FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Yaletown's trendy Opus Hotel - Vancouver's newest live jazz venue-The Jazz Club

VANCOUVER – Vancouver has a new live jazz club.
Yaletown's OPUS Hotel is showcasing the city's top jazz divas in a series of no-cover Saturday afternoon live performances. The series starts this weekend with popular Vancouver vocalist Karin Plato and sidemen Bill Coon on guitar and Darren Radtke on bass.

Vancouver Mayor – and jazz fan – Larry Campbell will help launch the new club by donning his fedora and emceeing Plato's first set.

Hotel publicist Pamela Groberman said the OPUS Bar wants to add live music to the Yaletown mix on Saturday afternoons. She said the new Jazz Club gives locals – and others – a place to get together on Saturdays and to listen to some of Vancouver's finest jazz artists in a "great bar setting." "Yaletown is filled with people on Saturday afternoons," said Groberman. "You see them out shopping, enjoying a coffee, or just taking for a walk. "Now we've created the perfect small venue to pop in and chill with live jazz."

Groberman said that Opus is targeting local jazz lovers, but may also end up pulling in jazz fans from out of town. "Seattle's a huge jazz city," she said. "And here we are – just two hours away by car."

Groberman said Yaletown – a restored warehouse district – is a perfect setting for jazz. "When you think about the history of jazz," she said. "It was played seventy or eighty years ago in small clubs in back alleys in the old part of town.

"That's a pretty good description of Yaletown. This music belongs here" Groberman said the other jazz singers performing at Opus for the February series include Sara Zacharias, Kate Hammett-Vaughan and Jennifer Scott. She said the sessions will be "intimate" because the room isn't big, and because liquor licensing limits the number of live musicians to three performers. "These will be small trios, not big bands."

OPUS Jazz Club is open Saturdays from 3:00 to 6:00pm in the bar at OPUS Hotel. Details of a second jazz series beginning in March will be announced at the OPUS web site later this month.

OPUS is located at 350 Davie Street at Hamilton. The hotel web site is at www.opushotel.com