You may have your preferences about hearing jazz in either a club or a concert hall.

You might make no distinction and choose all of the above, perhaps. In a club, you are closer to the action. You can often hear the music better, and yes the sound quality is usually better. The downside in terms of distractions are that you have to put up with other people eating, drinking and chatting and worst of all not caring because they are in the club not necessarily to experience the music. In a concert hall you might be 80 metres or further from the stage. Sometimes you can see artists who never play clubs and if they did they'd cost a bomb. However, the sound even in great halls may not be that pukka particularly if you have not paid to sit at the front or in a good spot half way back. You will have to put up with people shoving by to nudge you up out of your seat for them to get to their seat or the management force you to drink your beverage in a plastic cup. There is as much intimacy in a hall half the time as sitting at a bus stop waiting to trudge home.

The scale of small combos usual in jazz suits small places. This may well be the key to this whole brief discussion. However, more than that: the main considerations are more subtle. Jazz is a social music. It is not a studio experience, nor is it ideally sitting in a concert hall anonymously listening anonymously and leaving anonymously although we as punters are often forced to do just this. The place is all however you see it wherever and it feeds decisively into the art itself. The KKL concert hall in Lucerne, top, which has the best concert hall acoustics in our reckoning just about anywhere. Bertrand Tavernier imagined the classic and still powerful jazz club experience most convincingly via the inspiring writings of Francis Paudras in Tavernier's great film Round Midnight starring Dexter Gordon as Dale Turner excerpted above in the video.