Le Caveau de la Huchette, Latin Quarter jazz club since 1948

Le Caveau de la Huchette is a jazz club on rue de la Huchette, in the Latin Quarter, opened in 1948 by Maurice Goréguès. It occupies a vaulted cellar where, legend has it, the Templars and then the Rosicrucians met, before a Masonic lodge in 1772.

During the Revolution the Cordeliers and Montagnard clubs gathered there, and under the Terror the cellar served as a tribunal. Jazz arrived in 1949: Sidney Bechet, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Art Blakey and Claude Bolling played, and Boris Vian, Léo Ferré and Georges Brassens came by.

In 1970 the vibraphonist Dany Doriz took over the club. He opened a dance floor among the red banquettes and kept to swing and bebop. Marcel Carné shot Les Tricheurs there in 1958, and Damien Chazelle filmed Ryan Gosling at the piano for La La Land in 2016.

Dany Doriz still runs the house and plays there with his Big Bang several times a year. Every evening jazz bands follow one another beneath the vaults, with Rhoda Scott and Scott Hamilton among the regulars, and the floor fills with swing dancers in the 5th arrondissement.