Catt’s Avalon 360 Reopens Dauphin Street With Jazz and Spyro Gyra

Live music returned to Dauphin Street on October 11, 2012, as Catt’s Avalon 360 celebrated its grand opening with a ribbon cutting at 3:30 p.m. and a weekend of performances capped by contemporary jazz band Spyro Gyra. The opening added a purpose-built music destination to downtown Mobile’s entertainment district — a venue designed from the ground up around listening rather than drinking, in a city whose nightlife street had long wanted exactly that.

A Multi-Venue Music House

Located at 360 Dauphin Street, Avalon 360 pairs a recording studio and intimate Listening Room with outdoor spaces including The Veranda, Jazz Alley and a Patio Stage that can hold up to 1,100 guests. The configuration is unusual for a single address: indoor rooms sized for close listening, a working studio, and open-air stages that can scale to festival-size crowds, all operating under one roof and one management.

Managing partners include longtime Mobile radio personality Catt Sirten and Dave MacPherson, owner of the Bienville Business Club, alongside other local investors. Sirten’s name has been attached to Mobile radio for decades, a career spent championing music on the airwaves of the Gulf Coast, and Avalon 360 represented the physical extension of that work — a room built to present the artists he had spent years introducing to local audiences. MacPherson brought the business side and a stake in downtown’s revival that predated the venue.

MacPherson, whose company took over the Bienville Club atop the RSA BankTrust Building, said he was glad to help rejuvenate downtown Mobile. The remark placed Avalon 360 inside a broader effort visible across the street grid in those years: downtown Mobile’s steadily rebuilding entertainment economy, in which historic buildings found new commercial uses and nightlife returned block by block to Dauphin Street.

The venue’s stated focus is the music itself: ticketed shows in a controlled, acoustic setting with table service between sets. That model sets Avalon 360 apart from the bar-stage norm along Dauphin Street. Cover charges and advance tickets fund the room instead of drink minimums; seating and sightlines are arranged for the audience rather than the bar; and the between-set service keeps the listening experience from being interrupted by servers moving through the crowd during performances.

An Opening Weekend Built for Jazz

The opening weekend ran Mobile’s Suburban Jazz Quartet on Thursday, Billy McLaughlin on Friday, Zombo Combo on Saturday, and eight-time Grammy-nominated Spyro Gyra on the Patio Stage at 7:05 p.m. Sunday. The booking logic was deliberate — local players opening the room, followed by touring acts of increasing prominence, building toward a nationally known headliner on the largest of the venue’s stages.

Suburban Jazz Quartet’s Thursday slot gave the room a hometown christening by one of Mobile’s own working bands, the kind of ensemble that knows exactly what a listening room needs. Friday brought Billy McLaughlin, the fingerstyle guitarist whose percussive technique and improbable comeback story — he rebuilt his career around left-handed playing after a neuromuscular disorder took his right hand’s abilities — made him a compelling draw for an audience that comes to watch hands as much as hear songs.

Zombo Combo carried Saturday with its own brand of instrumental virtuosity, and Sunday belonged to Spyro Gyra, one of the most commercially successful bands contemporary jazz has produced. With a recording career stretching back to the late 1970s and a string of instrumental hits that made the band a fixture of smooth-jazz radio, Spyro Gyra brought exactly the profile Avalon 360 wanted for its Patio Stage debut: a nationally recognized name whose catalog fits the venue’s acoustic-minded presentation.

The 7:05 p.m. Sunday start was itself a statement about the venue’s intent. A jazz headliner on a Sunday evening — early enough for the audience to be home by eleven — defined Avalon 360 as a listening destination rather than a late-night bar act, aimed at an adult audience that buys tickets in advance and comes for the performance.

Dauphin Street Gets a Listening Room

For decades, Dauphin Street has been the center of downtown Mobile nightlife — a corridor of bars, restaurants and music rooms stretching through the historic district, with weekend crowds moving between venues. What the street has traditionally lacked is a dedicated room where music is the product rather than the background: a place where audiences sit, listen and applaud between songs instead of talking over them. Avalon 360’s model addressed that gap directly.

The Listening Room format — tables, tickets, attentive silence — has proven itself in music cities across the country, sustaining rooms where singer-songwriters and jazz players can perform for audiences who came specifically to hear them. Bringing that format to Mobile put local and touring artists in front of a kind of audience the city’s bar stages rarely assemble, and gave touring acts a reason to route through Mobile that a typical bar gig could not.

The outdoor spaces multiplied what a single building could offer. The Veranda and Jazz Alley created the shaded, brick-lined settings that suit acoustic performances and pre-show gathering, while the Patio Stage’s 1,100-guest capacity meant Avalon 360 could present touring headliners without renting another venue. Few addresses anywhere on the Gulf Coast combined an intimate indoor room, a recording studio and a festival-capable outdoor stage within a few steps of each other.

The recording studio added a dimension beyond live shows. A working studio inside the venue gave regional artists a place to record, tied the room to the production side of the industry, and supported the venue’s larger ambition of being a music destination rather than simply a stop on a tour schedule. Studios and stages feed each other — artists who record in a room tend to play it, and artists who play it learn to record there.

Investment in Downtown’s Revival

MacPherson’s stake in downtown’s fortunes extended well beyond the venue’s front door. His company’s takeover of the Bienville Club, the storied private club atop the RSA BankTrust Building, put his operation in two of downtown Mobile’s most visible addresses at once — the top of one of the skyline’s defining towers and a cornerstone block of Dauphin Street. His comment about being glad to help rejuvenate downtown reflected the calculation common among the district’s investors of that era: the entertainment district’s health and the value of every building in it rise and fall together.

Downtown Mobile’s revival had been building for years by 2012, driven by residential conversions of historic buildings, a growing restaurant and bar scene, and public investment in the street life that anchors the district. A venue like Avalon 360 fit the pattern precisely — adaptive use of a Dauphin Street address, a business model that draws evening traffic, and programming that extends the district’s appeal beyond the weekend bar crowd to a ticket-buying, concertgoing audience.

The grand opening’s ribbon cutting at 3:30 p.m. on October 11 formalized the entry, the kind of ceremony that draws city officials, chamber representatives and the local investors who bet on the project. By evening the room had moved from ceremony to music, and by Sunday it had hosted four nights of performances ending with a band that had earned eight Grammy nominations across its career.

Beyond Opening Weekend

Beyond opening weekend, the calendar promised a Habitat for Humanity event with Leadership Mobile, a Thanksgiving film and festival program with Canadian blues artist Rita Chiarelli, and performances by Matt Cusson and Broadway’s Shoshana Bean. The spread of that early booking list — a charity event, a film-and-music festival program, a blues artist, a singer-songwriter and a Broadway vocalist — showed the range the multi-venue layout was built to accommodate.

The Habitat for Humanity event with Leadership Mobile tied the venue to the civic side of the community from the start, using the room’s draw to support housing work in the region. Rita Chiarelli, a Canadian blues artist whose film work and festival programs blend documentary and performance, represented the kind of unconventional programming that a venue with a Listening Room and stage space can present when it is not constrained to bar-band bills.

Matt Cusson and Shoshana Bean stretched the calendar further still — Cusson, a vocalist and pianist whose soulful pop writing has earned praise in the blue-eyed soul tradition, and Bean, the Broadway veteran whose vocal range bridges theater, soul and pop. Neither artist fits a typical Dauphin Street bar bill; both fit a ticketed room with table service and an audience that listens.

That was the case Avalon 360 made in its first weeks: that Mobile could support a venue where the music is the reason the room exists, from Thursday-night local jazz to a Sunday headliner on the Patio Stage. The October 2012 opening put the proposition in front of the city — a recording studio, a listening room, a veranda, an alley and a stage for 1,100, all at 360 Dauphin Street — and the weekend of music that followed was the first argument in its favor.