Jam leader Mark Cabinian (ts, left background) plays the melody to “Work Song” with Seth Kalina (ts, foreground) as Charlie Snyder (center) and others watch.

UPDATE: As of August 2025, Gus has moved the club to 2 W Downer Pl in downtown Aurora, changed its name to just “East Wind,” and expanded its options of music to integrate itself into the local community.

By Dominic Guanzon

Thursday, 5/29/25

“We’ve only ever had one noise complaint,” Gustavo tells me.

“What were you playing?” I follow-up.

“‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ at midnight,” he says, plainly.

Gustavo Flores is Tiwa Bleu, is a drummer, is a bandleader, is the owner of the East Wind Jazz Club – a summertime jazz spot on the east side of Aurora, IL.

“[The name] ‘East Wind’ came from the truth that damn near everything we have ever liked came from the south east. Especially in music and art.”

It’s street parking amongst the local suburbia, but also just a half-hour walk from downtown Aurora. You can enter through the small gap between the beige house and disconnected garage. No house fee, only a small goose statue and some flowers, still springing to life, to greet you. Once you do, however, you’ll be greeted by a pretty damn big yard.

Entrance to the East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.

At the far rear end, by the shed, is a frame for a stage used for larger acts and crowds. Tonight, however, is a little more chill. It’s a soft launch for the 2025 season consisting of “only” 50 or so people throughout the night, 20 of whom are there to hit.

Stepping onto the driveway, I notice it’s composed entirely of brick that extends into an ornate, circular pattern to form the back patio. After passing by the goose bouncer, I’m welcomed by the music I’ve heard fill the neighborhood air since I stepped out of the car. It’s some good R&B playing off a phone connected to a speaker, but after a few minutes, it’s stopped.

“Time to hit?” says Mark Cabinian. The night’s jam leader is a leather jacket-wearing tenor sax player who plays in Gustavo’s group, Tiwa Bleu and His Chosen Few. I’ve seen Mark a number of times, both as a performer in the city and as a friend of a friend.

“Does he ever take the jacket off?” I ask Gustavo.

“I don’t think so,” he smiles.

And so began the four-hour jam, one of the opening tunes being Cedar Walton’s “Bolivia.”

Players from various local colleges pick up on melodies by ear. East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.

Mark Cabinian (ts), the night’s jam leader. East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.

For his part, Gustavo is wearing a red bandana, perhaps the only thing about him that screams, and when I say that, I’m including his demeanor, his voice, his reactions, and even his drumming. That doesn’t mean the Aurora native is boring by any means. The opposite, in fact. He’s earnest, a listener, and, like everything else about this place, just really chill.

Even then, don’t confuse chill with lazy.

“This year we’re hosting vendors too,” he points to the tents and tables set up behind the music. “Small business. Keep it community, you know?”

With the music continuing in the foreground, I made my way to the market in the back.

*Laura of L&L Jewelry. East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.*

Anarchy Vintage is a clothing re-seller with choice selections from a variety of locally-sourced items. “Goodwill’s pretty good, man,” Anarchy Vintage’s owner tells me, which I can’t deny. Meanwhile, tattoo artist Ink by Mei provided henna for a number of people throughout the night.

L&L Jewelry sources their rings and earrings from across Mexico, with its owner, Laura, providing appraisals for the various stones and materials.

Of all the vendors, Gloombirdart interested me the most, if only because I’m a (completely non-practicing) fan of animation. With “Work Song” being jammed on at the front, we got to talking about his self-taught illustration, and how, despite being young, leans on a lot of both Golden Age and Millennial nostalgia.

*Anarchy Vintage. East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.*

“That public domain Steamboat Willie goes hard,” the artist half-jokes, showing off his 20s-styled cartoon character in 90s-era clothes and electronics.

Perhaps my favorite entrepreneur of the night was trombonist Dorian Chase because of how random their wares were: cologne, crochet, earrings, and stickers of a wide variety, including the Bee Movie’s “Ya Like Jazz?” The sheer clash of every item with each other just seemed to fit the mood of the night. Dry-humorous than the sum of its parts, and yet, completely at ease with itself.

Gloombirdart. East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.

Ink by Mei applying henna to pianist Parker Belonio. East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.

*Blake Whatcott (keys), Thomas Robert (b), Gabe Koppel (d).* *East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.*

Making my way back to the jam solos-deep on Coltrane’s “Resolution,” I see some water bottles and a homemade pitcher of $2 agua fresca set on a table.

“Not a lot of people drink. It’s all BYOB/BYOE,” Gustavo points out. I see a couple cheap six packs, but for the most part, he’s right, and it really started to hit me how young the crowd was. I was certainly welcomed, warmly, but my 31-year-old self may be the only person in the whole joint who was alive during 9/11, let alone remembers it.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the image of suburban jazz hangs I grew up with, which trended older or never going beyond a handful of people. So to have a hip and diverse crowd fill up a whole backyard in DuPage County, approaching a full house at Green Mill or Dorian’s, is almost jarring.

“The most we ever had at any one time was 65 people,” Gustavo tells me, handing off the drums to another player as the sun is firmly setting. “We still get cats rolling up at 10PM.”

*Student players hang in the DIY patio as others play. East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.*

Indeed, fresh faces kept coming in and out every hour or so. Despite my earlier descriptions of diversity among the gathered, the musicians are all uniformly nerdy, which tracks, since they were almost all jazz students. From North Central College where Cabinian studies, to Elmhurst, to UIC, to as far as Michigan State University, where a cadre are home in Chicagoland for the summer.

According to Gustavo, there’s not a lot of Chicago players that pass through, making this Aurora venue the spot for this end of Metra’s BNSF line.

It’s a lot like Hungry Brain’s Wednesday Night Fellowship in the way that it’s a bunch of college kids who really, really look like jazz majors. But it’s a very different vibe, that of the coveted hang. A jam without the fear of being ridiculed into the floorboards for not knowing the melody to, say, “Naima.” Emphasis on the word “fear,” since I’ve not seen something like that happen anywhere, but dozens have shared that fear with me.

There’s plunking, humming, and yes, some iReal Pro scanning for several minutes between tunes. Ironically, that lack of fear revealed just how good a lot of their ears were, with those minutes lasting only minutes. Cabinian himself ran the “it’s so over/we’re so back” gamut trying to remember a melody, before promptly annihilating the changes by ear. Make no mistake, there’s a skill floor because there needs to be SOME gatekeeping. It’s just not the floor to a firing range, since everyone understood the assignment.

And when your fledgling, barely-formed reputation as a college player is in safe waters, you actually get to have fun. In their case, the Flintstones Theme at 300bpm.

East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.

Speaking of floors, Gustavo’s father works in construction, lending even more credence to the DIY nature of the place. The brick, the hanging lights, the pool deck, the stone fountain, the Virgin Mary statue encased in glass – all of it from “the Mastermind” of dad himself. While the outdoor fireplace fixture, the literal backdrop to the entire jam, is technically part of that list, “he hasn’t finished it,” Gustavo snickers to himself.

And yet, it feels as complete as anything else, if only because the blemishes act as a marker of authenticity. In other words, you know they didn’t get any COVID emergency small business loans, especially since the place only opened last year.

The view of the jam from the pool patio. East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.

East Wind’s homespun aesthetic is exactly what gives it its charm, much in the same way Fulton Street Collective has industrial warehouse origins or The Red Room is basically a concert co-op run out of a closet.

“The dream is to own a jazz club. A real one, not just out of a yard.” Gustavo declares, meekly.

I want to push back that he already has everything a jazz venue could want, and more, right now, except a liquor license and a PA system for vocalists. But I don’t say anything for fear of trampling on that hunger.

Thinking about it later, I don’t think I ever could have done such a thing, considering Gustavo has a plethora of collabs under his belt: Tiwa Bleu & the Celestial Treaty is a 13-person jazz-soul group that sounds straight out of an off-kilter 60s foreign film. Tiwa Bleu and His Chosen Few is his small group that I saw at The Whistler the week before, featuring Cabinian on sax, Samuel Rodriguez on bass, and Richard Gibbs III on keys.

Gustavo doesn’t necessarily view these as separate projects, however. “My band as a leader has been the same entity. ‘His Chosen Few’ and ‘Celestial Treaty’ have just been cool names to bounce back and forth from. I started a group with Parker [Belonio], Mark, and Ariyo [Akinyemi] called Southside Heights, back when I met them all in 2023. It had a focus on Afro-Latin and Hispanic music.”

As of this writing, he has two singles out on streaming, “Green Reflections” and “Tezeta” under the Tiwa Bleu name, but that may change soon enough.

“[The name] ‘Tiwa Bleu’ came from a combination of things… I’m thinking of rebranding too. To just my real name.”

All of this is under Gustavo’s group Quasar Networks, where, on their “About Us” page, they claim to “set out to nurture a community, to amplify the voices of tomorrow’s musicians, and to create a stage where sound and spirit could collide.”

Dorian Chase (tr). East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.

Gustavo is so DIY, he’s mostly self-taught in the many stylings of jazz drumming – from swing and rhumba, to waltz and five/four. I had assumed he was a college kid like every other player there that night, but not quite.

He has taken two lessons from Ted Sirota, a long-time Chicago mainstay known for hosting the Wednesday Night Fellowship, being an alum of Sabertooth, and holding a life-long hatred of authoritarianism that has translated to anti-Trump, anti-Israeli genocide stances on socials today.

But for the most part, it’s jazz DIY without no fancy degree.

*Gustavo Flores (d). East Wind Jazz Club, 5/29/25.*

East Wind hosts jams, its only time of operation, three times a month during the summer, currently ending on August 29th.

“I have thought of being able to do the East Wind Sessions through the cold. The dream is a jazz club called East Wind. Something with an edge, tasteful interior design, artistic marketing, etc. I would like it to be a place where you can go see traditional jazz music, Caribbean music, African music, Hispanic music. I’d love to put any genre on a stage that has its origin in the global south.”

After hearing “Windows,” I make the not-very-college decision to leave at the literal 11th hour, just as the latest round of student arrivals are getting out of their warm-up tunes.

Looking back on it, I am inspired by the tagline of Nik Cohn’s seminal 1976 work, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night.” Not because it reminds me of the story, with its dark, urban pressure cooker of a cast, but contrasts with it. In every which way, amid a world falling apart, East Wind is the total inverse of 2001 Odyssey. I’m completely re-writing the line, but Cohn completely made up his story, so I don’t care:

The new generation can’t afford risks; it graduates with obscene loans, can’t find a career, yet endures. And on Thursday night, it vibes.

Gustavo Flores’ East Wind Jazz Club is a suburban secret that’s working hard to not be one. It’s an authentic, cool space for the lovers of this silly thing called jazz to really sink their teeth into – academically or not. Some bars out this way can get the former, and some local colleges, the latter, but it took a true DIY effort to bring both to the patio table.

It is a total anomaly: homemade, self-run, communal, improving, and with enough work, a success.

Check out East Wind’s Instagram.

Check out Tiwa Bleu on Spotify.