Most Wednesday nights for the last three decades, a man has walked into a small club in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, sat down at a piano, and started playing jazz standards. Regulars know his name. Most tourists have no idea he also played the guy who gets eaten first in Jurassic Park.

A Regular at Rockwell

Jeff Goldblum has held a weekly jazz residency at Rockwell Table and Stage since the mid-1990s, largely without advertising. He started sitting in with fellow actor Peter Weller on the advice of Woody Allen, a jazz devotee himself, who reportedly pushed Goldblum to turn casual sit-ins into a standing gig.

Goldblum has said that when he's not out of town filming, he's there every week, playing Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk tunes for whoever wanders in.

The Band Named After a Real Person

Goldblum's band is called the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra. Asked at a festival what the group was called, he made up the name on the spot. Mildred Snitzer was real: a friend of his parents from outside Pittsburgh who lived past 100.

Decades later, she showed up at one of his shows in a sequined gown and danced through a song while he played.

Cold Calling for Gigs in Pittsburgh

Goldblum started piano lessons around age nine. As a young teenager he got ambitious about it: he locked himself in a room with the Yellow Pages, called every cocktail lounge in Pittsburgh he could find, and asked in his most adult voice if they needed a piano player.

Some hung up. A few said yes, and he played his first paid gigs before he ever acted professionally.

Number One on the Billboard Jazz Chart

In 2018, Goldblum and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra released their debut album, The Capitol Studios Sessions, on Decca Records. It debuted at number one on both Billboard's Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums charts, beating out records from musicians who had spent entire careers chasing that spot.

The album features guest vocals from Sarah Silverman, Imelda May and Haley Reinhart, plus trumpeter Till Bronner, and was recorded at the same Capitol Studios where Frank Sinatra once cut records.

Bigger Stages, Same Piano

Since the album's success, Goldblum and his band have played the Hollywood Bowl, performed alongside the LA Philharmonic, and taken the stage at Glastonbury Festival in England.

He still keeps returning to small rooms in Los Angeles, playing the same standards he learned as a teenager cold calling lounges out of a phone book.

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