When Austin multi-reedist Kris Kimura opened Parker Jazz Club in the Warehouse District, he created a showcase for local and touring jazz musicians. Then he and longtime friend and business partner Aaron Frescas took over the Elephant Room in order to keep the 34-year legacy of Austin’s keystone jazz bar going. Now the pair expand their footprint with Nica on 4th. As a cocktail bar with jazz, instead of a jazz club with alcohol, Nica sports a different vibe than either of the pair’s other ventures.
Frescas and Kimura met at Texas State University in 1996, where they joined the same professional music fraternity and lived as roommates for a semester. Mentored by legendary Austin horn man Tony Campise, Kimura made the rounds of Austin’s jazz scene while paying the rent by playing what he calls “the steak and lobster circuit,” holding down a residency at Eddie V’s for 14 years.
“We always called it audio wallpaper. I was somewhere between art and furniture,” he says from a table near the back of his new joint, as pianist Hank Hehmsoth’s trio swings in the background. “It wasn’t glamorous, but I made a good living.” He often worked with 54 Seconds’ Spencer Gibb, adding horns to the singer’s solo work, as Frescas entered the hospitality industry with Restaurant365, Suerte, and others.
Using seed money from his restaurant gigs, Kimura raised the funds to fulfill a longtime dream in 2018 by opening Parker Jazz Club, named for his son. When Elephant Room co-owner and operator J.P. Vermaelen retired in 2021 after 31 years, he offered his stake to Kimura, thanks in large part to the latter’s relationship with Campise. (Original co-founder David Chamberlain remains co-owner.) “I’m not an operator – I didn’t want to be the reason that the Elephant Room closed,” Kimura says. “This is a heavy thing, so I brought Aaron on, and immediately everything improved.”
The pair overhauled the sound system and the service model, retaining longtime Elephant booker Michael Mordecai. “I don’t have anything to do with running the club,” Kimura says, pointing to his partner. “He does, and he’s killing it.”
When the basement space next-door to Parker on Fourth Street became available, Kimura and Frescas jumped on it. They had their concept ready and the money raised, so the pair signed the lease in January 2025 and opened Nica on 4th – named for Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the mid-20th century’s “Baroness of Jazz” – in September. The goal was to have a completely different experience than what Parker or the Elephant Room could offer. At Nica, hand-crafted cocktails and casual conversation count as much, if not more, as the music onstage. “We want it to be laid-back, a place you can come in and have a first date or a 20th date. You can come in here if you just want to listen to music, or if you just want to have a great cocktail. It’s just another way to experience jazz.”
While the music may be presented in the background, it’s not intended as disrespect toward the players. “The musicians don’t have to be stressed because it’s not a listening room,” Kimura explains. “It’s not like Parker where everyone’s watching you. It’s so relaxed you can play what you want to play. You can explore.”
In fact, a Nica performance can be liberating for the players as they test out new material or stretch their own boundaries. “One of the comments I get at Parker all the time is, ‘Everything you do is safe,’” says Kimura, who often hones his newly acquired trumpet skills on the Nica stage. “That’s just how I am – everything is super-arranged. We do our solos, but I’m not going off into right field, because I know my audience. But I can do it here, and I love it. We can play a tune and take it to another fuckin’ stratosphere and it’s totally fine. So the musicians love it – there’s no limitations, no rules. Again, the compromise is, here, you are technically background music, but you’re not. So you can enjoy it.”
To further illustrate the point, Frescas, who serves as director of operations at both Nica and the Elephant Room, tells a story about Mingo Fishtrap/Grupo Fantasma saxophonist Dan Bechtold stopping by Nica to get the lay of the land. “He showed me a list on his phone of jazz tunes he needed to become reacquainted with so he can get some jazz gigs,” Frescas recounts. “I said, ‘Do you have your horn? This is a place where no one’s gonna scrutinize you, there are great cats onstage – what better situation than this?’
So he drinks half a beer, and he goes, ‘All right, fuck it.’ He gets his sax, quickly acquaints himself with the guys onstage, and starts playing.
“I have to go home to the family,” Frescas continues. “But Dan left his beer at the bar. So I grab his beer and walk up to the stage, and Dan’s just … eyes closed, head back, just going. I’m waiting for him to open his eyes, and he doesn’t. He’s just in it. I look around at the people seated up by the stage, and they’re all in it, watching Dan just feeling it. So I put his beer far enough away so he won’t kick it over and stand there, waiting to get his attention so I can go, ‘Hey, your beer’s right there.’ He’s just so in the moment. Everyone around him is just eating it up. This magical thing happened that couldn’t have happened at Parker because of the way our programming is, or at Monks because of the way the programming is, and wouldn’t have been as significant at Elephant Room because of how loud and crazy that room is. This was a unique situation and it was just fucking magic to watch Dan willingly sink into what was going on around him.
“He finally finished the tune and I pointed at his beer. He had to take a second and catch his breath and say, ‘Oh, right on, thanks.’ I walked up the stairs and watched him just lean back into it. What a fucking cool thing that we have this for people like Dan, who’s such an accomplished, amazing professional musician. There’s no comfier, cozier place in town, where you’re gonna get to play with better cats, on a better-sounding stage, to reacquaint yourself with this genre that you lost track with, where someone like him, who’s done so much in his career, can come up and have such a fresh, emotional performing moment.”
For Kimura and Frescas, circumstances like these keep Nica in Austin’s jazz tradition, even if the focus is technically on the people at and drinks on the table in front of you, instead of the stage.
“What amazed me about it,” Kimura enthusiastically elucidates, “is in the first two weeks we’re open, I was going around, trying to touch tables, and I’m walking up to a table with four twentysomething women. I said, ‘Thank you very much for coming in.’ And they said, ‘We didn’t even know there was a jazz club in Austin.’ Like, you’ve never been to the Elephant Room? It doesn’t matter. Because the point is, we can get the people who’ve never been to Parker or the Elephant Room. This is great – we’re the gateway drug!”
“It’s our responsibility to educate the listener,” Frescas adds. “You do love jazz – you just don’t know it.”
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated that Aaron Frescas played with 54 Seconds, but he in fact played with the band’s frontman, Spencer Gibb, on Gibb’s solo work. The Chronicle regrets the error.
