Northside Bar & Grill, tucked away on Boyd Acres Road on the outskirts of Bend, still looks and feels like a biker bar in most respects.

At first glance, the building looks like any other warehouse-type structure in an industrial district. A couple of bearded customers in leather jackets sat smoking cigarettes at a wooden table outside the drab, metal-and-brick building on a recent Tuesday night. A lighted sign hanging from the teal roof proudly proclaimed the bar’s name, and ads for Budweiser beer festooned the glass doors.

Inside the dimly lit building, more leather-clad customers sat along the bar, paying little heed to the immaculately dressed musicians setting up onstage. But another crowd — mostly older, though with a few younger couples scattered in between — sat at tables neatly arranged on the floor and adorned with tealights and tablecloths, polishing off drinks or finishing dinner while eyeing the stage.

At around 6 p.m., the four-piece band took the stage led by vocalist (and on that night, percussionist) Lisa Dae. The band broke into an upbeat, instrumental two-step to start, and slowly worked up to vocal songs such as Billie Holiday’s “Lover Man.” By the third song, couples occupied the wood-laminate dance floor in front of the tiny stage, swinging and twirling to the live jazz music pouring forth from the stage.

That scene is typical of Tuesday nights at Northside, which have been designated jazz nights for at least the last nine years. Current performers include Dae, vocalist Carol Rossio (both of whom play regular Tuesday nights), vocalist Michelle Van Handel, The Hot Club of Bend, Single Malt Jazz and others.

“I’ve always been grateful that they continued because all of us have been sideswiped on gigs,” Dae said while sitting with Rossio, Van Handel and Northside Booking Manager Nathanael Cain before taking the stage. “You’ll do a gig for two years and all of a sudden they won’t return your email. It’s like, what is that? And this is — I’ve always had open communication here about what’s going on with something down the pipe.”

A swingin’ start

While Bend has regular jazz music series, including the long-running Jazz at the Oxford series at the Oxford Hotel and Jazz at Joe’s, sponsored by Just Joe’s Music and its owner, Joe Rohrbacher, they bring in touring musicians from across the country. Northside’s jazz nights provide one of the few opportunities in town for Central Oregon-based jazz musicians to strut their stuff in a casual, jazz-club environment.

“It’s kind of telling that we can’t off the top of our head name more things (for local jazz musicians to play),” Rohrbacher said. “But jazz is a broad genre; it depends on who you ask what it means. I know that Marvin and the Notables play at the senior center on Saturdays and once a month at the Elk’s Lodge; that’s always fun. So there’s a variety of — it depends how far you want to put the definition out there. But a club-type setting as Northside (is), I can’t think of something right now.”

That setting is what draws local performers such as Dae, Rossio and Van Handel.

“(Jazz at the Oxford and Jazz at Joe’s) are concert venues, whereas this is more of a true — it could be closer to a jazz club in the stereotypical sense, where you have drinks, you have tables, you can chat a little,” Van Handel said. “… It’s not a concert. It’s about, you can meet your friends, you can talk a little, you can have dinner, food.”

Dae, who moved to Bend in 2007, helped start the jazz nights about 10 years ago out of an acoustic guitar jam hosted by Robert Lee that used to take place Sunday afternoons at the bar. At the time, Dae, who is married to The Bulletin’s news desk editor Tim Doran, was getting back into jazz vocal performance after focusing on classical and choir singing in college. She met Lee at Cascade School of Music, where she taught vocal performance at the time.

“He said, ‘Come start singing,’ so I plugged into the guitar amp,” Dae said. “It was horrific. And it was all for free. … And then what happened is, we liked what we heard, and then we thought, ‘Oh, we can do like a real gig out of this.’ We started doing Sunday afternoons after the jam.”

About a year later, the concerts moved to Tuesday nights due to Sunday football games, and jazz night has been on Tuesdays ever since. The bar, which opened about 14 years ago, according to Booking Manager Nathanael Cain, hosts music seven nights a week during the football off-season.

“There’s a crowd for jazz night; there’s a crowd for open mic; there’s a crowd for the weekends and it’s different, but it’s an eclectic mix,” Cain said. “We have people from Awbrey Butte that come down, we have people that are riding their Harleys in. We have the guy that’s coming in in his … coveralls. And it meshes well. We don’t have problems, we don’t have drama; we have a very nice, relaxed, open, welcoming environment.”

But playing for the Northside crowd in those earliest years could prove challenging.

“When we first came in here, it was, like, biker bar,” Dae said. “And we’re singing jazz on a Sunday. It was crickets for a while.”

Hidden scene

Van Handel started performing at Northside’s jazz nights shortly after Dae did. Known for her work with The Groove Merchants, The Vandals, her eponymous quintet and more, Van Handel has been a fixture of Bend’s jazz scene for more than two decades. She grew up in Oregon City and studied music at the University of Oregon.

She remembered early performances at a Thursday night jazz night at Broken Top Bottle Shop in Bend. Over the years she’s played with many local musicians in different groups (“It’s very much like dating,” she said).

“We’re a growing town, and we have growing musicians that are coming in and that are playing,” Van Handel said. “So we definitely have a jazz scene, and we have actually a high level in my view. They have a lot of very well-educated (musicians), and if they’re not institutional-type of educated, they’re very street savvy.”

Rossio, who moved to Bend from Portland about 3 1/2 years ago, is the relative newcomer on the Northside jazz scene. She spent 25 years in Portland performing with scene heavyweights such as Randy Porter and Tom Grant and recorded three albums while there.

“I was a little bit freaked out that there wasn’t gonna be any jazz scene here and no good jazzers,” Rossio said. “So I snuck in here one night and actually Michelle was performing with her band, and I’m like, ‘Oh, oh, OK, good; these people are good.’”

Thanks perhaps to its smaller size, the jazz community in Bend seemed more welcoming to Rossio than the burgeoning scene in Portland. She found a home right away at Northside, and now shares bandmates with Dae and Rossio.

“These women were so gracious to me,” Rossio said. “Instead of going, ‘Hey, what are you doing on our turf?,’ they were welcoming and nice to me. And I really was cognizant of that — that I didn’t want to be the new person in town going, ‘Hey, can I take some of your Tuesday nights away from you? What can I do in return to make it OK that I did that?’ I only took one, but there are only four Tuesday nights a month and those are the only jazz gigs in town.”

Playing to the dance crowd

Dae, Van Handel and Rossio all have followings that turn out regularly on their designated Tuesdays. These include dancers who fill the floor throughout the three-hour sets, including contingents from organized dance groups such as Bend Lindy Hop.

“They play music that we can dance to,” said Blair Agan, who founded Bend Lindy Hop in 2018. “There’s not a lot of live music in Bend that has a floor for dancing, let alone have music that’s similar to the big band swing era songs. So when we found out about Northside — we advertise it on our website and we send out a newsletter reminding people that there is dancing there, because they have a small floor.”

The song choices reflect this active audience. Dae likes to stick to standards — “If I can do ‘Ipanema’ every week and somebody wants to hear ‘Ipanema’ every week, I’ll do it,” she said.

“Tonight I chose a bunch of familiar songs, like ‘Satin Doll,’ songs I know like the back of my hand,” Dae said. “It’s what we all started out singing, right? And a lot of musicians are like, ‘What are you doing?’ Because they want to move away from the familiar and do something perhaps more creative. But to me, it’s about the audience and them connecting.”

Rossio will include French pop songs in her set (two of her albums were sung in French), and thanks to the influence of pianist Dave Finch, R&B and Motown grooves. Often, the musicians playing the gig will dictate the set lists.

“When a certain player comes into your life, you all of a sudden go, ‘This is exactly what I need,’” Dae said. “And then eventually it’s like, ‘Oh, I need something a little different.’ And so the music evolves based on who you’re playing with.”

Van Handel also keeps the dancers in mind when she plans her sets.

“The jazz umbrella’s so huge, because if you had asked Miles Davis, ‘Do you program for dancers?,’ he would have said, ‘No. Hell no. I turn my back on people and I just play what I play,’” Van Handel said. “So there’s many avenues of jazz, and at least at this venue, because there are dancers, I think about that. If I was gonna play at a wine bar and I knew there (were) no dancers, I might choose other material.”

Jazzing up Central Oregon

Other people in Central Oregon’s jazz scene have taken notice of Northside’s jazz nights, and some have introduced new opportunities for local jazz musicians. Cork Cellars in Sisters hosts jazz music regularly. And in November, Sisters newcomer and jazz aficionado Robert Sposato, who helped build the new Jazz Station in Eugene and ran it for five years, started a monthly jazz jam for high-school students at The Belfry. The next jam takes place at 6:30 p.m. March 17.

“I would say country, folk, rock, bluegrass is — especially in Sisters, where I live — that’s what’s king here,” Sposato said. “The (Sisters) Folk Festival’s here for a reason, you know. Jazz, nobody cares much about jazz in terms of the mainstream, especially young kids, so the challenge to fill a venue with jazz listeners is serious, and you have to work really hard. I know that if I’m gonna put 100 people in the seats, they’re not all gonna be jazz fans.”

For now, Northside offers Rossio, Dae and Van Handel — and the other bands that perform there — an opportunity to hone their skills with a regular gig.

“I feel like my chops have really improved having a monthly gig,” she said. “And it’s not that I wasn’t gigging in Portland, but I was never at the same place with the same people, so it was always just getting through the gig. … And then you get energy from the audience, because you feel like, ‘Oh, they like this, yay.’”

What: Jazz night

When: 6 p.m. Tuesdays

Where: Northside Bar & Grill, 62860 Boyd Acres Road, Bend

Cost: free

Contact: northsidebarfun.com or 541-383-0889