Mikey's Juke Joint & Eatery is calgary's premier live music venue featuring live music eight days a week
Calgary Plus.ca
A Juke Joint, After a Fashion
A juke joint in the southern vernacular is an informal, often rough-hewn establishment that features blues music, dancing, alcoholic beverages, and maybe even food. The term juke is derived from “joog” in the Gullah tongue, the language spoken by African Americans in the low country region of South Carolina and Georgia. It implied something rowdy or disorderly, and the emphasis of such an establishment was more usually the music and dancing, not the food. While Mikey’s is not known for being rowdy or disorderly, the name does otherwise fit. In more modern parlance it might be called a honky tonk.
The Music Is Important Here
Mikey’s Juke Joint is justifiably known for its music. It has special nights for jugs and blues, an open mic, and jams every Saturday. The energy level is high and the customers get off on the sounds. The list of performers grows longer and longer as time goes by. Such music men as Daren Johnson, Tim Williams, Steve Pineo, Tom Phillips, Ray Lemelin, and John Campbell are heard here, along with Mikey himself, playing the sax. It is not a swanky place, for, as the proprietor allows: “there’s enough fancy places in town”.
Food May Be Secondary, But It’s Still Pretty Darn Good
The food at Mikey’s runs principally to the Cajun stylings. There is crayfish etouffee, a dish which has crawdads (crayfish to the uninitiated) cooked in cayenne pepper, garlic, onions, green peppers, and celery, all smothering a bed of rice. The jambalaya is a dish made of meat, sausage, vegetables, tomatoes, rice, and stock. Great crab cakes and a tasty gumbo are also on hand. So play some pool, socialize, and enjoy the music, but do not ignore the food.
Mikey’s Juke Joint & Eatery New Kid on the Blues Block
JazzElements.com
Saxophone player Mike Clark has stepped out on his own to open Calgary’s newest blues club, Mikey’s Juke Joint and Eatery. Officially opening its doors October 31, 2007, the club showcases live blues acts and singer-songwriters six nights a week, while the menu features Cajun and Southwest cuisine.
Clark is no stranger to the live music club scene, the veteran musician and his band hosted the busy jam session at Morgan’s Pub for the past sixteen years. The Mike Clark Band are also frequently seen on the club circuit and at festivals in Alberta.
Mike Clark is recognized as one of Canada’s top saxophone players, having been nominated three years running for Maple Blues Horn Player of the Year. An in-demand studio player and sideman in a variety of settings, Clark has also lead his own group for nearly two decades and released the critically acclaimed CD Clarkology (2005).
Mikey’s Juke Joint and eatery fills a niche left open by the dearth of live music establishments in Calgary. With the escalating price of real estate and the costs involved with presenting live music, few club owners are willing to take the plunge. With his popularity amongst blues fans here in Calgary, there’s no doubt he’ll be highly successful in his bid to create one of the city’s busiest blues bars.
Swerve Magazine – Calgary Herald
Published: Friday, December 14, 2007
Mack and the boys called their joint The Palace Flophouse and Grill. In time, as told by John Steinbeck in Cannery Row, the boys converted the old storage shed for fish meal into a place to call home. Had they been further south, say in the heart of Dixie, and wont for dancing and carrying on, they might have called it the The Palace Honky Tonk. Had they been poor black migrant workers with blues music in the blood, they might have called it The Palace Juke Joint. Or had they been in Calgary six decades after Steinbeck wrote his Depression-era novel set in Monterey, Calif., the ruffians in question might be Mike Clark (pictured, above right) and Darin Muller, who would cobble together funds and friends and foodies for a live-music venue called Mikey’s Juke Joint & Eatery.
Mikey’s, open since Halloween, is no flophouse, to be sure. And, as Clark says, “it’s not beat up, it’s well-lived in.” The wood-planked floor is timeworn, the walls serendipitously fresco. Y’know, no big whoop. “There’s enough fancy places in town,” says Clark, bartender, host, multi-instrumentalist. A tall, lean, live-jam machine. “Fancy’s not me.”
Fellow musician Tim Williams suggested the venue when Jackdaw’s Pub went up for sale on the busy one-way dogleg at 18th Street and 10th Avenue S.W. Clark saw his chance at “blues and roots on a grassroots budget,” filling a void left by the late King Edward Hotel and Kaos Jazz & Blues Bistro. After 17 years hosting jams at Morgan’s Pub, he’d have his own joint; Muller would be the brains; Marc Anderson, Clark’s nephew from Chilliwack, would be the kitchen whiz, slinging southern fare like crawfish étouffée, jambalaya, killer crab cakes and fall-off-the-bone baby back ribs. Mikey’s would have its gumbo and eat it too: local brews on tap, pool table, Golden Tee, Hockey Night in Canada on the tube, pals like Williams, Steve Pineo and Tom Phillips, on stage singing “I’m going to play Hank Williams till I die.” One day, Clark muses, it could be “one of the happeningest places in Canada.” Sure, it’s not really a juke joint, “but it’s got that kind of energy.”