The New York institution, founded in Greenwich Village in 1981, opens in the basement of St Martins Lane hotel with two performance spaces and a programming philosophy built around the UK’s thriving jazz scene.
London’s jazz scene has been building toward something for a decade. Ezra Collective, Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Yussef Dayes, Kokoroko, Shabaka: a generation of British artists who have redefined what jazz sounds like in the 21st century and taken it well beyond the jazz bubble into pop festivals, mainstream streaming and international recognition. The Blue Note Jazz Club has been watching. Now it’s arriving.
Blue Note London opens in early September in the basement of St Martins Lane hotel in Covent Garden, the club’s first UK venue after 45 years in New York’s Greenwich Village and expansions to Tokyo, Los Angeles, Milan, São Paulo and Shanghai. The choice of London is not incidental. It is a direct response to what has been happening in British music over the last decade, and the people running it know that scene from the inside.
The venue
Two performance spaces sit within the basement: the main Blue Note room, a 250-capacity seated club designed from a blank slate with no structural columns, giving the team full control over the acoustics and sightlines. Below it is the B Side, a 100-capacity space with a more flexible format: tables and chairs for intimate gigs, then cleared for DJ-led nights, Latin music and dancing events. The combination is designed deliberately to attract a cross-generational audience across different moods and formats.
The main room follows the seated format of the New York original, which dictates a certain aesthetic and intimacy: you are there to listen. The B Side is where things get looser.
The programming
Nick Lewis, who joins as director of music and programming after 15 years at Ronnie Scott’s and a stint at Koko, has spent his career at the centre of the UK jazz scene. The artists he is naming as targets for the opening months are the artists he has been championing for over a decade: Ezra Collective, Shabaka’s various projects, Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Yussef Dayes. He knows them personally. Many are already confirmed.
The programming philosophy extends well beyond jazz in its traditional sense. As Steven Bensusan, president of Blue Note Entertainment Group, puts it: as long as it has jazz DNA, it belongs here. Soul, R&B, hip-hop, Afrobeats, reggae: anything that traces a lineage back to the music that gave Blue Note its name. This is the same philosophy the New York club has followed since 1981, when Dizzy Gillespie and Kool & the Gang shared the same calendar year.
The calibre of artist being targeted is, by Lewis’s own admission, pretty A-list. He’s not naming names yet, but points to the Los Angeles Blue Note’s record of underplays by major artists as an indication of what London might expect.
Why now and why London
The licence wasn’t straightforward. Blue Note faced opposition from local residents and the Metropolitan Police when it applied in 2025, and the process was, in Bensusan’s words, harder than anything they’d encountered in other markets. They got the result they needed. Lewis’s response to the difficulty is direct: this is a good news story for London, full stop.
Blue Note London is also the first step in a broader European expansion, with the Covent Garden venue acting as the flagship model. Milan has had a Blue Note for 22 years but sits in a smaller market. London changes the scale of ambition entirely. Other European cities will follow if this works.
The London x London Take: Blue Note opening in London is exactly the kind of thing the city’s jazz scene has earned. The combination of an internationally recognised room, a programmer who has spent 15 years at the centre of British jazz and a philosophy built explicitly around the UK artists who have made the last decade so remarkable is as good an opening proposition as London’s live music scene has seen in years. Book early once the first season is announced.
Need to Know
- Where: Blue Note London, St Martins Lane hotel, 45 St Martins Lane, Covent Garden, London WC2N 4HX
- Opens: Early September 2026
