The Elephant Room

A basement jazz club under Congress Avenue, and the name is literal. During the downtown building boom of the late 1980s the skeleton of a mastodon was dug up on the site of a high rise going in at the south end of this block. Some of the bones were stored in the long narrow cellar next door, and when that cellar was let as a nightclub in January 1991 the new owners named it after what had been in it. It opened on the eighteenth of January, 1991, without live music. In the first week the Austin trombonist and jazz organiser Mike Mordecai came in and left his card, and two nights later Tomas Ramirez and Jazzmanian Devil played the room, which settled the question of what it was going to be. It has booked jazz nightly ever since, more than thirty years. The room is underneath the Swift Building, a two storey commercial building of the late nineteenth century in the middle of the Congress Avenue historic block, and it is low, dark and long, with the bandstand at one end and no natural light at all. Austin is not primarily a jazz town, which is precisely what makes a club of this age and consistency notable here, and a set at the Elephant Room is about as far from Sixth Street as you can get while remaining two blocks from it.