Jazz Club Eau de Toilette by Maison Martin Margiela Review

Jazz Club by Maison Martin Margiela and its notes including vanilla, rum, tobacco, clary sage, pink pepper, styrax and lemon.

Is it mean to say this smells like a thrift store? Not in a bad way. It’s a nice refined version of that thrift store smell. I don’t know what it is that makes thrift stores smell like this. It might be the clary sage. Something about it is very dusty and herbaceous.

Despite that general impression, I don’t dislike Jazz Club by Maison Martin Margiela. It’s a creamy masculine fragrance with a sage heart. The vetiver and clary sage gives it a fresh herbal edge, while the tobacco and rum make this feel like a classic light masculine evening scent. I have no problems wearing this as a woman, though. This light and fresh, yet long-lasting enough to get you through a dinner date, and it projects very nicely.

And yes, this would be a nice fragrance to wear on a date. It starts out with a strong, traditionally masculine edge, but gradually mellows to a very cuddly amber base as time goes on.

A bent soft branch of common sage with fuzzy leaves.

Jazz Club smells quite dusty to me. A strong lemon floor cleaner or furniture polish, the harsh smell in the opening, fades away to herbal aromatic clary-sage-and-tobacco dust. It’s very heavy on the gray clary sage. The vetiver seems to extend it, giving woody body to the dusty gray scent.

This is bitter like over-steeped tea, dark and almost inky. It’s a cohesive dusty scent, well-blended and smooth. There’s little to say regarding the specific notes. The pink pepper sharpens the edge of the opening a touch, but I can’t point to anything at all floral in here that might be neroli.

Thirty minutes in, the sharp edge of the clary sage starts to fade and I become a little more aware of an equally dusty tobacco.

Two to three hours in, Jazz Club suddenly mellows out into a quieter dustiness. A vanillic, gently sweet amber undercurrent emerges. The drydown is a nice sage-tobacco-vanilla, a bit plant-y and a touch folk-medicinal. The vanilla is sweet, cozy, and warm, reminiscent of another Maison Martin Margiela Replica scent, Whispers in the Library.

It gets progressively warmer and cozier as time goes on, with the styrax kicking in significantly after six or seven hours. The harsh edge of the opening is now long gone, and Jazz Club is a completely different fragrance. It’s warm, it’s sweet, and it’s cozy, cozy, cozy. There’s more texture and warmth here than to the vanilla of Whispers in the Library. It’s closer to the late vanilla and chestnuts of By the Fireplace, long after the smog has cleared.

Botanical illustration of a vanilla flower, leaves, and bean.

In warm weather, this really only lasts four to five hours on me, but in cooler weather I get 12+ hours out of it. There’s a marshmallow-y light and simultaneously slightly playdough-y vanilla in Jazz Club that isn’t super prominent in warmer weather, but really makes up the body of the scent along with the odd herbal, almost plastic-y note when worn in autumn and winter.

That sugary vanilla is what lasts on the body long past any of the other notes. That long vanilla tail is a little cheap and quite uninteresting, and makes me wish it faded faster so I could replace it with a more multi-dimensional fragrance.

It seems like Jazz Club is having a moment among young people on social media this year. I’m not entirely sure why; it’s not a terrible fragrance, it just seems like a bit of an odd and random choice to me.

Regardless of whether you saw this one on TikTok, it’s mostly a mix of harsh, almost plastic-like medicinal sage and tobacco notes and inexpensive sugar-sweet vanilla, with some smoke and booze accents in the first hour or two.

This seems like the type of fragrance to appeal to many women just starting to play around with scents marketed as “men’s”, as it’s got plenty of base sweetness, as well as that smoke, booze, and bitter herbal veneer that loudly proclaim masculinity.

A large brown wooden lit cigar with a puff of white smoke.

Jazz Club is a fun one to try, but not for me. You might like this one if you’re looking for a meld of some traditional smoke-leather-and-booze masculine aesthetic and a healthy dose of vanilla sugar to help the medicine go down. One might say it’s rather one-dimensional and watered down, simple and generic, a boiled-down façade repackaging the “every body spray that harkens back to the smells of supposedly refined old men” aesthetic for quirky young people living in the candy perfume era, but it’s a fun gimmick.

And it’s a cohesive, inspired production. It doesn’t smell like any sort of jazz club — my experience is limited, but at the very least I’ve taught some swing dance lessons at fancy bars — but it is a unified front clearly inspired by the smells of an old-timey nightclub.

A very smooth scent that mixes traditionally masculine tobacco and lemon leather polish with a smooth vanilla sugar base. On me, it’s all topped with a simply colossal dose of dusty thrift store clary sage, but it all comes together thematically.

Not exactly an authentically old-fashioned scent, but a unique dusty herbal adventure nonetheless. Nose Alienor Massenet has composed something unique here, and while it’s not for me, I can see why many enjoy it.


A tall clear battle filled with amber-colored Jazz Club Eau de Toilette by Maison Martin Margiela.

Where to Find Jazz Club Eau de Toilette by Maison Martin Margiela

You can find samples and decants of Jazz Club EdT at Scent Split and MicroPerfumes.

Want more? You can find full bottles at Jomashop and MicroPerfumes.

These are affiliate links. If you click on them and buy something, the seller pays me a commission, at no extra cost to you. You can learn more about them here.



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