The nightclub is swathed in red. Every table is occupied by those dressed in attire as swanky as the cocktails they are sipping. The beer and whiskey drinkers are meanwhile puffing away in a smoking room at the rear, where a signature musty smell hangs heavy in the air. Opposite it, at the far end, a makeshift stage has been set up for a jazz band. It's a three-piece act that's joined by a singer with smoky vocals. The audience is involved enough to clap after every song. In fact at one point — when the saxophonist asks, "Are you having a good time?" — some patrons reply with an encouraging, "Yes!" But some others are more interested in conversation, though it's kept at a polite decibel level. There is none of the raucousness here that you'd associate with a bar for millennials. Rather the whole shindig — in one line — is a genuinely classy affair.

The scene harks back to an era when the city's southern tip would be agog with restaurants and clubs where highly competent musicians would belt out jazz tunes. But instead, the description is of what went down earlier this week at a new music property started at Luna, the nightclub in Lower Parel's The St Regis Mumbai. And if someone were to take a black-and-white picture of the entire place, you might have been fooled into thinking that it's a venue that was right next door to Venice, the long-shuttered club in Churchgate's Astoria Hotel that was a hotbed for jazz music in the '60s and '70s.