A Lot More Than Coffee — Qathra Cafe Launches Live Music Series

Seven months after quietly taking over at Qathra, new owner Brainerd James is ready to make some noise.

This Friday (5/13), the café on Cortelyou Road will host the second in what James hopes will become a regular series of live musical performances. The show will feature Roy Nathanson and Tim Kiah, who record together in the band Sotto Voce.

“For the first couple of months, everyone I met was like ‘I play the sax,’ ‘I play the guitar,’ ‘I play the piano,’ — everyone was a musician,” James recalled. “I thought—Great! This is great, we can tap into this.”

“So I decided, well, just ask them. ‘Hey, you wanna play here?’ And that’s how it all started,” he said.

James, who hails from Saint Lucia, came to Brooklyn in 2002. “I left the Navy back then and decided to try New York,” he said. While he wasn’t a cook in the Navy (“I washed dishes and cleaned the floor for a couple of months, but I was a technician”) he had always wanted to own a café. After losing a job he’d had for 12 years, he decided the time was right to make it happen.

“I knew Max (former Qathra owner Yasser Habib), so I asked him can I just work in his shop for free,” James said. “So I did. I just worked in the shop to learn the business. That’s how it all came about. He figured that I actually had the same goals and dreams that he had. He said, ‘If you want to do it, take it.’”

Since taking over early in October, James said he’s made only incremental changes to the restaurant. “I’m a slow person, actually. For me, all I did so far is small operational changes, how we run things, small changes in food and menu items.” He added daily soups and wraps, and started serving turkey chili as a mainstay on Thursdays.

But James was also planning for the longer term in those initial months. “I wanted to have that vibe. That’s my whole idea of a coffee shop, was a nice vibe, you know, good music, good food. Relax, have some tea, have some coffee. That was my goal and I’m hoping to achieve that for the long run.”

Developing a live music series was part of the plan, but James acknowledges that it can be a big hurdle getting people to come for evening entertainment to a venue that doesn’t serve alcohol.

“People are asking, ‘Hey, do you have beer, hey, do you have wine?’ So we’re working on that,” he said. “I hope we can get the community board to be like, ‘hey, do your thing.’ That’s part of our aspirations, to have beer and wine here. It’s a big deal and it’s expensive too.” James estimates getting approval to serve beer and wine would cost $6,000 or $7,000, and a full liquor license quite a bit more

He decided to move forward with the music series instead of waiting for permission to sell beer and wine. In keeping with his modest style, James planned a low-key February debut featuring acoustic duo DeLaroque & Strauss. The success of that show convinced him to continue presenting performances every month or two.

The show scheduled for Friday presents musicians with international acclaim—Nathanson is the founder of the Jazz Passengers, who recorded with Deborah Harry, Elvis Costello and Mavis Staples as vocalists. But Nathanson and Kiah’s appearance at Qathra is very much a local story.

“I knew Tim on just a ‘Hi!’ basis,” James explained, “and he told me, ‘I’m a musician.’ Just like that. I actually knew his friend Dan, and that’s how this whole connection started. Like, ‘Oh, you know Dan?’ ‘Oh, you know Tim?’ Before you know it we were talking about music and he was like, ‘I’ve got this guy I play with all over the place. He would be great here.’”

“This guy” was Nathanson, and when the musician ran into James at the Cortelyou Road farmers’ market, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. “He was super excited about having music at the place,” Nathanson said, “and I thought it would be cool.”

Both saxophonist Nathanson and bassist Kiah have wide-ranging musical careers, and the chance to see them in an intimate spot like Qathra’s garden is a gift to Ditmas Park from two of its talented residents. Besides sharing the neighborhood, the musicians play together in the ensemble Sotto Voce; over the course of three albums, they’ve mixed poetry, text, spoken word, instrumentals and song to link music and storytelling.

In the music they’ve recorded in the past ten years, their command of the jazz idiom is unquestionable and leavened with elements of soul, funk and hip-hop. Writing for Jazz Times, critic Steve Greelee described the music as “difficult to describe and easy to enjoy. Sotto Voce blends bebop, funk, free improv, poetry and hip-hop, and the result is bizarre and irresistible.”

For their Qathra gig, the duo has promised to “perform songs and anecdotes to honor the superstition of Friday the 13th,” according to James. If they’re taking requests, I’d love to have them tackle this tantalizing fact from Kiah’s online bio: “While at the Choir School, he also had an opportunity to perform with Leonard Bernstein, but was not well enough behaved.”

Now that is a tale I would love to hear told, Sotto Voce style.

The music is scheduled to start at 6pm Friday night, and there is no cover at Qathra. Seating is limited, so arriving early to score a table is highly recommended.