Churchill Grounds in Decatur: A New Stage in the Old Post Office
At 8 tonight, Monday, October 12, the EAV Trio with Larry Wilson takes the stage at 141 E. Trinity Pl. in downtown Decatur. Doors open at 7. Wilson led the jam session at Ten ATL in East Atlanta Village for more than eight years, and the club credits him with keeping the Churchill Grounds name alive. He brings that house band with him. That weeknight booking closes a ten-year stretch when Atlanta's best-known jazz club had no stage of its own.
The building matters as much as the reopening. Churchill Grounds spent its first life renting space beside the Fox Theatre, and it lost that space. It now plays inside the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Center, a 1935 former post office that the group running the club bought. That ownership is why Decatur's new seven-night jazz room looks built to stay.
Sam Yi opened Churchill Grounds beside the Fox Theatre on May 1, 1997. For close to twenty years it hosted the Harper Family jam sessions nearly every week, according to Creative Loafing's 2016 coverage. The trouble came from the landlord side:
Through all of it the club kept playing without a permanent address. Each step in that list is a space problem, which explains why the Decatur project looks the way it does.
Cornerstone Jazz Collective, founded by saxophonist Will Scruggs, closed on the Trinity Place property on August 30, 2024, WABE reported. Greene's Fine Foods was the building's last reported tenant before the sale. The AJC describes the building as a marble-covered former post office built in 1935.
Scruggs got his start as a jazz musician at Churchill Grounds. He now owns and operates the new club through the collective. "This puts Decatur on the map," he told Decaturish.
The funding shows how the old lease problem was solved. William McFarland, the collective's associate CEO, put the adaptive reuse at about $8.6 million. He said the collective has invested more than $4 million, and its backers put in less than $10,000 each on average. The Decatur Downtown Development Authority helped secure a $250,000 low-interest state loan and gave a $10,000 grant for exterior signage. So a large group of small backers, with help from the city's development authority, now owns the room that the Fox-era club could only rent.
The club is just one part of the building. Plans call for Koolbonga Studios for professional recording, named after a Mary Lou Williams composition. Scruggs Woodwinds, a woodwind sales and repair shop, goes in the basement that used to be storage. More space is set aside for education and rehearsal. Scruggs told Decaturish he pictures something like Jazz at Lincoln Center. The center is named for Mary Lou Williams, the Atlanta-born pianist and arranger who helped shape bebop and mentored Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie.
The club has a new address, but many of the same people. The EAV Trio with Larry Wilson holds Mondays all through October, on the 5th, 12th, 19th and 26th. The listing calls it a way to mark the band's residency in East Atlanta, featuring the Ten ATL house band and special guests. Ten ATL is where the Churchill community gathered between rooms, so Monday is the night when the club's last ten years show up on the Decatur stage.
The October calendar doesn't list a recurring open jam. The weekly Harper Family jams from the Fox era haven't been revived under that name, at least not yet.
The room seats about 140 people, with 100 on the main floor and 40 in the mezzanine. Because it's small, the ticket rules matter:
Weekends have two sets, so a full room on a Friday or Saturday can still turn over for the late show. Weeknights have one.
Rough Draft Atlanta's October 1 Quick Bites reported that Churchill Grounds had reopened, with limited seatings until a grand opening in November. Decaturish puts the grand opening for the whole Jazz Center in late November. No exact date has been announced.
Before that, the October calendar has a wide range of shows:
The calendar shows nothing on October 28 or 29.
Food and drinks will come from Clavé, a Cuban restaurant and bar in the building run by husband-and-wife team Luis Fernandez and Yanin Cortes, according to EarRelevant. Clavé's own site lists a rotating menu with empanadas, Cuban sandwiches, mojitos and chef-driven mains, plus a breakfast window and late-night service until 2 a.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Decaturish reported that the restaurant will serve coffee all day and into the evening from a window facing the outdoor patio. It's still coming, though. Clavé's site announces an October 12 grand opening but also says reservation requests are on hold until it opens, and the Jazz Center's site still lists Clavé as coming soon. Check before you go if you're planning dinner there.
If you live near Trinity Place, the old post office now gives the neighborhood a jazz club with a calendar every night of the week, owned by the people who run it. If you're curious how a landmark like this shapes the blocks around it, Jonathan Leach is glad to talk through what he's seeing in downtown Decatur. Let's Connect.
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