Celebrating 40 Years of the Dakota with Founder Lowell Pickett

 

This interview originally aired on The Afternoon Cruise on 09/05/25

READ THE COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

 

 

Sean McPherson (Jazz88) 

It’s the Afternoon Cruise. I’m chatting with Lowell Pickett. Lowell Pickett started the Dakota in 1985 and since that time, it’s been a linchpin of the music world. The storied venue is not only one of the premier music rooms in America, it is a venue uniquely recognized for its support of artists, even when those artists aren’t on the schedule. On Saturday, September 20, the Dakota celebrates 40 years of existence with sets from Room3, Davina and the vagabonds, Kavyesh Kaviraj, Jamecia Bennett, Patty Peterson and the Jazz women All-Stars, Nachito Herrera and more. This event is open to the public, and it runs from two to 10 on Nicollet Ave. Lowell, congratulations to you on 40 years.

 

Lowell Pickett 

Oh, thanks, Sean.

 

Sean McPherson (Jazz88) 

Now. Lowell, I have been in the Twin Cities since 1996 and the shows of the Dakota on Bandana Square were really a lot of my education in the world of jazz. I saw artists like Ahmad Jamal, Elvin Jones, Ravi Coltrane, Ray Brown, Christian McBride, Diana Krall, and even in recent years, I’ve seen so many great players at the Dakota on Nicollet, the Headhunters, Nate Smith, Bill Frisell and many more. After you started bringing in some national talent in the 1980s, how did you decide who to book for your room and who would make sense?

 

Lowell Pickett 

Well, I shouldn’t take too much credit for those decisions, really. It happened kind of serendipitously. When the Dakota opened, it really was not a national jazz room. It was we have so many incredibly talented people in the Twin Cities. We have this wealth of talent in the Twin Cities. And originally, the Dakota was a restaurant with a bar and jazz in the bar because I thought that’s what I would like to go out to at night. I’d like to go to a place that has great food and be able to step into the bar and listen to great music afterwards. So we our schedule initially with people like Moore by Four and Shirley Witherspoon and Tim Sparks and some of the great, great players that some of them are still part of the music scene here. Shirley, of course, we lost many years ago, but, and I really resisted having national artists. McCoy Tyner was the first national artist ever perform at the Dakota. He had, in another lifetime, when I was in my 20s, I was making films, documentary films, and two friends of mine from college and I created a nonprofit with the intention of making nationally distributed documentaries, nationally distributed PBS documentaries, which is a really altruistic kind of dream thing to do, because it’s difficult and it was and we were always broke, and we’re always working on it, and we kind of moved our way forward in the meantime, I loved music and I loved the arts, and I got involved in a lot of different arts organizations the Twin Cities as a volunteer, and with our film stuff, we were working with the Walker Art Center, among other and a I went to New York and went to the Village Gate and saw McCoy Tyner. I had a girlfriend that was there, and we went out to see McCoy Tyner, and I was blown away. I just And for me, I didn’t grow up listening to jazz. I grew up listening to folk and rock and roll, and my first real jazz experience was probably other than listening to Dave Brubeck records when I was young, John McLaughlin. I went to a concert at the Guthrie of John McLaughlin of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. And I thought, This is music. Can’t believe this. I can’t believe anything could sound like this. So I started looking into what McLaughlin did, kind of backed up. And when he first came to New York, he was with 19 years old, three weeks New York, and he was in the studio, recording on it in a Silent Way, and became part of that Miles period. And I started listening to more Miles, and then Coltrane and McCoy, and McCoy just really turned my head too. So I arranged a concert at the Guthrie Theater for the Walker Art Center. McCoy Tyner, okay, and that was just for the fun of it. And, you know, it kind of strikes me now how that was possible. But we were all kind of kids, and there was this creative energy in the Twin Cities and Niles, I mean, the person who was in charge of the Walker performing arts program at the time was really open to new things. And I brought that up to him, and he said, Sure, go ahead. So and McCoy and I became friends after that. It was a great concert. You know, we stayed in contact with each other. We’d have dinner when he came to town. We’d talk on the phone every three or four months. He tried to talk me in a movie to New York at one time. Said, what you’re interested in, you should be out there. And said, No, I like it here.

 

Lowell Pickett 

So 10-12, years later, the Dakota was open, and I get a call from an agent, and he was a jazz agent, and said, I’ve got McCoy Tyner coming through. Do you want to have him at your at your club? And I said, No, we don’t do national artists. We don’t present national artists. We’re not set up for it. And I’d never seen New York clubs. I thought that music belonged at the Guthrie or at orchestra Hall. That’s where, in my mind, that means. Music belonged. And I didn’t know the Dakota could even be that kind of a venue for presenting that music. So he kind of pushed me, and I kept pushing me, and I got kind of annoyed, and I said, McCoy and are friends, and I’d love to have him here. It’d be just such an honor, but I don’t think you should push him like he’s a used car or something. And I hung up on him, and he called back two weeks later and said, I talked to McCoy last night. I said, Yeah, and he said, he said you’re friends. And I said, Well, I told you that. He said, No, no. He said, You’re really friends. And he said, If you want him to come and play at your club, don’t worry about the money. Pay him whatever you can you feel you can afford and get him a good piano, and he’ll be happy to come and play, which kind of just dazed me for a moment, because I had no idea that that was possible, and I wanted to make sure that he had a good experience there. So rented a nine foot Steinway, put him up the Whitney Hotel, which is this amazing hotel, down the Warehouse district or along the river in Minneapolis at the time, and had a limousine pick him up at the airport. And I mean, I just, I just wanted him to be happy he was there. And we did two shows a night, and McCoy said, this is a really nice room. All this could this can work. You can do this. And so that worked out. And he also loved the food. He just loved the food. And so because he had liked it so much, Ahmad Jamal was represented by the same agent. So Ahmad said, as long as McCoy liked it that much, I’d like to come too. And then somebody knew Bobby Watson, and Bobby was just finishing up his first tour with Horizon, his brand new band, so Bobby came, and somebody, I think might have been Bobby or somebody, gave me Betty Carter’s home phone number, and she said, Well, I’ll come for what you can afford this time, but I’ll never do it again. I just haven’t been in that market for a long time. And then she won three Grammy Award the week before she got to the Dakota, and she played three nights, and she loved it. And she said, This is wonderful. They said, You ought to have Freddie Hubbard here. You ought to have Nancy Wilson here. So it’s just kind of dominoes, just dominoes. And then because of that Leigh, do you remember Leigh Kamman?

 

Sean McPherson (Jazz88) 

Of course, I do. Was legendary broadcaster.

 

Lowell Pickett 

Legendary broadcaster, legendary broadcaster the jazz image on Minnesota Public Radio every Saturday night. And lay had an incredible history in jazz that a lot of people aren’t aware of. He was in New York in the 40s, and he broadcast live from a club in Harlem, and he was really highly regarded by the jazz community. So Carmen McRae credited lay with being the first radio person in the war in the country to play her music when she went out on her own. And always felt that tied to Leigh. So we contacted Carmen. And Leigh was in New York at the time, and Carmen’s manager asked him, What do you know about this place? And he said, Oh, Betty Carter, liked it. Carmen, you’d like it a lot. So she came because of Leigh Kamman, yeah, she talked me into getting Shirley Horn. Who? And she said, Shirley Horn needs to be here. And because of that, then Freddie Hubbard, by the end of the summer, Horace silver had come. And then in the fall, Joe Williams came. And Joe became Joe came because of Carmen McRae and because of of Carmen’s recommendation. So it just sort of, you know, we didn’t build it up from let’s start booking national artists and see where we can go. It just sort of happened serendipitously. And I felt like I was just along for the ride.

 

Sean McPherson (Jazz88) 

I’m chatting with Lowell Pickett from the Dakota, and we’re getting a little bit of an inside look at how they started to become a real magnet for national and international talent in the jazz world. And it does sound pretty serendipitous Lowell, but so I guess the more useful question is, what made all these artists like it? Because the reverse thing could have happened. McCoy Tyner could have gone there and told Ahmad Jamal that place was garbage. The piano sucked. The food was bad. I didn’t have a good time at all. So if it was the word of mouth of these great artists telling each other this is the spot, what were they telling each other?

 

Lowell Pickett 

You know, I just felt very fortunate that and in awe of these artists, and fortunate that they were willing to come and play at the Dakota, wanted to make their experiences as positive as good as possible. Also wanted to make the audience’s experience as positive as possible, and we had already established really high standards internally for food. You know, my feeling is, if you’re going to do that, why not do it as well as you possibly can? And you know, if I used to think that, you know, if the primary objective was to maximize income in the food business, then open a pizza parlor, sure. Or. You know, something that has very low food cost and very low labor costs and high high volume. And if you really wanted to, if making money was the primary objective with a music venue, you know, having a cover band in a bar would generally work out better in those terms. And you know, neither of those were, you know, I, I thought, if we were doing this, let’s do it as well as we can. We treated we tried to treat artists. We still try to treat artists with as much respect as we possibly can. It’s Ahmed Jamal told me one time that he plays for free, he gets paid to travel. And I can’t imagine the life of an artist. You know, it’s really hard to be a touring artist. You have to be at hotels. You check in your hotel. Sometimes get up at three in the morning to catch a plane and get on to the next place. Or if you’re driving, load up the van and drive, and it’s a really difficult way. And we as audiences benefit from the incredible artistry, the virtuosity of these people come and play for us, you know, in very intimate settings or even in larger ones. But that’s not an easy life for them. And we just see that hour, that hour and a half when they’re playing music, we don’t see all the other stuff. I mean, I’ve seen that, you know, where we’ve had people picked up at 3:30am or, you know, looking for luggage that was lost. Or, you know, picking them up at the airport when they have piles of stuff and, you know, their instruments, and they’ve got to get them into a van and they’re tired because they played the night before. So we tried to make it as easy as we possibly could. When they were here, I heard a story one time. I was also because of those early days, a huge still, I’m a huge fan of John McLaughlin, the great guitar player, and the Dakota presented John’s concerts in the Twin Cities, all of them that have been in the twin cities over the last 25-30 years, and one time was at the Dakota, which was, yeah, that’s a coup. Gosh, it was after we moved on the Nicollet Mall and we didn’t have time to find a theater. And he said, Why don’t we do it at the Dakota? But I had heard from one of his tour managers that one time when they came to Minneapolis. Shortly before that, they had played at a place in Chicago where it was pretty rowdy and somebody had actually spilled beer in the sound board. And before that, they’d been in New York at a well known venue that I won’t mention. It’s a historic venue that isn’t there anymore. They had been charged for everything they ate there, including they were given, they were charged $10 for the pitcher of pop that they had back, the pitcher of Coca-Cola they had backstage. And I thought, you know, that’s kind of sticks in the craw of somebody that, if your hospitality, and if you’re  extending hospitality to people that come into your venue and sit in tables and pay to be there, wouldn’t you want to extend that same level of hospitality and respect to the people that are coming in there and, you know, sharing their artistry with you on Stage? I thought, why would you charge just 10 bucks for a pitcher of coke? Why not build that into the ticket price or the expenses of the show?

 

Sean McPherson (Jazz88) 

It’s a reasonable formula, but it’s often not used, and it differentiates a place like the Dakota, where artists are treated with respect. Frankly, it’s an island in a lot of places where you don’t get treated as respect as artists, particularly in the United States, but clearly the Dakota has built an incredible reputation. That’s why you’re celebrating 40 years.

 

Lowell Pickett 

By the way, I think that we’re really fortunate the Twin Cities. We have a lot of great music venues in the Twin Cities. And I think that that standard of care for for artists, you know, comes out of the Midwestern mentality, maybe, or maybe the twins Minnesota mentality. But I think that we’re really fortunate to have some great venues here in the Twin Cities, and we’re thrilled to be part of that community.

 

Sean McPherson (Jazz88) 

I sincerely agree. And I want to throw some headliner, some highlighter rather, on the artists that are playing this a 40 year Block Party on September 20, Room3, Dave and the vagabonds, Kavyesh Kaviraj, Omar, Abdul-Kareem, Jamecia Bennett, Patty Peterson and the Jazz Women All-Stars, Nachito Herrera and even more artists, which is pretty, beautiful. And I just want to ask you, you know, it sounds Lowell, like you fell in a little bit into the world of booking national level artists, and now it has become something that is a huge part of the Dakota’s identity and a part of your identity. At what year did you first imagine, oh, I might be celebrating 40 years of running the Dakota like 15 years in. Did you feel like I got the longevity This could last for 40 years? At what time could you see this type of timetable?

 

Lowell Pickett 

last year, 39 you know, it’s never really looked at it in that context at all. It’s a. We’re pretty concerned with what’s going on this year. And so, you know, time happens. Yeah, we all grow older, and we’re, if we’re doing what we enjoy, and we’ve next year, we happen to be at the same place, and then two years from now, the same place. So, and it’s, it’s still very satisfying to us to do this. And I love this community. And you know, you talked about the national artists that are coming that we built our reputation on, and we feel really fortunate that those national artists have come. I mean, we’ve people like Philip Glass has played at the Dakota, which just kind of awed me, that we had Philip Glass sitting on that stage. And at one point he did a song that he had written, a piece of music he had written to a company, an Allen Ginsberg poem, and Allen Ginsberg was no longer living at the time that glass is at the Dakota, and he said that they used to perform it together, and at one time they couldn’t always be out together. And he asked Allen Ginsberg if he would give him a recording of the poem of Ginsburg reading it that he could use in those times when Ginsberg couldn’t be with him. And he said, and I have it with me now, and there’s a boom box on the stage next to him. He said, so with your permission, I’m going to bring Alan here electronically. And he turned on the boom box. And so Allen Ginsberg’s voice fills the Dakota with, you know, on a tape that he had specifically recorded for this piece of music with Philip Glass sitting at the piano. Oh, that’s pretty cool sitting there. And so we’ve there are, little stories like that. But at the same time, we have this incredible community of artists here in the Twin Cities. And you just ran through all of those names, virtually everyone. 90% of the artists that are performing for our block party are from the Twin Cities or from Minnesota based. And you know, that doesn’t diminish the quality of their  music one iota.

 

Sean McPherson (Jazz88) 

It’s music. Nobody ever goes. I listen to local music. They go. I listen to music

 

Lowell Pickett 

And different generations. You know, Room3. Room3 was one of First Avenue’s best new bands of 2024 and what they’re doing is they’re taking the jazz tradition and they’re they’re incorporating it with rock and funk, and they’ve created this progressive fusion played by incredibly talented young musicians. So on the one hand, you’ve got that, and then Jamecia Bennett, who, you know, three Grammy Awards with, with the Sounds of Blackness, and she’s a dynamic performer. And then you’ve got Kavy and Omar. Kavy Kaviraj, we’re so fortunate, you think about the Twin Cities, we’ve become a magnet now for people to move here because they feel they can have a career here. And Kavy is an example of that. But world class pianist living here in Omar, specifically, a homegrown pianist.

 

Sean McPherson (Jazz88) 

Omar, trumpet player.

 

Lowell Pickett 

yeah, trumpet player and Omar used to come to the Dakota. I have really wonderful memories of Omar coming with his dad, Ahmed, who has Ahmed and the Creators. And Ahmed is 90 years old now, and Ahmed and Omar used to come to shows together at the Dakota when Omar was 12 years old at the old Dakota. And I just loved seeing them there then, and to see what Omar is doing now. So and then Nachito Herrera. I mean, here’s one of the great Cuban pianists on this planet, which places him among the great pianists in the planet. Chick Corea was at the Dakota once, and I brought up Cubanismo. And Nachito had been the music director of Cubanismo, and he happened to be the show that night. And I wanted to make sure that nobody was encroaching on somebody else’s space. And I said, Are you familiar with Cubanismo? Because Nachito had said that he had met him once in at the North Sea Jazz Festival. And he said, Yeah, amazing band. Are they here? And I said, well, the pianist is here, yes. Bring him back here. And then he turned to the other members of the band, Lenny white and Stanley Clarke, and said, This guy’s an amazing pianist, you know, and Nachito is, and he lives here among us. And then, you know, Patty Peterson, Ginger Commodore, Connie Evingson, the Jazz Women All-Stars. These are all national caliber artists, too. And then Davina and the Vagabonds. And then, you know, cap it off with Tina Schlieske. I don’t know if you knew that Tina was going to be playing. Yeah, Tina schleske. And Tina is a rock icon for the upper Midwest. Tina the B sides has had an incredible run. And then she does all of these other things too. She incorporates, she’s got this jazz thing that she does, kind of a off center thing, Sinatra to Simone. And she’ll be kind of pulling both of those things into her performance, and then the Suburbs. So it’s and that’s exciting for us. It’s really exciting.

 

Sean McPherson (Jazz88) 

Well, Lowell, it seems like you got your head calibrated in the right way, which is thinking about the next year, not 40 years from now. But I gotta say, personally, as a huge fan of music and a huge fan of live music in the Twin Cities. I hope that there’s 40 plus more years to come with what the Dakota is doing, and I appreciate you visiting Jazz88 and talking about it. And congratulations to you, something that you sort of dovetailed into through trying, through not making documentaries, has turned into something that has been such a treasure for Twin Cities, people, for musicians all over the world. We tip our hat to you Lowell Pickett and congratulations on 40 years of the Dakota.

 

Lowell Pickett 

Well, Thanks Sean, and thank you for KBM too, and for what you do, because this station is is an amazing part of the community, and not only for what it gives the community over the airwaves, but the the opportunity that it provides for students in high school to be close to a broadcasting environment and understand what a broad state broadcasting career could be like. I mean, that’s what it’s about. It’s about, you know, appreciating what you have and trying to make sure it’s available to others.

 

Sean McPherson (Jazz88) 

Thank you. Lowell.

 

 

 

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