Mendota, Minnesota has 206 people. It sits nine miles southwest of Minneapolis, just across the Minnesota River from Fort Snelling, and it has been a settlement of one kind or another since the 1820s. There is not much there now. There was not much there in 1966. What was there, from 1966 to 1991, was one of the most sustained jazz operations in the Upper Midwest — a room called the Emporium of Jazz that ran for twenty-five years in a converted potato warehouse and was recognized by the Minnesota Historical Society as one of the 150 things that made Minnesota.
I want to be honest about what I know firsthand and what I know from other sources. I came to this story through the musicians who were there — Butch Thompson, Charlie DeVore — and through Jay Goetting’s book Joined at the Hip, which documents the Twin Cities jazz scene with the care it deserves. Leigh Kamman, whose papers are now at the Hennepin County Library, wrote the foreword to that book. I produced Leigh’s show. Some of what follows is oral history passed down through the musicians who built the scene. I am telling you where it comes from.
What Was There Before
The Emporium did not appear from nowhere. Before it, there was Doc Evans’ Rampart Street Club, which operated in Mendota from 1958 to 1961. Doc Evans was a cornetist and one of the key figures in Twin Cities traditional jazz — a Dixieland revivalist who understood that the music needed a room and was willing to build one. The Rampart Street Club was that room for three years. When it closed, the infrastructure it had created — the audience, the musicians, the basic understanding that Mendota could support a jazz venue — passed to what came next.
The Emporium of Jazz opened in 1966. Stan Hall and Russ Hall — the Hall Brothers — were at the center of it. They ran the room with a rotating band of Twin Cities musicians: Butch Thompson on piano, Charlie DeVore, Mike Polad, Doug Haining, and others who cycled through the Emporium over the years. The band played Friday and Saturday nights, which was the right call. Nobody drove to Mendota on a weekday. On weekends, they came from Minneapolis and St. Paul and the suburbs, making the nine-mile trip to a town of 206 people to hear jazz in a converted potato warehouse.
Dave Odell and the Angel Investor Question
Every jazz operation needs someone who is willing to absorb losses in exchange for something that cannot be measured on a balance sheet. At the Emporium, that person was Dave Odell — a dentist, the venue’s angel investor, and the reason the Emporium survived the years when the numbers did not work.
The Emporium started as a bottle club, which meant patrons brought their own liquor and paid a setup fee. It eventually got a liquor license and added a restaurant. Behind the bandstand, they built the Funky Butt Dance Hall — named after a New Orleans tradition — which gave the room a secondary space and a name that told you exactly what the people who ran it thought was funny.
Odell’s investment was not passive. He kept the operation alive through fiscal distress that would have closed a venue run by people primarily concerned with profit. The Hall Brothers, by all accounts, were not primarily concerned with profit. The music came first. The room came second. The economics were a distant third. That ordering, sustained over twenty-five years, is the reason the Emporium lasted as long as it did.
The New Orleans Connection
The Emporium was a traditional jazz room — Dixieland, New Orleans-rooted, the music that Doc Evans had brought to Mendota in the 1950s and that the Hall Brothers continued through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. That sound connected them directly to the New Orleans musicians who were still working the circuit.
Kid Thomas — Kid Thomas Valentine, the New Orleans cornetist who had been playing since the 1920s — played the Emporium. Musicians from Preservation Hall, the New Orleans institution that kept traditional jazz alive through the same decades, passed through Mendota on their way through the Upper Midwest. The idea that a converted potato warehouse in a town of 206 people was on the same circuit as Preservation Hall is the kind of detail that sounds improbable until you understand how jazz geography actually works. Serious rooms attract serious musicians. The Emporium was a serious room.
Butch Thompson, who played piano at the Emporium for years, later became one of the most respected traditional jazz musicians in the region — a figure whose work at the Emporium was part of his formation. Charlie DeVore is another name that runs through the oral history of the Twin Cities scene, someone who was there during the Emporium years and who passed his knowledge of what happened to the people who came after.
Twenty-Five Years
The Emporium of Jazz ran from 1966 to 1991. That is twenty-five years of Friday and Saturday jazz in Mendota, Minnesota. In those twenty-five years, the room survived funding gaps, format pressure, the death of multiple Twin Cities jazz venues that had seemed more viable, and the general cultural drift away from traditional jazz that marked the 1970s and 1980s.
It survived because the Hall Brothers did not quit and Dave Odell did not stop writing checks. That is the short version. The longer version involves the specific stubbornness of people who believe that something matters and refuse to behave as if it does not.
In 2008, the Minnesota Historical Society recognized the Emporium as part of its MN150 project — 150 things that made Minnesota. The other items on that list include the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, the Mayo Clinic, and the invention of the pacemaker. The Emporium of Jazz in Mendota is in that company. That recognition landed sixteen years after the club closed, which is often how these things work: the importance becomes legible only after the room is gone.
There is a casino where part of Mendota’s downtown once stood. The threat of that development — the redevelopment money that nearly consumed the old buildings — was one of the pressures the town faced in the Emporium years. The jazz room survived longer than most of what surrounded it.
What It Means for the Twin Cities Story
The Twin Cities jazz scene is not a single institution or a single era. It is a sequence of rooms — the Emporium in Mendota, the Artist’s Quarter in Minneapolis and then St. Paul, the Dakota on Nicollet Mall, Jazz Central Studios today — each of which sustained the scene for a period and passed the audience and the musicians to whatever came next.
The Emporium’s twenty-five years overlapped with KBEM Jazz 88 establishing its jazz format. It overlapped with Leigh Kamman broadcasting The Jazz Image on Minnesota Public Radio. It overlapped with the Twin Cities Jazz Society organizing the community and editing Jazz Notes. All of these things were happening simultaneously, feeding each other, building something that no single institution could have built alone.
The potato warehouse in Mendota was one piece of that. Twenty-five years of Fridays and Saturdays, New Orleans musicians passing through, a dentist writing checks because he believed in the music. The Minnesota Historical Society got it right.
The Emporium of Jazz operated at its Mendota, Minnesota location from 1966 to 1991. Jay Goetting’s Joined at the Hip documents the Twin Cities traditional jazz scene, including the Emporium years, with the fullness the story deserves.
