The nine-year-old Blue Note Napa just announced they’ll close after a final show on New Year’s Eve, but the club’s top brass are dropping some notes that they may intend to open a San Francisco venue instead.

There have been some pretty notable performances at the Blue Note Napa since it opened at the former Napa Valley Opera House in 2016, as the venue is an outpost of the original Blue Note Jazz House in New York’s Greenwich Village that opened in the early 1980s, and which just opened a Blue Note Los Angeles this year.

But the Chronicle reports that Blue Note Napa will close permanently, with their final show being a New Year’s Eve performance by jazz pianist Brian Culbertson. The Blue Note's operators nonetheless jazzed up the closure announcement by strongly indicating they are now considering opening a San Francisco venue.

“Blue Note Napa has always been about bringing people together through great music and shared experiences,” the club’s managing director Ken Tesler said in a statement. “Though our time at the Opera House is ending, this is far from the end — it’s an evolution.”

To San Francisco readers, Blue Note Napa was probably best known for their Labor Day Weekend Blue Note Jazz Festival that was originally hosted by controversy-courting comedian Dave Chappelle. That lasted until Chappelle complained of the host venue Charles Krug Winery that "I’ll never drink a cup of wine from this dusty ass field," all because they were trying to enforce a curfew. The festival rebranded as the Black Radio Experience and moved to Napa’s Meritage Hotel, where it continues to be held annually.

So while the club is closing, the annual festival is reportedly still going. And there may be more to Blue Note’s plans, as they’ve teased a possible new San Francisco venue.

“The Bay Area has such a rich musical heritage,” Blue Note Entertainment Group president Steven Bensusan said in the same statement. “We look forward to creating a space that reflects the energy and spirit of San Francisco while staying true to the intimacy and authenticity that define Blue Note.”

That is some vague wording there, as saying “a space that reflects the energy and spirit of San Francisco” is not necessarily committing to opening a San Francisco venue.

But if Blue Note is serious about this, we have some ideas for a venue they could use! The Blue Note Entertainment Group expressed some interest in the former Yoshi’s space in the Fillmore back in June 2023 when then-Mayor London Breed was soliciting requests for proposals (RFPs) for that space. That former Yoshi’s-turned-Fillmore Heritage Center space continues to sit empty to this day.

Related: Video: Foo Fighters Play Tom Petty Cover To Small Crowd At Napa's Blue Note [SFist]

Image: Annabelle R via Yelp