Brooklyn Jazz Heroes
New York
For the past 16 years Debbie McClain has run BrownStone Jazz in Sankofa Aban Bed & Breakfast, at 107 Macon Street, Brooklyn. You could walk, of an evening, right past this 19th-century town house on a quiet, tree-lined historic block of Bedford-Stuyvesant, not expecting anything special, until you see through its windows people inside swaying to a groove, and hear music wafting through the air.
Inside, McClain is a hands-on hostess, watching over the performances she’s curated with bassist and co-founder Eric Lemons — seven each weekend, the intimate venue (capacity, 200) typically selling out. “The parlor of brownstones like mine were ballrooms in bygone days,” she comments. “People gathered in elegance, and we look to continue that old trend.”
The audience sits back on folding chairs during the parlor performances, absorbing the music and restored 1880s furniture and decor. McClain points to the parlor piano, with parts dating to 1860, and says, “The piano has not just a history, but a soul.” She’s sensitive to the ambience of all this; her family has owned the building for six generations.
Harlem-born but Brooklyn-raised, McClain took piano lessons as a child, performing recitals at Brooklyn Academy of Music, and was in the All-City Schools Choir. But she had drifted away from music, and was running a salon as a stylist in part of the Macon St. brownstone until she won a court ruling about the property in 2009. As quick as she could, Debbie turned it into a jazz venue.
Bassist Lemons offers a list of musicians who’ve performed: “Kiane Zwaldi, Carla Cook, James Spaulding, Houston Person, Vanessa Rubin, Carol Sudhalter, Bobby Sanabria, Craig Holiday Haynes, Lafayette Harris, and, of course, Patience Higgins.” That’s an impressive roll call. Years from now, fans will look back and consider BrownstoneJazz akin to the Brooklyn haunts of the 1940s – ‘60s — places like Tony’s, Blue Coronet and Club la Marchal, where Miles Davis, Roy Haynes, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln and Randy Weston went. For opening her ancestral home to jazz, sustaining and enriching the musicians and listeners alike, the JJA is proud to celebrate Debbie McClain as 2025 Brooklyn Jazz Hero.
— Ronald E. Scott, Amsterdam News
