A jazz club with an attached restaurant is set to open in Roxbury’s Nubian Square next month after it secured nearly $2.5 million in public and private funding.
Jazz Urbane Cafe, the brainchild of composer and Berklee College of Music professor Bill Banfield, will be housed in previously unused space on the first floor of the Bruce Bolling Municipal Building at 2300 Washington St.
“The Roxbury area is a perfect launching pad for revitalization,” Charles Hunter, CEO and managing partner of Jazz Urbane LLC, said in an interview. “We are now the center of Roxbury, so to speak, and we are part of what the new birth of Roxbury is going to be.”
In addition to live acts, the cafe will have an attached restaurant with a rotating menu and an upscale wine selection, Hunter said. Films will also be shown in the center, he noted.
“We’re going to be doing everything we can to do every focal point of the art scene in Roxbury,” Hunter said.
The project is backed by a mix of public and private financing, including a $380,000 equipment loan from the state’s development arm, $1.63 million in financing from M&T Bank, and a $450,000 credit enhancement from the city.
City Councillor Miniard Culpepper called the funding collaboration “a model for future startups and future businesses. This is the kind of thing that will keep young folks right here in the city of Boston,” he said.
The concept of a jazz cafe in the Bolling building has been long in the making.
In his 2019 State of the City address, Mayor Marty Walsh said Banfield would “soon” be opening a jazz restaurant in the building, but it took until 2022 for the cafe to gain zoning approval and until 2025 to secure a liquor license.
Hunter said the city provided its loan first, and that financing agreements with M&T bank and the state were finalized early this year.
“A million dollars doesn’t go as far as you think it does,” he said. “This is not like we’re going into a McDonald’s and turning it into a Burger King. This is from the bones up, starting from nothing but an empty space.”
In September 2025, a plumbing company doing work in the building sued Jazz Urbane LLC and a construction company it had contracted for $100,000 in unpaid funds, according to court records.
In an interview, the owner of the plumbing company, Chad Perry, said Banfield “ran out of money” in February 2025 yet kept “having us work there right up until April.”
The lawsuit was ultimately settled out of court. Perry said he received the remaining balance on April 2. MassDevelopment had announced its funding agreement for the jazz cafe just before that, on March 26.
Neither Hunter nor Banfield responded to requests to discuss the lawsuit.
Renovations in the building are 90 percent complete, Hunter said. When doors open, he said, the company will first focus on paying its 26 full-time employees and then pay back its investors.
For Culpepper, who grew up in Dorchester and hung around Nubian Square in his high school days, having a jazz club in the area will bring a “new energy” to the square.
“I’ve been so blessed to grow up in Boston and to be able to experience all that I did as a young person, and now to really help implement some of the seeds that were sown in me,” he said. “It seems like great progress.”