Bar Exam

The host/pianist at the jazz open mic at Tula’s in Belltown is going
to favor the crowd with a piano instrumental. Everyone applauds. “You haven’t heard it yet,” he demurs.

“I didn’t clap,” the bartender intones, deadpan, to his
mini-audience at the bar across the room. He’s got a beautiful
snow-white mustache; he’s cursed (or blessed) with one of those faces
that, at rest, looks unapologetically homicidal, making his
smiles all the more gratifying. Between songs, he says he worked his
way through college playing in piano bars, back when the bar was
actually the piano or built right around it, with the spilled drinks
leaking inside eventually changing the tuning. Who’s the big round
table in the back with the handwritten “Reserved” sign for? He just
laughs.

A woman sits alone at the bar with a stack of sheet music and a
pink drink with lots of speared fruit in it. Another woman has
brought her own microphone. A gentleman wearing a Hawaiian evening
shirt, palm trees on black, takes the stage—a low platform, with
more tables beyond the spot-lit piano and singer—and launches
into some hypnotically soothing, proprietary patter. “Welcome to
Tula’s,” he says. “It’s a Monday night thing”—pause—”that
happens every Monday.” The bartender joins in, nonchalant, for the last
four words. Tula’s has been around for 16 years, and it seems possible
that this patron/performer has said the same thing for 832 consecutive
Mondays. He then launches into a rendition of “Paper Moon” that
contains a good amount of soulful scatting.

When people sing on Monday night at Tula’s, a reverent silence
reigns. Plates of just-arrived food sit neglected in the dim; tinkling
of the ice in your drink and a very occasional murmur (preferably
appreciative) are acceptable, clinking cutlery is not. As with a single
consciousness, the audience ignores the infrequent but insanely loud
ringing of the bar phone, the sporadic ding of the oblivious
order-up bell, and, for a while, a sound from the kitchen like
something’s being beaten to death on a metal table.

The place is unremarkable, well-worn. It’s the intense focus of the
room that alchemizes what’s happening—regular people singing
songs about love, with varying levels of skill, merely because they
love doing it—into something heart-explodingly good. When
Hawaiian-shirt man finishes singing, he looks very happy, sits down,
and (silently) eats a salad. One woman’s wavering notes are tiny,
wrecking tragedies. A guy’s story about the first time he fell in love,
leading into “I Just Found Out About Love,” goes exactly, perfectly
nowhere. The pianist’s work gets looser, more miraculous, as he
gets into the scotch.

When asked in a whisper for the bill, the bartender replies, sotto
voce, “Four hundred and ten dollars.” He jests! But there is an
$8 cover charge.

Tula’s, 2214 Second Ave, 443-4221.

bethany@thestranger.com