For one night only, on Oct. 31, the Keyhole Club will re-open its doors. “Noche del Cucuy,” hosted by ¡VIAJE! World Vibrations, will pay tribute to San Antonio’s former jazz venue, the Keyhole Club, now home to the mutual aid group Sociedad Fraternal Cruz Blanca.
¡VIAJE! curates DJ nights and is co-owned by Rebecca “Sue Problema” Gonzales and Rambo Salinas. To prepare for their Halloween event, Gonzales said that she looked through archives to compile a history of the Keyhole Club. According to Gonzales, the space originally opened Nov. 3, 1944, on the Southside, as the first integrated nightclub in San Antonio.
The club was owned by Don Albert, a jazz trumpeter based in San Antonio. Gonzales said the Keyhole drew a racially diverse audience and became a jazz hot-spot, attracting the likes of Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.
By the late ‘50s, Albert was forced to relocate the club to the Eastside, where it still stands. Gonzales said that “Noche del Cucuy” is a nod to one of the club’s re-openings, which coincidentally fell on Oct. 31.
“[Albert] opened the club in 1950, and then it was closed a couple of times because of the police commissioner. They were coming in and raiding the space,” Gonzales said. “It was after one of the closures that they won a court case and were forced to be left alone, so they had a big reopening. It was 1958, Friday, October 31st, which just happened to line up.”
Salinas said that reviving the Keyhole Club was the perfect idea for their upcoming Halloween event. He said that they hope the event will bring awareness to the nightclub, which remains a relatively obscure detail in San Antonio’s music history.
“It’s kind of creepy, because we’re all going to be filling the space with energy,” Salinas said. “This is a piece of history. These floors have seen so much.”
Salinas said that the party is as much about honoring the past as it is about creating a future for San Antonio’s music scene. This is ¡VIAJE!’s first event open to all ages and hosted at a community space rather than a club or bar.
“This is more of a passion project for us. We’re just here to have fun,” Salinas said. “I’m really interested in the blend of history and contemporary culture, trying to keep that alive, because it is an ongoing project, I think.”
At the time of the Keyhole’s heyday, night life at Trinity University looked very different. According to Trinity’s university archivist, Abra Schnur, although Trinity integrated early compared to many other universities, the school’s music culture — white, affluent and Protestant — stood in stark contrast to Keyhole’s.
“Can I see a large group of students sneaking out of the dorm and going to the Keyhole Club? Not really,” Schnur said. “A lot of the girls would bust over to the military bases for dances. Perhaps there you might have had more mingling of people, maybe non-traditional or even big-band music.”
University records suggest that jazz didn’t make its way onto campus until the ‘50s, when a student started a music review column in the Trinitonian called “Needle Noise.” In 1951, Trinity established its first swing group, “The Skyliners,” though it was short-lived.
“Any sort of ‘jazz’ that students would be listening to was probably big-band music, like the Glenn Miller Orchestra, [and other] white-lead orchestras,” Schnur said. “It was just a very segregated time at this point, so when we look at photo representations of the culture on campus, we see a classical, traditional, Western culture of music.”
Skyler Salinas, a local DJ who performs as “Kowboy,” is set to play the Keyhole event alongside Genesis Moreno, a musician from McAllen. Salinas said he plans to incorporate international music, while paying tribute to local sounds.
“I’ll be playing cumbia, a little bit of reggae … highlife, Fela Kuti, African funk,” Salinas said. “I’ll be pulling out whatever records I have from around the world. Because we’re in the Westside, I’ll be playing Tejano and conjunto.”
“Noche del Cucuy” is tonight, Oct. 31 from 6 p.m. to midnight, at Cruz Blanca on West Poplar Street. To participate in the event and bring back Keyhole, tickets are $5 per person and can be bought at the door.
