Danny Bensusan, a September opening and a family business, 1981 onwards.

The Blue Note is a jazz club before it is a brand. English Wikipedia says the original club opened on 30 September 1981 in the Manhattan district of Greenwich Village, founded by Danny Bensusan, and that the opening performance was given by the Nat Adderley Quintet. The same article says the club takes its name from the blue note of jazz and blues harmony, the bent or flattened note that gives the music its colour, and that other clubs around the world have carried the name, among them a Paris club of the 1950s and 1960s.

Japanese Wikipedia says the club has no direct connection with Blue Note Records, the New York jazz label founded in 1939, whose own story is told in the Blue Note Records guide.

The idea was a room as much as a programme. English Wikipedia quotes Bensusan’s belief that if he brought big acts into a comfortable environment with good food, he could fill the house night after night. In a 21 March 2008 interview with the Music Business Journal, published by students at Berklee College of Music, his son Steven Bensusan said his father set the club apart from others of the time through its bookings and its supper club atmosphere, and named Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Lionel Hampton, Oscar Peterson and the Modern Jazz Quartet as frequent performers in the early years.

The business has stayed in the family. In the same 2008 interview Steven Bensusan described the Bensusan Restaurant Corporation as very much a family business, owning the Blue Note clubs in New York, Japan and Milan as well as B.B. King Blues Club & Grill, opened in Times Square in 2000, and the Highline Ballroom, which he said had opened the previous May with Lou Reed. Today English Wikipedia names Blue Note Entertainment Group as the company that runs the clubs under the brand. Pollstar described Steven Bensusan as president in August 2025, and in August 2026 named Tsion Bensusan as co-owner of the group.

A franchise in Japan, a club in Milan and new rooms in Hollywood and London.

The club travelled to Japan early. Japanese Wikipedia says Blue Note Tokyo opened on 28 November 1988 near Kotto-dori in Minami-Aoyama, and that it is operated by Blue Note Japan, a Japanese company that runs the club as a franchise. The same company opened the Cotton Club in Marunouchi in November 2005 and Blue Note Place in Ebisu on 6 December 2022. Japanese Wikipedia lists further Japanese clubs that have since closed or changed name: Osaka, opened in July 1990 and run by Hanshin Blue Note, which became Billboard Live Osaka in August 2007; Fukuoka, opened on 22 November 1990; and Nagoya, opened in November 2002 and closed in August 2020. English Wikipedia gives 1988 for Tokyo and 1990 for the openings in Osaka and Fukuoka.

Europe followed. English Wikipedia says the group opened Blue Note Milano in 2003, and that in 2016 and 2017 it opened its rooms outside New York in the United States, at the Napa Valley Opera House in California and in Hawaii, as well as its clubs in China and in Rio de Janeiro. It lists Waikiki, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Milan and London among the locations in 2026.

Asked by the Music Business Journal in 2008 how the clubs differed, Steven Bensusan said the look and feel of the rooms was very similar, that New York was the more intimate room, and that when the group built other clubs it tried to keep that intimacy while adding comforts New York had no space for; the main difference, he said, was the menus, which are matched to each market.

The Los Angeles club shows that approach at work. Pollstar reported on 14 August 2025 that the club was opening that day in Hollywood, in a building that had held two restaurants, and that the January fires had delayed the project. The magazine said the room had been designed to look like the Greenwich Village club with its own Los Angeles nuances, with a second space called the B-side room for developing artists and after-parties, a d&b audiotechnik sound system and a menu by Asaf Maoz. Robert Glasper opened the club with a two-night stand. Tsion Bensusan told the magazine that the group looked for accessibility, parking and a space with few columns, and that the builders ended up gutting and rebuilding the whole interior.

Blue rooms, brass plaques on the tables and the name of a note.

A music venue is usually met from the street before it is met from the stage. The name on the façade, whether painted, carved, lit in neon or spelled out in changeable letters on a marquee, is often the oldest part of the identity and the hardest to change, because regulars use it for directions and photographers use it as a backdrop. Inside, the room itself does much of the branding work: the shape of the stage, the colour of the walls, the seats or the standing floor, the lighting rig and the bar all become part of what people remember. Printed matter carries that memory outwards. Gig posters and handbills tend to change with every booking, so a venue often holds a few fixed elements, such as a name block, a colour or a border, and lets the illustration and lettering vary from night to night.

Smaller pieces matter as much as the big ones. Tickets, wristbands, hand stamps and backstage passes put the venue’s mark on the body and in the pocket, and collected tickets turn into a record of nights out. Some clubs and halls extend the name into recordings, through live albums, compilation mixes or a house label, which means the mark has to work on a sleeve, a streaming thumbnail and a radio credit. Merchandise adds another layer, from shirts and tote bags to prints of the building. A workable system decides in advance which parts stay constant across all of these and which are free to change with each season, promoter or performer.

From West Village tables to a Covent Garden basement.

A detailed account of the club’s look comes from the London room. Pollstar reported on 6 August 2026 that Blue Note would open its London club on 23 September 2026 in the basement of the St Martins Lane hotel in Covent Garden, with Robert Glasper headlining the opening nights and serving as the club’s creative ambassador. The magazine said the rich blue interiors, elegant drapery, bespoke lighting, curated jazz photography and the Blue Note plaque tables, which it described as synonymous with the brand, were designed by Julien Legeard of Legeard Studio, who also worked on sightlines, lighting and acoustics. A second room, again called the B-Side, was to follow later in 2026 for emerging British musicians. The programming director, Nick Lewis, had spent more than fifteen years at Ronnie Scott’s and then led music at KOKO, the magazine said.

Around the rooms the group has built a set of related names. English Wikipedia says the Blue Note Jazz Festival began in New York in 2011 and has since run in other cities, including at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles; Pollstar reported in 2025 that the Hollywood Bowl edition that June was staged with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Wikipedia also describes Blue Note Travel, set up in 2015 to run music-led trips, and Half Note Records, the club’s live label. Steven Bensusan told the Music Business Journal in 2008 he was not sure exactly when the label began: it started informally, with deals to sell musicians’ recordings in the club shops, and grew into a distribution deal with Ryko and a run of albums largely recorded live at the club, by artists including Elvin Jones, James Carter, Arturo Sandoval and Kenny Garrett. He also said each venue employed its own graphic designers and marketing team.

For a design guide, Blue Note Jazz Club shows how a hospitality brand can travel by repeating a room rather than a logo: the same blue, the same tables and the same supper-club format, with a menu changed for each city. Compare the Village Vanguard and Ronnie Scott’s guides. For this guide we use room blue, midnight, plaque brass and tablecloth with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Blue Note Jazz Club’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.