Every Thursday evening, the sounds of jazz rise up from beneath the Newell House.

The trio of Ron Coulter, Jim Wall and Mel Goot have a standing gig at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays for about a year in The Grotto bar, located beneath the restaurant. The three have an interesting mix of backgrounds: Coulter is a senior lecturer of percussion while Wall is a radio-television senior lecturer; Goot is a Spanish teacher at Murphysboro High School.

“We want to keep people guessing,” Goot said. “Too many people have this preconceived notion of what they think jazz is, and jazz encompasses so much; everything from down-home traditional to the latest space funk and everything in between. Right when they think they have it pegged, we want to throw them a curveball.”

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As the sounds of jazz begin, they descend on the evening like steady beating raindrops. The tempo is rhythmic, calm and collected.

The piano keys beat amid the drum taps and pulsing bass. The cadence scrawls from one highlighted instrument to the next. The bass notes take control and begin to shape around the keys like the moving of the sea.

Eventually, the set begins to rise in the well establish rhythmical finesse of pure steaming jazz as audiences know it. The piano keys act like little drips of water that could dance in melodic fashion. The notes are struck in such a way that the tapings of feet are eminent.

The drums roll like horses in the night that trod gracefully into dawn. Once this night fades, the tempo snaps alive into harmony with the song “Will it Go Round in Circles,” written by Billy Preston. There is never a discordant clamor; the sounds simply race and rise to rinse and fall. It is a cycling beat like the swell of the sea. If the sound itself could be an ocean, then the instrumentation is the water which fills it and gives it body.

The keys lead in again like a spark and in a steady rising synchronicity which creates a burning flame the trio of instruments then meld together.

The melodic sounds come alive and blend like the chromatic harmonica and into the atmosphere where they flow as the drum stirs and the bass beats within “Bluesette” a song written by Toots Thielemans.

But the trio doesn’t just reprise favorites; they often play their own compositions.

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“We never know what we’re going to do from one night to the next, so we just look out to the crowd and feel it and try not to do two things too similar in a row,” Wall said.

There is a harmony to the playing of these songs. However, it is the trio’s uniqueness which beckons audiences down the staircase.

“The Newell House (has) been good to us and we appreciate them,” Coulter said. “We are here every Thursday with no cover and good food, good drinks and good people.”

Jake Saunders can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @saundersfj, or by phone at 536-3311 ext. 254.