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.
From 1966 to 1991, Mendota held one of the most sustained jazz operations in the Upper Midwest—a room called the Emporium of Jazz that operated for twenty-five consecutive years in a converted potato warehouse and was later recognized by the Minnesota Historical Society as one of the 150 things that made Minnesota.
I need 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 on KBEM. Some of what follows is oral history passed down through the musicians who built the scene. I am telling you where it comes from.
Did Jazz Need a Room in Mendota, Minnesota?
Yes. The Rampart Street Club proved it first, and the Emporium proved it could sustain.
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. Evans played there with local musicians and brought in players from the circuit. When it closed in 1961, the basic infrastructure it had created—the audience, the musicians, the understanding that Mendota could support a jazz venue—passed to what came next.
The Transition From Evans to the Hall Brothers
In 1966, Stan Hall and Russ Hall—the Hall Brothers—opened the Emporium in the same converted potato warehouse that would house the room for its entire twenty-five-year run. The building sat on Mendota’s main street, small enough that you could see the whole venue from the door. The Halls had the cornet-and-piano tradition that Evans had established. They kept the repertoire: Dixieland standards, New Orleans blues numbers, the tunes that went back to the 1920s and early 1930s.
The band rotated musicians from the Twin Cities—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 economic 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.
The Audience Architecture
By the early 1970s, the Emporium had established a steady crowd. The room held maybe 75 people on a tight night. On good nights—and most nights were good nights—people stood at the bar and in the doorway. The door opened directly onto the main street, and you could hear the music from outside, which brought people in from the street on Friday and Saturday nights.
The audience was not exclusively traditional jazz aficionados. Some people came because they wanted to hear Butch Thompson play piano. Some came because the Funky Butt Dance Hall—a secondary space behind the main stage—gave them a place to dance and talk without disturbing the people who came to listen. Some came because it was the only live music venue for fifty miles in any direction. Some came because Dave Odell, the dentist who financed the operation, knew half the town.
Who Kept the Emporium Alive When Economics Didn’t Work?
Dave Odell did. He was the venue’s angel investor, and he chose to absorb losses for twenty-five years.
Every sustained jazz operation needs someone who is willing to absorb losses in exchange for something that cannot be measured on a balance sheet. That person was Dave Odell—a dentist with a practice in Mendota, 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 operation, with food that was basic but competent: burgers, fish, the kind of food that kept people in the room and spending money. Behind the bandstand, the Halls built the Funky Butt Dance Hall—named after a New Orleans tradition—which gave the room a secondary income stream and a name that told you exactly what the people who ran it thought was funny.
The Economics of Patronage
Odell’s investment was not passive. The Emporium’s operating costs—the band’s pay, the utilities, the maintenance on that converted potato warehouse—were steady and non-negotiable. The revenue fluctuated. A cold winter meant fewer people drove out to Mendota. A competing venue in Minneapolis pulled crowds. The general cultural drift away from traditional jazz in the 1970s and 1980s meant that some years were harder than others.
Odell kept writing checks. 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 alternative—a business model based on profitability—would have closed the room in 1973 or 1978. Instead, the Emporium ran until 1991, which meant that musicians who started there in the 1960s were still playing there in their sixties and seventies. That kind of stability is rare in jazz.
| Year | Operating Status | Notable Events |
|---|---|---|
| 1958-1961 | Rampart Street Club | Doc Evans’ traditional jazz room establishes Mendota audience |
| 1966 | Emporium opens | Hall Brothers take over the converted potato warehouse |
| 1966-1975 | Building audience | Steady Friday/Saturday operations, adding restaurant and liquor license |
| 1975-1985 | Sustained operations | National drift away from traditional jazz; Odell’s patronage critical |
| 1985-1991 | Late era | Continued operations as other Twin Cities venues close |
| 1991 | Emporium closes | After 25 consecutive years of operation |
| 2008 | MN150 recognition | Minnesota Historical Society names it one of 150 things that made Minnesota |
How Did a Potato Warehouse in Mendota Stay on the Same Circuit as Preservation Hall?
The Emporium was a serious room. Serious musicians came to play there.
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.
Nobody drove to Mendota on a weekday. But on Friday and Saturday, they came from everywhere—musicians knew where the serious rooms were, and the Emporium was one of them.
The Emporium’s Place in a National Network
Serious rooms attract serious musicians. The Emporium was a serious room because the Hall Brothers and Dave Odell treated it that way. They did not compromise the music for profit. They did not book pop covers to bring in a younger crowd. They played the traditional jazz canon—Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings—and they played it straight.
That commitment was rare enough in 1966 that it became a calling card. By the early 1970s, New Orleans musicians knew that if they were touring the Upper Midwest, there was a room in Mendota where they could play their music to an audience that cared about it. The New Orleans jazz network—the musicians who had been on Rampart Street in the 1920s, who had recorded for Folkways, who were traveling as the living archive of the tradition—knew about the Emporium.
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. Both of them learned the music and developed their playing in a room that was not trying to be something it was not.
The Musicians Who Made It Serious
The rotating cast of players at the Emporium were not stars by national standards. They were serious traditional jazz musicians in a region where serious traditional jazz was not a given. They came from the Twin Cities jazz community—musicians who had day jobs or who lived on the money they made from gigs. They played the Emporium because it was the kind of room where you could play all night and not be asked to compromise the music.
That stability mattered. A lot of jazz rooms in the 1960s and 1970s were driven by whatever made money that week. The Emporium was driven by what music mattered. The difference, over twenty-five years, shaped entire careers.
What Did Twenty-Five Years in Mendota Mean for the Twin Cities?
It meant sustained institutional memory at a time when most jazz rooms were closing.
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.
The Emporium in the Context of Twin Cities Jazz
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 in 1976. 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 radio station provided reach. The print publication provided context. The room provided live experience. The society provided community.
The Institutional Permanence Question
By the 1980s, most of the rooms that had sustained the Twin Cities jazz scene in the 1960s and early 1970s were closed. The Emporium remained. It was no longer cutting-edge—it was running the same program in 1986 that it had run in 1966. By some measures, that made it invisible. By other measures, that made it essential.
The musicians who came of age in the Emporium in the 1960s were teaching the next generation by the 1980s. Butch Thompson’s influence on the scene came partly from his playing and partly from his work at the Emporium, where he demonstrated that you could build a life around serious music without compromise.
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.
What Happened to Mendota After the Emporium
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. By 1991, the Emporium was one of the oldest continuous operations in Mendota, a town that had not been kind to old businesses.
The building still stands. The potato warehouse conversion never housed anything after the Emporium closed. It sits quiet on Mendota’s main street, the kind of building that jazz historians point to when they drive out to the site and remember what happened there.
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. For current information on Twin Cities jazz venues and events, check Twin Cities Jazz Society.
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