One Flight Up is a jazz room in Manhattan’s Financial District, created and run by drummer Joe Strasser and his longtime friend Mark Quinn.

Joe came to New York in 1990 to study at the New School and never left. Over thirty-five years, he became one of the city's most distinctive bebop drummers, recognizable the moment he touches the cymbal. He's shared stages with George Coleman, Harold Mabern, Etta Jones, Cecil Payne, Jane Monheit, Peter Bernstein, and countless others. His heroes are the great timekeepers Jimmy Cobb and Philly Joe Jones - drummers who made everyone else sound better.

Joe and Mark met in the 90s, hanging around the same Greenwich Village clubs: Bradley's, Sweet Basil, the spots that don't exist anymore but still shape how New York jazz musicians think about a room. They stayed close for thirty years, and always talked about doing something together. Mark went on to build a career as an attorney while Joe kept playing, until the time was finally right to make the shift from jazz club participants to jazz club proprietors.

The partnership works because they’re each experts in a different part of the field: Joe knows the music and the musicians, and Mark knows the business. Neither of them wanted to run this alone.

Finding the room was its own small miracle. Joe, who moonlights as a real estate agent, came across a listing for a bar for sale on Facebook Marketplace. The rent was so low he assumed something had to be wrong with it. Nothing was. The space, up a narrow flight of stairs on Greenwich Street, had the bones of the rooms Joe had loved for decades, something that reminded him immediately of Bradley's.

The name picked itself. One Flight Up is a nod to the Dexter Gordon album, and a literal explanation of the space: you’ll find us up one flight of stairs, in a room built for listening.

To run the club, Joe brought in Darcy Burke, who spent years behind the bar at Smalls in the West Village before joining One Flight Up. It's a fitting connection: both are clubs owned and shaped by musicians, built in the spirit of the rooms that came before them. In fact, Smalls owner Spike Wilner headlined One Flight Up’s opening night, a reminder that in New York, a new jazz club isn't competition. It's another home.

One Flight Up is a home for New York's straight-ahead players, the same musicians Joe has spent thirty-five years sharing stages with, alongside a new generation finding its way into the tradition.

Join us.