The Afterthought

Musician friends mention it in passing, and suddenly an entire origin story unfolds. First gigs. First jam sessions. First time hearing somebody and realizing music could be a life. First dates. First nights that stretched too late and somehow changed everything.

Everyone seems to carry a different Afterthought.

I never told anyone I was working on this piece, but I felt pulled toward writing about the Afterthought and the giant hole it left in our musical community last week, while sitting at my son’s end-of-the-year party across the street from the shell of what was once the Afterthought.

People felt it immediately, but I don’t think we understood the gravity of it until years later.

When the mural panels ended up at Dave’s Place, I felt connected to that. There was something right about a physical piece of that room surviving. Music was still being made in front of it. New memories forming underneath old ones.

Then Dave’s Place followed the same inevitable path. Nobody wanted us to close. Everyone said the same thing people had said about the Afterthought: When are you going to reopen? Someone should bring it back. Maybe that’s because we misunderstand what made those places special.

The Afterthought wasn’t just a room. Dave’s Place wasn’t just a room. Those places existed exactly when they needed to exist. Recreating the furniture, the stage, the menu, the walls…that isn’t the same as recreating the people who found each other there.

Lately, I’ve caught myself wondering if that’s part of what we’re building at Moody Brews. Not another Dave’s Place. Not another Afterthought. But another place where community forms quietly. Where people become family. Where memories are being made, and origin stories are beginning. Most of us won’t hear those stories until long after we’ve moved on. Not because we wanted to move on. Just because that’s what life does.

The Afterthought was where everything started for me, but most of the kids coming to the jam at Moody Brews never even knew the Afterthought.

It’s where I cut my teeth in the jazz world. My first jam session. My first real combo experience. The first time I learned what it felt like to not just practice jazz, but to actually play jazz with people who knew what they were doing.

Looking back now, it’s hard to overstate how much that room shaped me as a musician. The room had history. Serious history. Looking back now, it’s astonishing how many players passed through that room before I even knew what a saxophone was. But it never felt exclusive to me.

On any given night, you might end up sitting next to a businessman relaxing after work, a local representative, a city board member, or somebody who had been coming there every Thursday for twenty years. People came to listen. People came to talk. People came because that room had become part of their routine. That mix always felt special to me. National-level players on the stand, regulars at the tables, and somehow it all felt completely normal.

From the outside, it didn’t announce itself. It just sat quietly on the corner of Beechwood and Kavanaugh in Hillcrest with nothing to prove.

Inside felt different.

Huge floor-to-ceiling glass windows lined the Kavanaugh side, and from the bandstand area, you could watch cars pass while you played. There wasn’t a proper stage. Just a section of parquet wood floor in front of five giant floor-to-ceiling panels painted with a mural depicting a busy New Orleans square full of life and music.

Off in the opposite corner sat an old black grand piano. Not polished. Not meant to impress anybody. Just there.

Across from it was a fireplace built into the middle of the dimly lit dining room. At the back of the room, opposite those big windows up front, was a full bar with every spirit you could imagine lining the walls.

It felt like one of those places that already had stories before you walked in and kept collecting them after you left because it was.

My dad actually took me there when I was in high school to hear a friend of his play. At some point during the night, he convinced them to let me sit in.

I was fifteen years old.

I don’t remember everything I played. I’m sure some of it was rough. But I remember the feeling of being in that room and realizing, maybe for the first time, that this was something I wanted to chase.
Over the years, The Afterthought became more than just a place I played. It became part of the rhythm of my life. I spent countless nights there listening, learning, sitting in, subbing with different groups, and eventually leading my own nights.

Some nights were quiet and conversational. Other nights felt electric from the first tune. Almost every night eventually turned into a jam session. You’d start the evening with one group on the schedule, but by the second set, there might be extra horn players standing around the bandstand, a singer getting talked into sitting in, or a musician visiting from out of town quietly unpacking a horn case near the bar. Nobody really thought twice about it. That was just what happened there. And when the music connected, the room changed.

You could feel conversations stop. Ice would stop clinking in glasses. The room would slowly lean in toward the bandstand until all that seemed to exist was the music itself.

And if one loud drunk at the bar missed the cue and kept talking over the band, they usually didn’t last long. Not because management stepped in, but because the audience cared enough to protect the room. People came there to listen.

That always meant something to me.

The musicians who played there pushed each other, too. Nobody had to say anything outright. You could just feel the standard in the room. And yet for all the talent that passed through there, what I remember most now is the feeling. The feeling of setting up a horn while hearing glasses and quiet conversation in the background. The sound of somebody counting off a tune while traffic rolled by outside those giant windows. The warmth of the fireplace in winter. The low light. The mural behind the band. The sense that something special might happen at any moment.

More nights than I can recall ended with that feeling that the band had somehow become bigger than the individual musicians on stage. Those were the nights that kept all of us coming back.

Places like that don’t really disappear. Even after the doors close, they keep showing up. The Afterthought may be gone now, but for those of us who spent part of our lives inside that little corner room in Hillcrest, it never really left us.