“Keeping the Legend Alive” — Swing 46 Documentary a Love Song to West Side Supper Club

To step through the doors of Hell’s Kitchen’s Swing 46 jazz club is to travel back in time — specifically, to when Midtown was the beating heart of the city’s jazz scene .

While heartbreakingly few of the West Side’s clubs remain in business, a new short documentary, Swing 46: The Last Swingin Supper Club pays fitting tribute to the Restaurant Row stalwart that has maintained a place in the hearts — and on the dance cards — of New Yorkers for nearly three decades.

The documentary —  created by independent filmmaker Jay Kolucki as part of his studies at Montclair State University’s Filmmaking Program — explores the club’s emergence during the swing revival of the 1990s and its continued survival amid a challenging financial climate through lively, engaging anecdotes from owner John Akhtar, longstanding bandleaders, managers and performers as well as historians. The documentary premiered at the Big Apple Film Festival and will be screened later this summer at the Long Island International Film Expo , the Arts Alive Film Festival , and at Swing 46 itself.

Jay has long been a fan of the retro swing movement and Swing 46 but his first chance to gain behind-the-scenes access to the club came during one of the venue’s darkest moments: the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

“At the time, Swing 46 — just like so many businesses — was struggling with the pandemic,” said Jay. John, as well as managers (and Swing 46 performers) Michelle Collier and Sarah Hayes “opened the doors to me,” he added, as they put together a retrospective short in hopes of raising money for the club.

The wealth of footage, stories and legends of Swing 46 meant that the project quickly ballooned. “It went from a five- to eight- to now, a 17-minute film. It grew from Swing 46 to a bigger landscape — what I like to call a ‘sandwich doc,’” said Jay.  “It’s about Swing 46, but in the middle [there’s] a quick snapshot of what the retro swing renaissance was worldwide.”

A beacon of the 1990s swing revival movement — in which groups such as the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, The Atomic Fireballs and Squirrel Nut Zippers fused classic swing with the sounds of ska, punk and rockabilly, recreating the jubilant post-war musical landscape of the late 1940s — Swing 46 quickly became a home base for musicians, dancers and swing-curious New Yorkers.

“In 2001 my friend Ray Gelato was playing there, and I went to see him,” said Sarah. “I just walked in, and I thought, ‘my God, if I could ever work at this club — that’s my dream come true.’ A couple years later, I moved to New York to do Broadway, acting, singing, whatever. But I ended up going to Swing 46 and I ended up sort of working there,” she laughed. “I put a band together in New York, and I’ve been there off and on throughout about 21 years now.”

Michelle was a Hell’s Kitchen local who had lived in the neighborhood for years before discovering Swing 46. “I used to walk by it every night with my friends, and there was this really friendly guy wearing a retro suit and suspenders who would ask us to come in and dance — and we were always like ‘no, no, no!’ But finally, I met Sarah, who told me ‘I work at Swing 46,’ and I said ‘it always looks like fun, but I’ve never been there!’ And so I came in and I think I immediately started working coat check!” she said.

What Michelle and Sarah discovered was a passionate, tight-knit crowd of New Yorkers across all neighborhoods and walks of life — all of whom flocked to Swing 46 for its unique sense of community and camaraderie. “It’s the jazz version of Cheers ,” said Sarah, referencing the many instances of marriages and lifelong friendships forged on the dance floor of the club mentioned in the documentary.

“Once you come to Swing 46, you become part of the family,” she added. “I really wish this [documentary] could be a reality show, because of the colorful characters that we meet — I’ve been on the stage in my evening gown and chased people down the street who tried to walk out on their bill!” she said. “ It’s an amazing, colorful slice of New York Life, and you’re hard pressed to find that anymore.”

One member of the Swing 46 community was Dawn Hampton, a well-known cabaret artist from the 1930s and a regular at Swing 46 until she died.  “John Akhtar was so generous — every time Dawn came in, which was four nights a week, her dinner was on the house. He took care of it because he knew,” said Sarah. “She’d hold court, and people would come by and get her autograph or want to sit and talk to her. She loved dancing and talking to people and telling jokes, and she’d always write poetry — every New Year, she’d give us a poem for the club and she’d sign it. The last one said, ‘the light is on’. That was her phrase, ‘the light is on.’”

When she passed away, people would ask about her, said Michelle, and the team decided to create a tribute. “When you’re at the club, you’ll see a poster that says, ‘Dawn Hampton, the light is on’,” added Sarah. “People like her are the fabric that make up the whole community.”

Swing 46’s unusually strong alchemy is one that Jay hopes to further explore in a feature-length documentary. “Swing 46 has 30 years of this amazing story — to condense it down to 17 minutes or so, that was a real challenge,” he said. “But it seems that people are happy with it, and it opens it up for a larger story later on… hopefully it is a building block for Michelle, for Sarah, for John, for the team to market [Swing 46] to be a place that you need to come back to — not just to initially visit, but to come back and be a part of.”

“I think Jay’s documentary is going to make people so aware we’re here,” added Sarah, who hopes that the publicity will help bolster the club’s profile as they weather the rough seas of a post-pandemic reopening. “It’s been held together by a lot of Gorilla Tape,” she said, but, “if it wasn’t for Swing 46, I wouldn’t still be in New York. If you want to find me, that’s where I’m going to be.”

“People from around the world seek out Swing 46,” added Michelle, noting that patrons from the UK and Japan swing communities to curious NYU students have found their way onto the dance floor. As John puts it at the end of the film, “we keep it going.”

Swing 46 is located at 349 W46th Street (bw 8/9th Ave) and will screen Swing 46: The Last Swingin Supper Club later this year.

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