The concert stage in the basement of downtown St. Paul’s historic Hamm building has gone dark once again.

The owners of the nightclub KJ’s Hideaway, which opened in September 2021, announced the venue’s abrupt closure Monday morning via a Facebook post: “Due to unexpected emergent personal matters, KJ’s is closing effective immediately. All future shows are canceled. Refunds will be issued in the coming weeks.”

Jeremy Siers, who ran the club with his wife Kristen, declined to comment further: “The (Facebook) post says it all.”

The space began hosting live jazz in 2001, when drummer Kenny Horst moved his club the Artists’ Quarter from Lowertown to the Hamm building. Thanks to its intimate setting and pristine sound, the Artists’ Quarter built a national reputation. Drummer Roy Haynes earned a Grammy nomination for a 2006 performance recorded live at the venue. Three years later, Down Beat magazine named it one of the top jazz clubs in the world.

In 2013, Horst announced the club was closing. In a Pioneer Press interview that October, he expressed doubt about the venue’s viability as a space for live music: “(A new club) would have to be a really good thing, and it couldn’t be just a Band-Aid. I wouldn’t want to take anybody’s money and then end up closing a year later anyway. There are a variety of reasons I’m closing. Even before my expenses skyrocketed, I wasn’t getting rich. I was just scraping by as it was.”

More than a year and a half after the Artists’ Quarter shut down, the Minneapolis-based Dakota Jazz Club took over the space, rebranded it with a New Orleans theme, a wider variety of music and the new name Vieux Carre.

At the time, Dakota’s co-owner Lowell Pickett told the Pioneer Press that “The cover charge will be $10 or lower because it was important for us to be affordable. We wanted it to be approachable and comfortable, a place where people can hang out. It doesn’t have to be a special event to come here. We like to think of it as a neighborhood speakeasy.”

Vieux Carre lasted five years in the space. A June 2019 news release from the venue said “we have not been able to establish the level of consistent business needed to justify its continuation.”

Jeremy and Kristen Siers were fans and patrons of Vieux Carre. Six months after it closed, the couple called the leasing agent to inquire about reopening the space, even though they had no experience in running a nightclub. They spent a year planning for the opening, rehiring some Vieux Carre employees and working on a social media presence. “We love the space and it’s our mission to do what we can to help support artists,” Jeremy Siers said in July 2021.

The pair booked an eclectic mix of blues, jazz, Americana, country and folk acts to perform at the club, which has a capacity of 150.

White Bear Lake singer/songwriter Katy Vernon performed at KJ’s a handful of times and said the owners were very supportive to musicians, treated them well and tried to do interesting and new things in the space.

“They were always trying to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” Vernon said. “But I had a really hard time promoting shows there. They’re literally underground and there’s not enough signage. There was a lot of pressure to bring in a crowd. I played that space when it was the Artists’ Quarter and Vieux Carre and it’s not a new problem for that spot.”

Vernon said the club’s closure is indicative of the greater challenges of presenting live, original music to the public. She sells out venues with her ABBA tribute band, but struggles to draw crowds for her own material.

“There was a bit of a peak in interest in the summer of 2021, but it absolutely dropped off,” she said. “People need to get out and celebrate live art or it’s not going to survive.”

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