Walk up to The Jazz Station in downtown Eugene, and the first thing you notice are the album covers featuring jazz greats: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Artie Shaw. The window display comes from retired professor Steve Owen’s personal collection, and just walking into the club, that personal touch is palpable. That’s because the storefront space is more than a music venue, said Owen, who is president of The Jazz Station. “It’s a place where people come to connect.”

The club is run by the nonprofit Willamette Jazz Society, which began in 2002 largely to help middle-grade and high school students win a place in the summer jazz camp Owen started when he went to work for the University of Oregon. Three years later, the society started The Jazz Station, a venue for live jazz in Eugene. (Read Daniel Heila’s 2018 ArtsWatch feature about the Station’s history.) The club, the only full-time community-run jazz club in Oregon, has about 235 members. Most are jazz enthusiasts but not professionals, said Eve McClure, Owen’s wife and acting director as well as treasurer of the club. 

The mission of the society and the club “is to foster a vibrant local jazz scene through concerts and educational programs that encourage our community to love, study and perform live jazz.” 

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To that end, besides providing a performance space, The Jazz Station offers four outreach programs. Owen, who is also artistic director of the club and UO professor emeritus of jazz, created First Monday Night Big Band and One Set Wednesday, both designed to provide students a place to play outside of school. House Band Clinics visit local schools to introduce students to jazz or inspire them to continue their study of it. And Jammin’ With the Pros enables anyone from the community, including amateur musicians and young people with no previous experience playing in public, to perform with seasoned professionals. 

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About 70 people volunteer at The Jazz Station. The handful I spoke with said they went first for live jazz, then were drawn to the other people who go there.  As Zig Lawsha, event manager and the venue’s first paid employee, says in a video on the club’s website, “It’s kind of a family more than just like a club.”    

Annual membership costs $100, and members have access to advance ticket sales and can vote for board members. Thirty percent of tickets sold are to regulars who attend four or more shows a year. The venue, at 124 W. Broadway in the city’s entertainment district, occupies a space of about 1,500 square feet and hosts more than 500 local, regional, and national musicians annually on stage. The front room, called “the listening room,” holds 70 seats and includes a bar that offers local beer and wine, but no cocktails or food – the focus here is on music. 

The club has seven part-time paid staff but most of the work, such as management and artistic direction, is done by volunteers. Dona Clarke, a vocalist who moved to Eugene from Los Angeles in 1993, was volunteer coordinator for 10 years, starting in 2009. She spoke about volunteers as if their appearance at the club was almost magical: Somehow, she said, the right person always came at the right time. Take Rich Linton, for instance, a retired UO administrator with plenty of development experience who volunteered just when the club needed help writing grant proposals.  

McClure says her volunteer job as treasurer and director mirrors what she did in her working life. “It’s what I did my whole life, run small businesses.” Now she applies that experience to running a nonprofit jazz club.  

Such clubs are rare, said Owen, as are jazz clubs in general, even for-profit ones. Despite being uniquely American, the genre isn’t as popular in this country as are other music styles. That’s partly because of the lack of availability. 

Owen was introduced to jazz the way a lot of enthusiasts are, by playing in his high school jazz band. The experience propelled him into a career as a jazz composer, saxophonist, and educator. When he moved to Eugene from Ohio in 1988 to work at the university, he started the Jazz Studies Program and the Summer Jazz Improvisation Camp. Jazz camp alumni have gone on to the music program at UO and to become professional musicians, including Owen’s son, Paul, a former drummer with the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. 

Owen came up with the idea for First Monday Night Big Band – the next one is Dec. 2 – which typically starts with a lot of “really experienced players,” he said. As the evening progresses, younger people, mostly students, start sitting in. One Set Wednesday, a student showcase, gives students the experience of playing an entire set in front of an audience. Professionals usually play two sets, Owen explained. The one-set evening allows a beginner, who may not be ready to perform two sets, to be “an ensemble leader on stage.”   

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Twice a month, Clarke curates Jammin’ With the Pros, an organized jam session. She works around the schedule of professional musicians and also performs. You never know how many “jammers” are going to show up from the community, she said. It could be eight or 20, but one thing is for sure, a lot of regulars attend.

A couple of years ago, Clarke recalled, an 8-year-old girl came in with her mother. She had a little alto saxophone and could play, but the thing that impressed Clarke was that she brought musical charts, which she passed out to the band. A professional move, by any standard, the youngster showed the audience — who loved her — that you can learn to act professionally at any age. 

Club volunteers Charles Lawrence and Ted Ledgard don’t know each other, but they have a few things in common. Both were introduced to jazz through their fathers and both moved to Eugene for retirement. Though neither plays anymore, they have put in a lot of hours at the club. Lawrence came to Eugene from Washington, D.C., where he worked as a health researcher at the National Institutes of Health, and Ledgard retired to Eugene from Texas, where he was director of a nonprofit technology association.  

The Jazz Station is about the only place Lawrence goes since his retirement, he said. He tried a couple of different jobs at the club, before McClure realized he could create advertising art on the computer. Now, he is basically the club’s graphic artist. He puts in about 15 hours a week, developing artwork and content for posters, pamphlets, and other promotional materials. He attends two performances a month. What he likes best about the club, he said, is the quality of professional talent brought in, for instance, the university musicians who sit in on Big Band First Monday, or national acts such as The Headhunters, a band formed in the 1970s by Herbie Hancock.

Like McClure, Ledgard has put his past professional experience to use as a volunteer, helping to reorganize the venue after it moved from its first, smaller location. He assisted in building the board of directors to help make management decisions and formed a committee that met weekly “to discuss club business and solve problems.” The committee functioned for six years until the club closed for 17 months during the pandemic. 

During that time, Owen and McClure said they felt the lack of human connection. The upside was they received help in the form of state and federal grants. Not only did the revenue get the club through COVID, but it also allowed them to remodel and create a more inviting atmosphere for when they reopened.  

It was a rebirth, said McClure, ultimately made possible by a “very devoted community of supporters.” They built a new bar, repurposing wood from the old one. They repainted every surface, added more seats, and improved the sound system. They made a better listening room. 

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Still, there is more to The Jazz Station than music. Ledgard said volunteering gave him the small group of friends he now has in Eugene, people who share interests and enjoy each other’s company. He got to know them by talking between sets about music and then about other things.  

It didn’t always have to be about jazz, he said.