Forty years of live music. One room. One story.
1986
A café becomes a jazz club
Sergio Duvaloni and Rosy Merlini arrived in Brussels in the mid-eighties and took over number 28, rue de la Tulipe. The place was a rock and rhythm and blues café at first. On the advice of Pol Lenders, the man behind the Bierodrome, they turned it into a jazz club. SOUNDS has claimed it proudly ever since: the best of jazz since 1986.
1986 - 2020
The jazz years. A room that built a scene
For thirty-five years, jazz was the whole story. Musicians came for the room, the piano, the late-night jams, and a crowd that knew how to listen. The great figures of modern Belgian jazz played here, Philip Catherine, Aka Moon, Steve Houben among them. The club became a springboard for a generation that would shape Belgian jazz: Eric Legnini, the Brussels Jazz Orchestra, Melanie De Biasio, Jef Neve, Antoine Pierre, Margaux Vranken, and many more.
From the nineties on, the international scene found its way to Ixelles too. Charlie Mariano, John Abercrombie, Paolo Fresu, Mark Turner, John Scofield, Jacky Terrasson: world-class names, played at arm’s length.
2020
A new chapter. Buen Vivir and Resist
The new team created Sounds Resist, a program dedicated to resistance and resilience for human rights, carried by Latin American rhythms and sounds from Africa, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. The jazz club kept running alongside it, first with Sounds Live ASBL, then, from the 2024 season, fully in the hands of Sounds Resist ASBL. One house, one team, two programs on the same stage, played with the same seriousness.
2026
Forty years. The newest layer
This year, for its fortieth anniversary, SOUNDS opens a new chapter: groove, hip hop and soul join the bill. Each layer of the story extends the one before it. Jazz started it. SOUNDS never stopped adding to it.