Tom Florek and John Irving have been hosting their open mic shows for 20 years. (Staff photo by Matthew Kassel.)

By Matthew Kassel

Twenty-five years ago, John Irving met Tom Florek at an open mic at Good Time Charley’s, now Charlie Brown’s Steakhouse, in Kingston. They both played piano and were a part of the unofficial local area open mic circuit. But they got the sense that most musicians were not getting enough attention.

So five years later, in 1990, Irving (not the author) contacted the Arts Council in Princeton about hosting a monthly open mic series. The Arts Council was receptive, and Irving enlisted the help of his friend Florek, and Beth Bacon, another regular at Good Time Charley’s, to get things started.

They called the series Café Improv, which was the name of a weekly jam session at the Arts Council in the late 1980s, and began hosting the show in a small room in the Arts council building. In 1991, the show was moved officially to a loft upstairs, where it has since remained.

“We wanted to do an open mic that had a little more respect for the musicians,” Florek said, looking back 20 years later. “It’s typical to find a place that doesn’t respect you.” Bacon has since dropped out, but Irving, 62, and Florek, 48, are still running the monthly series, albeit haphazardly.

“The ‘improv’ mainly comes from the fact that we’re disorganized,” Florek joked. “We’re always improvising how to run the damn thing.”

But that doesn’t stop people from coming back. Spouses Frank and Ellen Ruck, a musical duo, have been going to Café Improv since the start. Frank, 57, and Ellen, 60, have lived in Princeton for 30 years and feel that the series is very popular with Princeton area musicians.

“It’s fun. Tom is a real fun host, and they have it on TV and give us a nice DVD of the performance, which we have used as demos to get gigs,” said Frank, who knew Irving from the Princeton Folk Society before Café Improv started.

The series has been broadcast on Princeton Community Television since 1998. Florek, a Lambertville resident who works at ETS as a programmer, manages the whole operation: setting up the cameras and wires and sound, and finalizing the video for TV 30. It now airs twice a week.

“I noticed Princeton Community TV was in the same building as us,” Florek said of how he came to get the series on the air. “I knocked on their door and said, ‘Hey, can we put our show on cable?’ And they said, ‘Hey, great idea.’”

That was when crowds started to get bigger—drawing performers from all over New Jersey, from New York and Philadelphia, intrigued by the prospect of being on television.

Irving, who works as technical coordinator at the National Association of Scholars in Princeton, manages the booking. He lives in Princeton with his wife and three children.

“I don’t ask for a demo disc or anything. I book people pretty cold from the telephone or e-mail,” Irving said. He added, “It usually turns out all right.”

Florek still plays music, joining in on group jams—which Irving’s children will also sometimes sit in on—by the end of the three-hour night. “He plays piano and sings rather nicely,” Irving said of his friend. But Irving doesn’t touch the piano much anymore: “I used to try,” he said, “but now I have three children and I take it out on them.”

“John used to bring his little children to sing before the show started and they were so cute that people used to show up to see the kids,” said Ellen, reminiscing. Frank and Ellen play in a gypsy jazz trio called Blue Jersey and will next perform at Café Improv in February.

But the open mic is not only for musicians. Despite that the majority of attendees go to play an instrument or sing (the line-up for October included all musicians), comics and poets are welcome to perform as well. The series even hosted the Irish Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon on one occasion.

From 2005 to 2008, Café Improv relocated to the Princeton Shopping Center while the Arts Council building—an old, deteriorating structure built in the 1930s as a project of the Works Progress Administration—was being renovated to become the Paul Robeson Center.

Café Improv has been back in the new building for three years, in the Solley Theatre on the second floor. On a standard night at Café Improv, there could be anywhere from 10 to 60 people in the room. Entry is $1 for Arts Council members and $2 for nonmembers.

“It’s a cheap evening in Princeton, which is rare,” Irving said dryly.

“Café Improv gives people a nice place to play, which you need in every area, because everyone likes to play,” Frank said. Ellen added, “It’d be nice if there were more Arts Council Functions where local musicians could participate.”

But for the last 20 yeas, there has been Café Improv, which doesn’t appear to be going away. When asked if there is any end to Café Improv in sight, Irving and Florek said jokingly that each new month is a potential end to the whole operation.

“Each new episode is a miracle,” Florek said.

Of course, he meant it on one level. But Irving and Florek have been organizing the event for so long, they admit, that they can’t not do it. By now, it’s a habit—a welcome one—every month.