Pop-Up Jazz Club on Key Highway Is An Incubator for Local Performers

Ed Baldi spends his days surrounded by sound. As a freelance producer, event promotor, and musician, his Locust Point studio is packed with keyboards, computers, and monitors from which melodies emerge. And just a few doors down, he’s now bringing music to the masses.

Baldi is a cofounder of Sonic Lifeline, a passion project that he started with his nephew, photographer Nick Moreland, during the pandemic. They wanted to provide an artist-centric opportunity for young musicians and strengthen Baltimore’s reputation as an important East Coast city for jazz.

A Federal Hill resident, he didn’t have to look far for a venue, approaching his friend Marc Gentile, managing partner at the restaurant Little Havana, about using its back room to stage a new concert series.

“I walked in there, clapped my hands, and heard the reverberance,” says Baldi. “The room sounded like an instrument. I said, ‘I want to hear a horn being blown in here.’”

The first shows were performed in 2022. During concerts, the space, which normally is used for private events, is transformed into a roughly 60-seat jazz club called the Hemingway Room. With a background in theater and film—Baldi worked as a stage manager on and off Broadway in New York, and in the art department during filming of HBO shows, The Sopranos and Oz—he especially enjoys turning a blank space into a theater of sorts.

Food and drink are available through Little Havana, but the focus is on the music.

“We’re not just supporting emerging artists, but also reconnecting the dots of what was once the jazz circuit between New York, Philly, Baltimore, and D.C.,” says Baldi, with the venue joining the likes of Keystone Korner and Caton Castle in showcasing the genre. “I like to say we’re not jazz brunch…This was specifically designed to be a place for musicians, by musicians. We’re creating an incubator for these performances.”

The fall slate of concerts runs through mid-November. Among the highlights is an Oct. 18 performance by Zach Brock, Bob Lanzetti, and Keita Ogawa, three members of the jazz collective Snarky Puppy. Each artist plays two evening sets.

In July, an episode of PBS’s Artworks featured Sonic Lifeline and the Hemingway Room. Another episode, which captured a Sonic Lifeline-produced performance at the SpringHill Suites in downtown Baltimore, aired in September.

Baldi hopes more collaborations like those will take place in the future, and he is currently in the planning stages of winter and spring editions of the concert series at the Hemingway Room.

“This is not just a recital—we want to create an experience,” says Baldi. “My feeling is, if we have a space where musicians are safe to create, uninhibited, the audience is privileged to peer into that world.”