyone) invited them in, convinced a cook to stick around and feed them, and the two bands ate and jammed in the empty club until two in the morning. Beside Turrentine on the wall is a picture of trumpeter Roy Hargrove. Lowell first met Hargrove at the 1989 Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy; he was the road manager for Moore By Four and Hargrove was still a teenager yet to release his first record. Since then, the Downbeat poll winner has performed at the Dakota on numerous occasions. "To Lowell, The most comfortable jazz club in the world for musicians and patrons. Peace + Love."

The tributes go on and on: nationally renowned jazz cat, pungent memory, heartfelt inscription. Finally, there's McCoy Tyner, the pianist in John Coltrane's legendary quartet who went on to become an influential dynamo in his own right. Tyner and Pickett were friends for more than a decade before Tyner became the Dakota's first national jazz act in the fall of '88.

Then the legacy jumps from the wall of portraits to the bandstand. It's the week between Christmas and New Year's, and for the eighth year in a row, that means hip, ironic trio The Bad Plus are playing the Dakota. Lowell introduces the group, wryly noting that the crowd is larger now than it was for the band's first show at the club in 2000; also that the trio is fresh from a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall and an effusive write-up in The New Yorker. What he doesn't say is that back in high school, before they even knew each other, two of the three Bad Plus musicians, pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Reid Anderson, were at the Dakota for that first McCoy Tyner gig.

Three weeks before The Bad Plus took the stage, the Detroit blues singer Bettye LaVette played her now-regular winter engagement at the Dakota. After decades of barely scraping by, LaVette's career was finally showing a pulse when she got a call from Lowell. Four years later, LaVette sits in her dressing room after wowing the capacity crowd she now typically draws to the Dakota. She talks about "the night Lowell and I sat right here and talked until almost daylight. Oh, you should have heard us going back and forth from the ladies rest room that night! I'm threatening to burn down the bathroom because my picture isn't in there. And he's saying, ‘Well, let me get to know you better.'" LaVette lets out a big laugh, then suddenly gives me a no-bullshit look from behind her tinted glasses. "Lowell is just somebody I want to hang with. I do a million gigs a year and I don't know any other club owner or any other promoter who I'd want to hang with."
 

Judging from his childhood and public mien, Lowell Pickett is one of the last people you'd expect to be earning hanging privileges and trading bathroom bon mots with a sassy, streetwise black woman from Detroit. He was born and raised in Austin, Minnesota, the Hormel company town where his father ran the local J.C. Penney and his mother was a music teacher and ardent cellist. Lowell was their third child and second son, reared in a quiet neighborhood, tucked away from the countercultural changes of the '60s. Lowell's folks were molded by the Depression, which meant that the family never ate out and pinched pennies to invest in education.

"My father grew up dirt-poor in the middle of North Dakota; at sixteen he had to find a place for his family to live. He couldn't afford school, and used to read college catalogues the way other people read travel brochures," Lowell says, explaining how his dad gently coaxed him into attending Shattuck Academy, at the time an Episcopalian military school in Faribault (now most famous for such alumni as Marlon Brando and Nick Nolte), first for the summer and then for a year. When he graduated from Austin High in '67-right in sync with the Summer of Love-he had already been accepted to St. Olaf College in Northfield. He planned to earn a law degree, and was considering a double major in business administration.

That careful, cultivated side of Lowell, now fifty-nine, can be seen as he introduces acts from the stage or roams the club troubleshooting. He's almost always attired in a gray suit and matching tie, and his longish hair and short, graying beard are immaculately groomed. He's a bit hangdog around the cheekbones and shoulder blades, but his voice has the dulcet, reassuring tone of an FM radio host. He can also display the unerring formality of a funky but ace maître d'.

But that's the master disguise, the veneer of decorum acquired (and required) when you grow up in the sticks. A less obvious but more important side of Lowell is the dreamer and adventurer-the one who's always ready to receive, or concoct, what the flamboyant reedman Rahsaan Roland Kirk once referred to as "Bright Moments." The moments when Joe Williams turns back the clock and breathes through every pore; when Turrentine and Marsalis are sharing a blues and some blackened fish in the wee hours; when McCoy Tyner passes a baton to The Bad Plus before the group even existed in the minds of its members.

This side of Lowell was kindled at St. Olaf, where he landed a roommate from Philadelphia. Lowell's mother had made sure her children took piano lessons and were steeped in the classics. Show tunes were also played around the Pickett household, and Lowell had ventured further, from the New Christy Minstrels into songwriting-oriented folkies such as Donovan, Tim Hardin, and his first musical hero, Bob Dylan. But this dude from Philly had been a drummer in a rock band back home and had an entirely different crate of sounds. "Cream and Moby Grape and the Grateful Dead and the Mothers of Invention," Lowell says, reverently rolling out the names. "I had never heard that stuff before. I just loved it."

 
^{Another bright moment: organist Jo DeFrancesco—known as the undisputed king of the Hammond B3 organ—and his band onstage last year.}

 
Suddenly law school and an MBA didn't seem all that important. Lowell teased it out until he was a semester away from graduation. Although he has never gone back to college, he claims that "I didn't really drop out so much as I decided to take a break for awhile. I realized I was interested in other things." Like making films, writing songs, and acting in local theater. Then he began plotting bright moments on a larger scale. He promoted concerts by Muddy Waters, Leo Kottke, and Doc and Merle Watson at the Northfield armory. He planned to start a film society and rented a storefront to screen movies in Northfield, but somehow that idea morphed into The Argus record store, which survived for eighteen months.

Perhaps a more succinct thumbnail sketch of The Argus days comes from Pat Pollard, the much-beloved bartender at the Bandana Square Dakota location for nearly its entire history. "When I first interviewed for the Dakota job, someone told me that Lowell Pickett once ran a head shop in Northfield, stepped out one day for a cigarette, and came back two weeks later. That's when I knew I would be in good hands," Pollard says. Anyone who was hanging around a college campus during the mid-seventies knows that drugs were omnipresent. "There was certainly marijuana around back then, but I wasn't a big drug user," Lowell demurs. "I wasn't pristine. But I saw what it could do to people, and I was just into too much other stuff."

Yet a mischievous smile flashes across Lowell's face when he's asked about rumors that he and a bunch of people lived in a commune on the outskirts of Northfield by Fox Lake. "Oh no, it was just two farms across the road from each other where eight or nine of us lived. We grew some vegetables, had gardens, but they weren't working farms. Oh, and we raised chickens," Lowell says innocently. "That was pretty neat."

"We had a dinner-table discussion about getting some chicks," says Phil Sims, who also lived at one of the farms with his then-girlfriend (now wife) Meredith. "So we got this catalog from a hatchery in Iowa and decided to get like two dozen of the Bard Rocks breed. We left it to Lowell to actually place the order. But when we went down to Faribault to pick up the shipment, there were all these three-foot-square boxes. He'd gotten 318 day-old chicks! We said, ‘Lowell, what were you thinking?' And he said, ‘Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.' It cost us like $100 a month to feed them; our rent was $55."

The chickens were part of a flurry of activity at the farms. Lowell and another housemate rigged up a system where they could control the lights and heat in their makeshift chicken coop with the use of lasers, low voltage relays, and speaker wire. There were plenty of other ventures as well: the company Lowell started to dismantle dilapidated barns in the area and sell the vintage wood. Or the system to vacuum-pack the vegetables grown at the farm. Or the trips up to the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis for mind-blowing rock shows in the relatively tiny venue. Lowell recalls the first time he saw John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra there: "It totally transformed my concept and sense of what music was." Bright moments all around.

The farm experience ended with a spectacular explosion on the night of the winter solstice in '73. Normally the house would have been full of people-in fact Phil Sims had planned a party but cancelled to catch a flight home to Texas for the holiday. Others were also with their parents, or working, or, in Lowell's case, in Minneapolis at a party. A gas leak blew out the kitchen walls and demolished the home, which was insulated with corn cobs. Lowell lost thousands of records, "including all my Dylan bootlegs"; thousands of photographic prints and his darkroom equipment; rugs he'd haggled over in Greece and carted across Europe; his then-girlfriend's father's vintage Leica camera, and many musical instruments and personal writings.

"The things I thought I couldn't live without were all gone-everything I owned could fit in a cardboard box," Lowell recalls. "But it felt very light, and kind of liberating. I realized how fortunate we were that nobody was hurt."

 

Just as there are people in life who are said to march to the beat of a different drummer, Lowell Pickett measures time by the shadows of a different sundial. "Lowell has been late for everything he's ever done in his life," says Marty Walter, his classmate at St. Olaf and later his partner in a filmmaking business. "It's not because he's lazy; it is because he's always going in eighty directions at once. Even in college, he'd take your car somewhere and was supposed to be back by six, then call you at midnight. You'd be ready to strangle the guy but at the same time you knew he was always coming from a good place."

"One year for Christmas, we all chipped in for a deed to a planet out in the galaxy that you can officially buy online for a couple hundred bucks," recalls Pollard, the former Dakota bartender. "That was our present: a deed to Planet Pickett, so he would know we knew where to find him." Longtime Dakota employee Andrea Myers also remembers the gift. "The great thing is that I'm still not sure Lowell knew what it was we were giving him," Myers says.

Not surprisingly, I had my own close encounters with Planet Pickett in the course of trying to gather information for this story. After more than a half-dozen potential meeting times set out weeks in advance came and went, I called the Dakota and left word at the club that I was concerned the story might not happen. After putting me on hold, an employee returned and told me that Lowell might have forty-five minutes to an hour to talk if I could be down there by six. It was 5:10.

I made the appointment with minutes to spare. We went up to a private dining area on the second floor and talked for more than two hours. Approximately half of that time was consumed by the fantastic, intricately detailed stories Lowell recounted about his filmmaking partnership with Marty Walter and a third person at their nonprofit Minnesota Public Programming Corporation. As he discussed the MPPC's first project, a proposal for a television documentary, you could still sense his enthusiasm for a thirty-year-old venture that never even got off the ground due to lack of funding.

By the second hour, Lowell's phone would vibrate every five minutes or so. He'd get it out from his jacket pocket, flip it open, scowl, then flip it shut and resume talking. It was a glimpse at life on Planet Pickett, orbiting while the tour guide pointed out all the bright moments in the constellations.

 
^{Lowell with Cuban pianist Nachito Herrera. "Lowell Pickett and my family, we have a spiritual relationship," Herrera says.}

 
After seven years, the three principals in the MPPC finally wore themselves out, and Lowell had already taken a second job in a restaurant. In '83, he became a manager at Faegre's, where he started booking local music acts. He also volunteered on the board of the Southern Theater and with the Minneapolis Arts Council. And it was through those connections that he met the Bandana Square developers, who asked him if he wanted to open a restaurant. After resisting for about a year, Lowell was finally won over by the unique character and history of the building (they built Pullmans and repaired other railroad cars there).

The Dakota launched in August '85. Its original business plan was to offer quality food and wine with strictly local jazz music. But in '88, McCoy Tyner's agent began cold-calling jazz venues across the country to see if he could assemble a national tour. Lowell was outraged, and berated the agent for peddling Tyner like insurance, telling him that he'd been friends with the pianist since '76. In fact, Lowell credits Tyner for providing his "jazz moment"-the moment that won him over to the music for life-when he helped promote one of the pianist's concerts at the Guthrie. "Just blew me away," he says, shaking his head. "That was true on record but when I heard him live, there was this whole other dimension."

Lowell told the agent he would be honored to have Tyner at the Dakota, but couldn't afford him and didn't believe the room was sufficient for a man of Tyner's stature. A few weeks later, the agent called back and said Tyner would make himself affordable to the Dakota if Lowell would ensure a quality piano on the premises. Flattered but nervous, Lowell rented a Steinway and put Tyner and his band up at the posh Whitney Hotel in Minneapolis.

Tyner praised his engagement at the Dakota so much that the agent asked Lowell if he'd be interested in booking pianist Ahmad Jamal. Then a regular patron at the club said he had a connection to saxophonist Bobby Watson, who played the month after Jamal and slipped Lowell the number for vocalist Betty Carter, who in turn agitated for Freddie Hubbard and Shirley Horn. Radio host Leigh Kamman convinced Carmen McRae to appear. Word of the luxurious accommodations and delightful between-set food got around, and just like that, before '89 was out the Dakota was hosting top-caliber jazz artists on a monthly basis.

Yet despite this vibrance, the nightspot's first years were rocky from a financial standpoint; in January 1987 it was placed under Chapter 11 bankruptcy regulations. Lowell says he stabilized the business after that, but interest on the debt continued to mount. (He also personally owed money to the Internal Revenue Service.) Four years and numerous near-catastrophes later, the Dakota finally was ordered padlocked in April 1991 and its assets seized and liquidated under Chapter 7. When he discovered I would be including the padlocking of his club in the story, Lowell grew angry and, when that didn't work, argued the coverage was unfair because "many people who go to the club today have no idea that there was even a Bandana Square location." It was as if the maître d' side of his persona had spotted an obstreperous bum on the premises and demanded he be evicted forthwith.

If anything, however, the Dakota's financial woes may have enhanced the esprit de corps among the club's patrons and employees. "Lowell was both a consummate gentleman and a gentle man; very non-confrontational," says Pollard. "He was well-read, well-rounded, and a man of manners, a rare and important thing in this world. It was hard for him to say no and everybody wanted a piece of him. He is not a hard-core businessman." He goes on to recall "that horrible night" when the club was closed down. "All of a sudden my bar was surrounded by these truck-driver types with broken noses. They weren't normal characters. They came in at quarter to twelve, demanded the till and started taking the artwork off the walls. We were all aghast but we also knew it was inevitable.

"As I recall, we were closed for three months," Pollard continues. "We never thought of it as being closed, of course. We knew it would be hard to get another job, because if Lowell ever reopened we'd all go back to him."

Local musicians played benefits. The "A-Train" program was started, where for every $100 members contributed they received $110 in trade at the club. (Full disclosure: I contributed $400 back in '91.) Even so, many observers believe the Dakota wasn't really out of the financial woods until Lowell sold half his stake to Richard and Julie Erickson and the club moved across the river to Minneapolis in October 2003.

"About two years before we moved, I was talking to Lowell and he seemed to seriously be considering selling the Dakota," Erickson reveals. "I wasn't interested in buying the whole thing but asked him how much he would ask for me to be his equal partner. He told me, and I talked it over with Julie and we agreed. Lowell told us to take our time and make sure. And we did and we were sure. But we were also sure we needed to get out of Bandana Square."

The escape plan came in the form of an available street-level space in the Target corporate headquarters at Tenth and Nicollet. Lowell and Erickson green-lighted the move once they realized the ceiling could be knocked out to add a balcony for more seating, and reached what Erickson describes as a "fair, favorable lease agreement for both sides" with Target.

It was inevitable that some club patrons would be unhappy with the new location-and, by extension, the new culture-of the Dakota. The new club is tonier and more expensive (thanks to the cost of Nicollet Mall real estate), and, for better and worse, the staff is more professional and less like a big family. The music is also less purely jazz-oriented, reflecting Erickson's taste in blues, R & B, and New Orleans-based music. St. Paul residents and hardcore jazz fans are now more apt to coalesce around the Artists' Quarter east of the river.

That said, Lowell's taste and personality continues to hold sway at what is now known as the Dakota Jazz Club & Restaurant. That means that as 2008 was being ushered in, patrons arrived in furs, in hoodies and jeans, and in little black dresses. It means that the music that night was broadcast from coast to coast on National Public Radio, as were past New Year's Eve gigs by Roy Hargrove, Harry Connick Jr., and others.

This time out, the headliner would be Cuban pianist Nachito Herrera, paired with members of the Steele family and a crackerjack horn and rhythm section. When Herrera arrived in Minneapolis in February 2001, Lowell told him how much he had enjoyed promoting the careers of other Cuban pianists such as Chucho Valdés and Gonzalo Rubalcaba. Lowell put Herrera in touch with an immigration attorney, recorded him live at the Dakota, and released a CD from Herrera on his own label. He also helped the musician land work at the MacPhail Center for Music. After 9/11, when it looked like it would be impossible for Herrera to get his wife and two daughters out of Cuba, Lowell told him to keep his hopes up and keep working the bureaucracy. And when Herrera's family finally got to Miami in February 2003, Lowell saw that they reached Minneapolis as soon as possible. "Lowell Pickett and my family, we have a spiritual relationship," Herrera says.

And now it is time for the last set of music to grace the Dakota stage in 2007. As Lowell steps to the mike to greet a national audience of radio listeners and a buoyant, sold-out club, the glow on his face tells you all you need to know: A Bright Moment is in the offing.