Jazz

A Neighbourhood Stage in Northern Liberties and the Runway Young Musicians Need

Philadelphia produces more musicians than it has rooms to pay them, and a bar on North Second Street is quietly doing something about that.

By Harry Hayman 6 min read
A Neighbourhood Stage in Northern Liberties and the Runway Young Musicians Need

Upstairs at Bourbon and Branch, at 705 North Second Street in Northern Liberties, a marquee sign spells out the arrangement in movable plastic letters. Live jazz upstairs, every Thursday and the first of the month, six to nine.

That sign is doing more for Philadelphia’s music economy than most panel discussions about Philadelphia’s music economy. I spent a Friday night in the room underneath it and left more convinced of that than when I walked in.

The room

Bourbon and Branch has been programming live music in Northern Liberties since 2014, in a rustic room built out with theatre curtains, recycled cedar pallets and live edge black walnut. It runs a full menu, it runs a bar, and on most nights it runs music, jazz alongside indie rock, cabaret and hip hop. Several nights a week carry no cover charge at all. On the Grid’s Philadelphia guide lists it among the neighbourhood’s fixtures.

A no cover policy is not generosity. It is a business model, and understanding which one it is matters. The venue is betting that a room full of people who came for free music will eat and drink enough to cover the band and the night’s costs. Having spent most of my working life on the other side of that arithmetic, I can tell you the bet only pays when somebody in the building is doing the unglamorous work of booking musicians who will actually draw, night after night, and building an audience that turns up on a Thursday because it trusts what is on the stage.

At Bourbon and Branch that person is Bill Saurman, who books and curates the jazz programme, and who is now a friend. The distinction worth drawing is between filling a calendar and building a room. Filling a calendar means the slots are not empty. Building a room means the audience develops a habit, the musicians treat the gig as somewhere worth playing, and a young artist can be put in front of people who did not come specifically to see her. Bill is not doing it from the sidelines either. He plays, and he does the work himself.

Why the runway matters more than the credential

The artist on the stage that night was Diamond Franklin, a Philadelphia born, classically trained mezzo soprano whose work runs across jazz, opera, gospel, rhythm and blues and musical theatre. She holds a bachelor of music from Cairn University and sings with the Philadelphia Chorale and with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s own choir. She has shared a stage with Andrea Bocelli.

In autumn 2025 she was named one of five finalists in the fourteenth annual Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, drawn from close to two hundred entrants across twenty seven countries, and performed at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center that November as part of the TD James Moody Jazz Festival. Kate Kortum won that year. Being one of five out of two hundred is a serious result, and it is also, in career terms, a beginning.

That is the part I keep sitting with. A competition finalist with those credentials is still a working musician who needs bookings. Nothing about the credential automatically produces a calendar. What produces a calendar is a series of people deciding, one at a time, to hire her before it is obvious.

Somebody has to book her. Somebody has to mention her to another venue. Somebody has to be in the room and tell a colleague what they heard. I want to be one of those people, and I would point out that none of it is charity and none of it requires believing she will be famous. It requires believing she is good now, which is a much smaller ask and considerably more useful.

The gap between an emerging artist and an established one is not a talent gap. It is a bookings gap, and it is closed by rooms like the one upstairs on North Second Street.

There is a second thing a regular room gives a young musician that a competition cannot, which is repetition in front of strangers. A competition is one set, prepared for months, judged by specialists. A Thursday residency is set after set in front of people who did not come for you, some of whom are talking, some of whom are eating, and one of whom is paying very close attention. Learning to hold a room like that is a separate skill from being excellent, and it is only learnable in rooms like that.

Two generations in the same building

Also in the room that night was Ruth Naomi Floyd, and Franklin names her among the musicians she has trained under.

Floyd grew up in Germantown, sang in church choirs, studied piano, flute and bassoon, and has spent more than twenty five years building a body of sacred jazz composition. Her major work, Frederick Douglass Jazz Works, sets Douglass’s own speeches and writings for jazz septet, and WHYY has written about what that work asks of an audience. Her own account of the project sets out how the compositions and the texts fit together. Jazz Philadelphia named her a hometown hero.

So the teacher was sitting in a neighbourhood restaurant listening to a former student, ten feet from the stage, on an ordinary Friday. I was ten feet away from both of them.

That configuration is how the music actually transmits. Not through a curriculum, though the curriculum matters, but through proximity: an older musician in the room, an emerging one on the stage, and an audience that gets both at once without being told that is what is happening.

Rooms that make that possible are not interchangeable with rooms that book touring acts. They are where a scene renews itself.

Culture is not decoration around an economy

There is a habit of treating arts and culture as the pleasant surface on top of a city’s real economic activity. I keep saying otherwise, and what happened at Bourbon and Branch that night makes the case in numbers rather than sentiment.

A musician gets a stage. An audience turns up for the stage. The audience eats dinner and buys drinks, which pays the venue’s staff and the venue’s rent. Some of them arrive by taxi or rideshare. Some of them discover a neighbourhood they had not spent an evening in before and come back for something else. Somebody in the room hires the singer for a private event. Somebody tells a venue owner in another neighbourhood.

Every step of that is economic activity that would not have happened without the stage, and the stage would not exist without somebody choosing to programme it.

I should be honest about the size of any single night. One Thursday upstairs in a bar does not move a city’s employment figures, and I am not going to pretend it does. The argument is that this is the unit the sector is actually built from, and that a city with two hundred such nights a month has a different music economy from a city with twenty, even though no individual night in either city looks like policy.

The same logic runs the other way when rooms close. No single closure registers. The cumulative effect of a decade of them is a city that still produces musicians and can no longer keep them.

Jazz Philadelphia maps a scene that is deep in players, educators and history, and consistently short of paying rooms. That imbalance is the constraint. We have produced some of the most significant musicians in American music and we keep producing them at a rate the city’s venue count does not match.

The next generation is not coming. It is already here and already trained. What it needs is somewhere to play, and somewhere to play is a decision somebody makes on a Tuesday about a Thursday in a room above a bar.

Sources and references

Back to all of Harry's writing