It’s a Thursday evening at the Gin House Jazz Club in Del Rio, a small border city in southwest Texas. The spacious, well-lit room feels cozy with stone walls, a wooden floor, and an exposed-beam ceiling. As guests settle in for the evening, Aurelio “Buddy” Laing sits down at the shiny black grand piano he’s played most nights of the week since he and his wife, Ely, opened the club last October. One by one, other musicians arrive and take their positions on the stage, really a corner spotlighted by a deer antler-adorned chandelier. Under Laing’s direction, the group performs a set of jazz, blues, and easy listening tunes, including a sultry version of “The Girl from Ipanema.”
Gin House Jazz Club
900 Pecan St., Del Rio.
Text for reservations:
830-488-1190;
ginhousejazzclub.com
For nearly 120 years, the building housing the jazz club has been known to locals as the Cassinelli Gin House. Located at the corner of Pecan and Academy streets, it was completed in 1908 by G.B. Cassinelli, an Italian businessman and stonemason. Originally one story, the limestone building housed a cotton gin when cotton was a booming industry in Texas. The old steam engine once used to power it is still buried on the grounds.
At some point, a brick story was added. But over the years, the building often stood abandoned. In the 1980s, a local bank bought the property with plans to restore it to its original condition. Laing learned the building and its two-acre lot was for sale about 16 years ago. After graduating from medical school and moving back to his hometown, he started working at a nearby clinic. Like other locals, he “always wondered why people didn’t do anything with this building,” he says.
The building had good bones, but it needed a lot of work to make it habitable. There were unsteady wooden stairs, burn marks on the ceiling from two fires, and broken beer bottles strewn all over. Other initial concerns included potential flooding from San Felipe Creek, which flows through a canal on the edge of the property, and restrictions from the city due to the building’s historical status. Still, the building was within walking distance of his job and had a mortgage he could afford, so Laing purchased it and moved in. When he met Ely through a mutual friend 10 years ago, she helped make the gin house their forever home. They married in 2018.
Two and a half years ago, though, the couple realized the building was no longer practical for their family, which now included their son, Frankie, and Laing’s aging parents. They moved to a house across the street and decided to transform the gin house into something else. Owning his own club was always in the back of his mind. Born into a musical family, he started taking piano lessons at age 4. His father was a music teacher and the high school band director and his parents owned a music instrument shop.
“I played there all day long. It’s kind of what you do,” Laing says.
While an undergrad at St Mary’s University in San Antonio, he dropped out of school to tour with a Tejano band. He eventually got his degree in medicine from Texas Tech (he still works as a hospitalist 15 hours a week), and he continued performing gigs at places like Memo’s, a Mexican restaurant owned by the Calderon family since 1936. (It’s where he met Ely.) Doc Watkins’ Jazz, TX at Pearl in San Antonio served as a main inspiration for the idea of a jazz club for the couple.
“It’s nice to have a space where everything is set up,” Laing says. “I can play and get my own little stage.”
The couple kept the building’s original wood ceiling and exposed limestone and brick walls. Ely, wanting “to bring the outside in,” added cedar posts from Texas and other natural tones and elements. She describes the feeling inside as “cave-y, rustic, and earthy.”
The second floor, formerly the couple’s bedroom, is now a comfy lounge and listening room. It’s furnished with card tables, leather chairs and couches, a bookcase stocked with local and regional reads, and a vintage hand-cranked record player that can be used to play vinyl records Laing inherited from his grandfather.
Off the patio, a food truck serves everything from wings and burgers to a charcuterie board. There is a playground for kids, a spring-fed pond, and a stone path that leads to the banks of the San Felipe Creek.
While Ely handles the business side—maintenance, the food and drink menus, supplies, scheduling special events—Laing books the entertainment. Sometimes he plays alone and other nights he performs with friends, including bass player Daniel White, a former member of the U.S. Army band; saxophone player Juan Nanez, a retired Del Rio High School band director; and drummer Larry Campos, who Laing has played with since he was 15 years old. Singer Ron Bailey Jr., retired from the Air Force, was once an audience member. Now he’s in the band.
“He would come in and sit in the corner, always looking super sharp,” Laing says. “We wondered, ‘What’s the story with that guy?’” One day, a friend of Bailey’s told Laing he could sing. “We asked him to come up and do a song and our mouths hit the ground,” Laing says.
Occasionally, out-of-town acts perform. A trio of jazz students from Texas A&M Corpus Christi blew Laing away. “They played for three hours one night and were amazing, just another level,” he says.
Rising country star and Del Rio native William Beckmann, a friend of Laing’s, has visited the club. The first night, he didn’t play. The next night, he sang a couple songs with the Family Jewelz, aka Jack, Ethan, and George Calderon, scions of Blondie Calderon, a local legend who was Ray Price’s band leader and pianist and a former owner of Memo’s.
Laing says people tell him his jazz club will eventually become a country and western bar, but he dismisses that, saying, “People know music well enough that they don’t have to listen to [jazz] their whole life to know it’s good music.”
Having grown up in a music shop, he knows there are a lot of great musicians in town who appreciate the chance to play at a jazz club. “Now they have a space,” Laing says. “I call up all the guys I know and say, ‘Hey, I need you to play.’”
