Crescent Ballroom owner to open 2nd Phoenix music venue
Crescent Ballroom owner Charlie Levy and his business partner, Tucker Woodbury, are opening a second downtown music venue called the Valley Bar. It will be on Central Avenue three blocks away from the Crescent.
As Levy sees it, having a new club that close to the Crescent is "a huge plus."
The Valley promoter, who also runs Stateside Presents, envisions "a symbiotic relationship" between the rooms.
"It's great for us and it's great for people coming to the shows," he says. "It's almost as if Crescent is expanding. People who like to go out, after three or four hours in one place, sometimes you want different scenery. And also, say you're done seeing a concert at Crescent that ends at 11:30 and Sean Watson plays some amazing electronic DJ stuff and that is not your cup of tea. You can walk three blocks away and listen to Morris Alan doing an R&B/soul revue. And vice versa. We're doing our best to book the venues so that it keeps things like that in mind."
The Valley Bar, which has been in the works for a year and will open in May, is an underground venue. And by underground, we do not mean the type of music they'll be bringing in. We mean under the actual ground.
That's part of what appealed to Levy.
"I'm drawn to anything unique and different," Levy says. "And having a basement venue in a 65-year-old building is exciting."
The Valley Bar will be in a three-story building at 130 N. Central Ave., just south of Monroe Street. The 8,000-square-foot space has a capacity of about 250.
"There are bands that we can't have at Crescent because we're already booked that night or just the capacity of Crescent is larger so we need to fill it up," Levy says. "Some bands just aren't at that stage yet to sell Crescent and this way they have a place to play."
And the size of the room allows Levy to take a chance on different types of shows.
"I think we're really gonna make a concerted effort to expand on jazz, classical, spoken-word, things of that nature that you normally wouldn't associate with Crescent," he says. "I think we're going to push the envelope that way and see how it goes. We're talking with the Nash about doing some regular nights, and Doc Jones about doing some things down there. We're talking to Adele Stein about doing some classical stuff. We're gonna do a monthly spoken-word readings called 'This Arizona Life.' I'm reaching out to the people at Arizona Arts to do some plays. We're gonna really try to mix it up."
One other way the Valley Bar will be different than the Crescent? There's a billiards hall, complete with Skee-Ball, shuffleboard and darts.
The bar is set to open Tuesday, May 19, with a show by British alternative-rockers Wolf Alice. Other shows on the books include Crocodiles (May 20), Sergio Mendoza y la Orkesta (May 22), Ximena Sarinana (May 23), Cas Haley (May 26), Honeyhoney (May 30), Ed Schrader's Music Beat (May 31), Griffin House (June 17) and the Life and Times (June 19).
A few shows originally scheduled for the Valley Bar were moved to other venues.
"Lesson learned," Levy says, with a laugh. "When you want to put a venue with a restaurant and bar in a basement, it takes a little bit longer than you might think. There were just things we had to do that you normally wouldn't need to worry about when something is above ground, as in ventilation requirements and sump pumps, things I didn't know about a year ago. I never heard the word sump pump until last June."