The popular jazz club, Bal Blomet leads the public and artists in the footsteps of the great figures who have frequented it from Man Ray to Ernest Heningway.
A generation eager for distractions
The Bal Blomet adventure began in 1924. Jean Rézard de Wouves, West Indian candidate for deputy, set up his campaign headquarters at 33, rue Blomet, in an 18th century house converted into a wine trade and then into a cabaret under the name of ” Bal Blomet”. To attract and retain the meager audience at his political meetings, Jean Rézard, a better musician than orator, sat down at the piano and played the music of his Caribbean origins with great success. The generation of the Roaring Twenties is then eager for distractions on a background of music and dreams of a new world in reaction to the sufferings of the Great War. We are frantically passionate about new cultures and new aesthetics such as Surrealism, Dadaism, Jazz, Art Deco…
An exotic atmosphere
The artists of the Roaring Twenties frequented the Bal Blomet assiduously to enjoy the exotic atmosphere: we came across Joséphine Baker, Foujita, Calder, Maurice Chevalier, Mistinguett and the muse Kiki de Montparnasse accompanied by Man Ray. American writers Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, meet there. The artists of 45 rue Blomet Joan Miro, André Masson, Francis Picabia, Robert Desnos and his surrealist friends meet Mondrian, an excellent dancer, or Kees van Dongen there. The Prince of Wales escapes from an official ceremony to slum it and offers generous tips to the musicians.
A concert hall dedicated to jazz
Threatened with extinction, the elected representatives of the West Indies mobilized in 2010 to safeguard this testimony to the past. It was the crush of Guillaume Cornut, a former London trader and amateur pianist, who finally made it possible to bring this emblematic place of history back to life. The reopening took place in 2017. Renovated in a cabaret spirit, the establishment is composed of a concert hall mainly dedicated to jazz.
Le Bal Blomet
33 Rue Blomet, 75015 Paris
