Brent “Doc” Watkins just wanted to play jazz, to perform sweet melodies and syncopated rhythms that swing, bounce and soar.
He held no aspirations for starting a jazz club. He did not dream of becoming an entrepreneur. He had no vision to build community through live music and hospitality.
Watkins simply wanted to entertain. With his fingers dancing across the piano. With a band pulsating with improvisational riffs.
Yet here he is, 10 years after opening his doors in a basement at Pearl: a businessman celebrating a milestone. Watkins is an entrepreneur expanding his live music footprint in Houston (and next year in Chicago) with the jazz club, “Docs.” And he’s an author telling a story — Jazz, TX marks its 10th anniversary Sunday — he never expected to tell.
Watkins’ new book, “Jazz, TX: A Love Letter To Live Music, Community And The Little Club That Could,” is more than what it claims to be. Scheduled for release on Aug. 25, “Jazz, TX” explains how a city without a major jazz venue gave birth to the premier jazz supper club in Texas.
“The story of Jazz, TX is an underdog story,” Watkins writes in the prelude. “It’s a story of going back to analog. A story about live music and shared community. It’s about centering the human element of making music and putting the house back in hospitality. We didn’t set out to create a movement when we built Jazz, TX, but in founding a successful jazz club in a place that jazz clubs weren’t supposed to be, we tapped into a very old desire that starves in a modern world where going out seems quaint when everything can come to you.”
The book takes readers into the bones of the building below Pearl’s Bottling Department. It guides them through the architecture and history of a space that once supported a brewery.
“So when you walk into the vestibule of Jazz TX,” Watkins writes, ”you are actually walking into an old iron elevator cage from the brewhouse.”
The memoir rips open wounds from his youth: parents who hated each other and divorced, chronic misbehavior that prompted his mother to homeschool him; harsh rebukes from the musician father he idolized.
The book traces the arc of a musical journey: from piano lessons at 7 to a music scholarship at 18, from masters and doctorate degrees in music to a decision to abandon classical music for jazz.
“Everyone started calling me Doc,” Watkins writes, “because of the degree.”
He started at the bottom. A piano in an Italian restaurant once caught his eye. Watkins asked the owner if he could play jazz for free. She provided a bass player. Watkins brought his band. His pay for the night: $60.
Gig by gig a jazz career blossomed. He played at steakhouses. He recorded albums. He built a following. Then came an offer he wanted to refuse. Investors asked him to start a jazz club at Pearl. A CEO offered a check that “made my eyes pop.” Watkins did not feel qualified. Lots of other people, he believed, were better suited to launch a jazz venue.
Friends pushed back. They told him he was the guy. Watkins resisted until he relented, agreeing to an offer that included help with the construction. “That was the birth of Jazz, TX,” he writes.
People packed the place on opening night. After the first show on Aug. 23, 2016, patrons applauded the launch. Dinner, service and show, they said, went well. Behind the scenes, though, problems kept erupting. Pipes leaked. Burglar alarms sounded accidentally. The ticket printing system broke. The kitchen caught fire.
“It was a whole series of stupid mistakes,” Watkins writes.
Then there was the rat, a stubborn rodent that tormented Watkins and the staff that first year.
They tried traps, poison, pest control. Nothing worked.
Watkins pulled out a pellet rifle.
When the rat appeared after a business meeting, Watkins pumped his weapon. The rat leaped from a mop bucket and scurried across the floor. Watkins fired and struck the club’s general manager, Jake Corney, in the leg.
“Seventy-two hours later, Jake’s whole thigh was purple,” Watkins writes. “It looked like a horse had kicked him, or like one of those crab nebula photos from the Hubble Space Telescope.”
Corney recovered. The rat never returned.
While Corney hasn’t read the book’s account of the incident yet, it resembles what he remembers. An uncatchable rodent. A mop bucket. A misfire.
“We just lost all composure,” Corney said, recalling that the rat leaped out of the bucket. “When he (Watkins) jumped back, the gun came up and he pulled the trigger. I’m kneeled over and I see the rat run back across the floor. He said, ‘What happened?’ I said, ‘You shot me.’ He said, ‘No I didn’t.’ I pulled up my jeans and I had blood coming down.”
It took Watkins and his team three years to get each of the club’s major elements — food and beverage, music and service — just right. The menu evolved. The kitchen expanded. The staff grew. The seating tightened.
“We needed our guests to rub against each other a little,” Watkins writes. “On the practical side, we want to sell more tickets. If you max out your fire code capacity and get a hundred people in a space that comfortably seats ninety, it’s like a hot knife through butter. People love it. If you cut that crowd in half, the same people will act totally different. A full room is amazing. A half-full room is a nightmare.”
When Watkins is not performing, recording, writing or opening clubs, he’s managing TurnTable, a digital ticketing platform and marketing and production company he created to support jazz clubs and other venues.
Or he’s producing short jazz films. His latest project, filmed in Japan, will be released this fall: “One Night Stand in Tokyo.”
Once an aspiring classical pianist, Watkins has become something else: an artist with an entrepreneurial spirit, rising, shifting and soaring, like a fine riff of jazz.
