Above the Beat: Studio 151’s Vinyl and Sushi Sessions in the East Village
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Studio 151 is one of New York City’s most respected listening bars — explore more in our NYC Music Venues guide.
Venue Name: Studio 151
Address: 151 Avenue C, New York, NY 10009, United States
Website: studio151nyc.com
Phone: +1 917-409-0251
Spotify Profile: N/A
There’s a moment on Avenue C when the traffic hum falls away and you hear a fragment of music where you’d expect only the hiss of tyres on asphalt. It might be a walking bass line, it might be a crisp rimshot. You look up — there’s a neon-lit sign above a narrow door. This is Studio 151.
Climb the stairs and you’re in a room that feels like a Tokyo jazz bar that took a long holiday in New York and decided to stay. The walls are dark, the booths deep, the bar lit in a low amber that makes everything — glass, vinyl, conversation — look warmer. At the far end, a DJ is cueing up a record on a Technics deck, the tonearm lowering like it’s bowing into the groove.
Studio 151 shares its DNA with Nublu, the club downstairs known for sweaty, brass-heavy jam sessions and genre-crossing DJs. But this is the upstairs sibling: more precise, more measured, and yet still undeniably New York. The sound system is tuned for detail rather than volume, the kind of setup where a snare hit has both crack and air, and where upright bass can be felt as well as heard.
Then there’s the sushi. This is no afterthought — a full omakase service runs alongside the listening programme. You might be halfway through a slice of fatty tuna, the wasabi opening your senses, when the selector drops a track from Masabumi Kikuchi that turns the room into a slow-burning daydream. The combination is alchemy: flavour sharpening the ear, music stretching the palate.
The programming leans Japanese in flavour — jazz from the Nippon Columbia catalogue, city pop deep cuts, Shigeo Sekito’s soft electric organ lines — but this is New York, and the selectors will pivot without warning into a slab of early 70s funk, a dusty Afrobeat 12-inch, or a gospel soul track that brings the room to stillness.
The crowd is a study in cross-pollination: East Village lifers, Nublu regulars, industry heads, couples on date nights, and the occasional vinyl tourist who’s read about the place and made the pilgrimage. Conversation is present but secondary. The music sits in the foreground here — a deliberate, chosen thing.
I take a seat at the bar, which feels more like a listening perch than a place to drink. The bartender glides between pouring sake, placing plates, and leaning in to exchange a quiet word with the DJ about what might work next. Service has that East Village looseness wrapped in Japanese precision.
The sushi arrives in a sequence, each plate carrying its own visual rhythm — a stripe of fish here, a curl of shellfish there — and between each piece, the room is filled with something new from the speakers. It’s almost like the chef and selector are in quiet collaboration, mapping the night’s energy together.
Lighting here is part of the tuning. It’s dim enough to make the outside world vanish, but not so dark that you lose the connection between the people in the room. The glow from behind the bar catches the edge of a vinyl sleeve propped on a stand — tonight it’s a Terumasa Hino LP from the 70s, and you can hear the trumpet’s heat cutting through the mix.
The night builds in movements. Early evening is exploratory — selectors digging through slow grooves, Brazilian bossa, brushed drum ballads. By 10pm, there’s a sharper edge: funk, Latin jazz, break-heavy disco. And as the midnight hour closes in, things might turn abstract, the sort of soundscapes that make you lean forward into the mix, sake glass in hand, listening for the next turn.
One of the things that strikes me about Studio 151 is how it manages to hold two identities in the same space. On one hand, it’s an East Village bar with a strong pull for the neighbourhood. On the other, it’s a destination for the global vinyl crowd, the people who treat a night here as much a listening pilgrimage as a social one.
When you finally step back down to Avenue C, the street noise feels almost brash after the controlled atmosphere upstairs. But there’s an echo that comes with you — a sense memory of taste and tone, of a bass note fading just as you swallowed the last piece of sushi.
Studio 151 doesn’t need to shout to make itself heard. It just opens the groove and lets you fall in.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
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