A Full House for Jazz Bridge at the Fishtown Jazz Festival

Rain was falling past the brick archway of the Black Squirrel Club on Sunday, and the big green doors stood open anyway. Before I say another word about what was inside, I should tell you who is talking. I am Harry Hayman, I serve on the board of Jazz Bridge, and Jazz Bridge presented the day. Weigh my enthusiasm accordingly. Inside, a brass chandelier hung over the band, people had settled into wooden pews under tall arched windows, and by the second set there was not an empty seat in the room. New faces all over the place. And the music, holy smokes. This was the Fishtown Jazz Festival, a free afternoon and evening of live jazz in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood, and the photographs make the argument better than I can.

A Washout Weekend and an Open Door

The forecast for that weekend was ugly, and it was right. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it a rare September nor’easter, reported that rain and wind would keep coming across the region on Sunday, and listed the events it knocked out, from South Street’s Saturday Fall Fest to the Bike MS cycling event. NBC10’s forecast promised periods of rain all weekend, with the strongest gusts from Saturday evening into Sunday morning.

Jazz Bridge’s listing for the festival lays out the day. Sunday, September 27, 2026, from 2 PM to 8 PM, at the Black Squirrel Club, 1049 Sarah Street, free and open to the public, with four musicians on the bill. The listing also names two partners. One is Penn Treaty SSD, the Penn Treaty Special Services District, a nonprofit that makes grants and sponsorships to community organizations in Fishtown, Northern Liberties, Olde Richmond and South Kensington. The other is Mural City Cellars, the neighborhood winery on Frankford Avenue.

Then the weather forced everything inside, and the Black Squirrel Club opened its doors, so my thanks go to Gabor, Ben and the club. Rain is usually the end of a festival’s good day. This time it packed people under one roof, and the roof turned out to be a great room with a great vibe.

Inside the Black Squirrel Club

The Black Squirrel Club calls itself a performing arts venue and describes its home as a historic 1890s steam plant in the heart of Fishtown, with two distinct spaces, vintage chandeliers, exposed brick and authentic cobblestone areas. Philadelphia Magazine’s 2024 guide to live jazz says there is nothing in Philadelphia quite like it and singles out the exposed brick, the tall windows and the eclectic decor. The weekly Monday Night Jam is hosted by the bassist Richard Hill Jr., who assembles a different house band each week. Philadelphia Magazine’s 2024 Best of Philly named the club a truly eclectic venue, said it hosts the best jazz jam in the city every Monday, and added that the same building also hosts chamber music, comedy and weddings.

In my photographs the details do the talking. The entrance is a brick archway with green doors, and a steel beam and chain hoist hang over it. Just inside, a Jazz Bridge sign sits on a table. Above the bandstand a ladder is rigged with stage lights, a baseball jersey and a suit jacket hang on the brick, and a Keep Off Grass sign sits near the piano. It looks like a room that accumulated one piece at a time, and jazz tends to sound at home in rooms like that.

Four Musicians Who Call Fishtown Home

Jazz Bridge’s listing names four musicians for the day, describes all four as people who call Fishtown home, and runs them in four slots, the first at 2 PM and the last at 7:15. Guitarist Victor North comes first. He arrived in Philadelphia from Alaska after a year at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. He has played in bands led by Mickey Roker, Charles Fambrough, Orrin Evans, John Swana, Jimmy Bruno and Elio Villafranca, and he spent much of 2018 and 2019 touring with the organist Joey DeFrancesco.

Drummer Tom Cohen follows at 3:45. He teaches at Temple University, his latest record is Embraceable Brazil, and eight days before the festival he was at the kit for Jazz Bridge’s MONTCO Jazz Fest night in Conshohocken, which I wrote up after the show. Vocalist Mary Ellen Desmond has the 5:30 slot. She has sung professionally for more than 30 years, from clubs around Philadelphia and New Jersey to Tavern on the Green in New York, she is classically trained, and she teaches voice at the Community College of Philadelphia.

Vibraphonist and composer Morgan Walbridge closes at 7:15. She is originally from Rochester, New York, and moved to Philadelphia in 2016 to attend the University of the Arts, where she studied vibraphone with Tony Miceli. She plays with groups such as the Philadelphia Mallet Ensemble and the LOVE Jazz Orchestra, and her vibraphone has turned up on film scores and video game soundtracks. Guitar, drums, voice and vibraphone. Four ways into one tradition, and all four of them work in this city right now, which is the point I keep coming back to.

What Jazz Bridge Does When a Musician Hits a Rough Patch

Jazz Bridge is a Philadelphia nonprofit that assists jazz and blues musicians in the Greater Philadelphia area who face financial, health, housing and similar crises. The singers Suzanne Cloud and Wendy Simon founded it in 2004 after watching fellow musicians rely on an emergency jam session as the only safety net they had. It incorporated in Pennsylvania in 2005 and won its 501(c)(3) status from the IRS in 2007. From the start its founding board wanted two things at once, help for musicians in hard times and public awareness of the region’s music through neighborhood concerts hosted by regional musicians, and the organization says that dual focus still drives it. To me, a free festival with four Fishtown musicians and a room full of new faces is the second half of that job done in the open.

Most of the first half happens quietly, on purpose. Jazz Bridge says it has confidentially helped musicians with medical, dental and legal aid, home repairs, unpaid bills and instrument repair. Its home page puts numbers on the effort: more than $500,000 in direct assistance since 2005, 95 grants worth over $49,000 from the Musicians Assistance Fund, and paid performances for more than 100 local musicians a year. That fund began in 2020 as a COVID Assistance Fund and has become an ongoing program, and musicians in trouble can also reach a dedicated social worker through the organization.

Any jazz or blues musician in this region can hit a rough patch, whether it is a hospital bill, a late rent notice or a horn stuck in the repair shop. A musician who needs help can call or fill out the form on the request assistance page, where Jazz Bridge says it will do its best to return a call within 24 hours. Anyone who wants to give can use the donate page. I wrote about how the crisis grants work in an earlier post about Jazz Bridge.

Full Disclosure: Harry Hayman and the Jazz Bridge Board

Plainly, then. I am one of the board members named on Jazz Bridge’s leadership page, where the organization also lists its president, vice president, treasurer, executive director and director of operations. Jazz Bridge presented this festival, so I am not a neutral critic and I will not pretend to be. What I can be is a witness with a good seat. When I congratulate Doug, Paul, Bob and the entire Jazz Bridge crew, I mean the people who put on a free festival the same weekend a nor’easter came through, and who ended up with a room full of listeners anyway.

Still Being Made in Philadelphia

Philadelphia loves to talk about its jazz history, and it should. Philadelphia Magazine’s guide to where to catch live jazz runs to a dozen rooms. It calls Chris’s Jazz Cafe on Sansom Street the longest running jazz club in the city, ties South to the old Zanzibar Blue, and lists the Black Squirrel Club too. South and Zanzibar Blue are rooms I have been involved with, so that lineage is personal to me. A list like that can still make a city sound like a museum. Then a Sunday in Fishtown puts four local musicians into a former steam plant during a nor’easter, and the pews fill up. That is not a museum. That is the music still being made, by people who live near the room, for people who came in out of the rain.

Then there is the part nobody photographs. Look at who was involved: a nonprofit that pays musicians and helps them through a crisis, a neighborhood district that makes grants across four Riverwards neighborhoods, a winery on Frankford Avenue, and a club that opened its doors. Wikipedia’s entry on Fishtown puts the neighborhood in Philadelphia’s River Wards, northeast of Center City, says the name comes from the fishermen who settled it, and describes a place that stayed working class for centuries. A steam plant from the neighborhood’s industrial past now holds a jazz festival, and I like knowing that.

If you missed this one, Jazz Bridge’s events page has the rest of the season. The next community concert on its calendar is Ella Gahnt at the Cheltenham Center for the Arts on Wednesday, October 7, where tickets are $20 in advance and $5 from every ticket goes toward the musician assistance fund. More follow in Collingswood and Cheltenham through May 2027. Go, and bring somebody who has never heard of Jazz Bridge. Jazz is alive and well in Philadelphia, and I have three photographs to prove it.