“I have been a working musician for over fifteen years. My days of dreaming about playing in front of stadiums and listening to the screams of adoring fans ended years ago. Now, I spend my time working to book a few extra gigs in order to pay the bills, cramming time in the studio to finish up new songs, and often dreaming of just a nice and appreciative audience to play for.

But every once in a while an opportunity pops up that can at first seem too good to be true. I recently had one of those gigs. The fact is, when your band mate offers you a two week run at a waterfront club in Gustavia on St. Barthélemy, it is hard for a working stiff like me to think of anything that could possibly be better.

Saint Barthélemy is a tiny island in the French West Indies, and something of a playground for the rich and famous. It’s an incredibly gorgeous and yet sleepy island most of the year. It is also not very easy to get to at all, making it the perfect spot if you don’t want to draw much attention from tourists.

Those of us not arriving via super yacht need to take a small plane, more accurately described as a minivan with wings, from St. Maarten. In order to land, the plane needs to drop down the side of a mountain to a runway that ends at the beach, with the Caribbean only a few yards away. It’s a real life white-knuckling thrill ride to say the least, but I suppose the journey is all part of the charm, right? It was a long journey, and when we were making the first of our nightly walks to Baz Bar for our opening performance we were certainly tired and blurry-eyed. But what we didn’t know then was what laid before us was simply one of the most beautiful bars you will find anywhere in the world.

Baz Bar sits along Gustavia’s wharf and is adorned with gorgeous teak wood, giving it a decor that is one part luxury restaurant, one part local tavern and one part pirate ship. And to be honest, this is true for the place as a whole. At Baz Bar you can find some of the Caribbean’s best culinary delights or just sit and have some drinks with a few friends, new and old, and watch the harbor’s comings and goings. And as the wee hours approach, don’t be surprised to find yourself hooting and hollering with a few of the island’s scallywags. For two weeks, that is exactly what we did. But before the fun began, we had the enormous pleasure of playing for them.

An appreciative audience can sometimes be a hard thing to find for a band, but not at Baz Bar. We knew the effort and money spent to bring us here, so we gave it everything we had and the audience let us know they appreciated it. It also became a regular thing to be stopped on the street or the beach the next morning by someone who had seen us the night before and just wanted to tell us how much they enjoyed the show. The pleasure, however, was truly all ours,

Baz stand for Le Bete a Zailes, a Creole expression meaning “the beast with wings”. It is a nickname given years ago to the bar’s owner and undisputed captain Jean-marc LeFranc. To Jean-marc I owe many a thanks that I could never repay for the best two weeks of my long but humble career.”