For the past three months, diners at the West Street Market have heard a rotating lineup of professional musicians every Sunday evening. Owners of the Pizza Collective and The DeLuxe sponsor the live entertainment in their communal dining room as part of their plan to support each other’s businesses and the local music scene.
“A big inspiration of what we’re doing here is a place in Berkeley called the Cheese Board Pizza Collective,” said Zach Condron, one of the owners of the Pizza Collective. “They have a collective model that kind of inspires what we’re doing, and they also have live music for their lunch and dinner service all days of the week.”
Since it opened six months ago, the cooperatively owned Pizza Collective has fostered a sense of community within the West Street Market businesses. Condron, along with Rich Selden of The DeLuxe, decided that, since the market shares a common area, the draw of live music could benefit everyone.
“Rich and I, all of us are really dear friends, even the people who are in the kitchen, not just the business owners,” Condron said. “It’s really rad seeing and having comfort around, if everybody’s doing OK, then we’re going to eventually be doing OK as well.”
As a long-time fan of jazz music, Condron reached out to some local musicians he had met through the University of Nevada, Reno’s jazz program about serenading the dining room. Chris Sexton, Miguel Jimenez-Cruz and Dave Strawn answered the call and have since created a band they call Noise Palette.
“It kind of turned into a group from doing this thing every Sunday,” said Chris Sexton, keyboardist and singer. “Because it was Miguel and Dave and I, and we were like, ’Hey we’re sounding pretty good. This is fun, and we have good chemistry, so let’s continue to play.’”
The members of Noise Palette play different genres and musical styles to keep each session fresh. They’ll switch between standards, instrumental and some originals as they think the room requires.
“We kind of change up the genres of music, so it’s not just jazz,” Sexton said. “We’ll try to play, like, some Latin music or Brazilian, or we’ll play funk, just try to change it up a little bit.”
They also invite other musicians to take part from week to week. Members of the audience with some musical experience are also welcome to add to the sound.
“If someone’s in the audience, and they play saxophone, and they’re like, ’Hey I know this song, can I come up and jam with you guys?’ like, yeah, we’ll jam out with you,” Sexton said.
To Condron, the cooperative aspect of his business filters down to the entertainment as well. Noise Palette currently only plays on Sundays because of the pay rates that Condron and the band personally negotiated.
“We had conversations with all of the musicians that come in here about what is a reasonable wage for them to make this sustainable,” Condron said. “A, so we can have good quality musicians coming back, and, B, because that’s part of our principles behind what we’re doing. We’re not trying to penny pinch musicians so we can get money out of them, it’s—the more that we can create sustainable systems and models in what we’re doing, the more it’s going to naturally perpetuate itself.”