Music

Sense of Place: This Boston jazz club has thrived for nearly 80 years

WSHU | By Raina Douris,

Published January 25, 2025 at 7:00 AM EST

Frank Poindexter is the great-grandson of Joseph L. Walcott, who opened Wally's in 1947.

Running a music venue is hard work. It's also risky — many venues don't make it. But for almost eighty years, Wally's Cafe Jazz Club has not only survived, but thrived in Boston.

Wally's was opened in 1947 by a Barbadian immigrant named Joseph L. Walcott, and it's still owned and operated by his family.

For our Sense of Place: Boston series, Walcott's great-grandson Frank Poindexter welcomes you into Wally's and shares the club's story. He'll talk about how Boston, a city full of talented music students, has shaped Wally's. He'll also talk about how Wally's has shaped Boston — and helped start a wave of integration when it first opened as a place where black and white people could listen to jazz together.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.

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Music World Cafe

Raina Douris

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She is also involved with Canada's highest music honors: Since 2017, she has hosted the Polaris Music Prize Gala, for which she is also a jury member, and she has also been a jury member for the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.

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Kimberly Junod

World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).

See stories by Kimberly Junod