Gaye Anderson photo by Daniel Sheehan

A pillar of the Seattle music scene has fallen.

Gaye Anderson, owner and operator for 27 years of the New Orleans Creole Restaurant, in Pioneer Square, died Thursday [August 30].

Miss Anderson was 62. She went into a diabetic coma and was taken to Harborview Hospital, where she died of complications related to lung and heart disease, said her mother, Alice Coleman.

“She had a loving, loving heart; she was just so caring,” said Miss Anderson’s mother.

Apparently Seattle musicians felt the same way. In 2005, Miss Anderson was inducted into the Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame.

“There was no one – I repeat, no one – that was as generous and kind and loving to the musicians than Gaye Anderson,” said Garfield High School Jazz Band director Clarence Acox, who has played drums at the club for 26 years.

A petite platinum blonde with a smoker’s rasp and a wicked tongue – she once kicked out customers who abused her wait staff – Miss Anderson was known for her outsize love of musicians. A former publicist for the restaurant, Jim Hamilton, used to lovingly joke that Miss Anderson was “so nice, it was as if she were trying to make up for someone in her past who had run over a musician.”

The fourth of four siblings – one of whom was the late Washington legislator Cal Anderson – Miss Anderson was born in Seattle in 1950 and moved to Tukwila when she was 6. After graduating from Foster High School, she attended business college, then worked for Andy’s Diner.

Miss Anderson then ran the Bumblebee restaurant with her business and romantic partner, Jimmy Allen, a chef, who died in 1996.

In 1985, Allen and Miss Anderson opened the New Orleans on Yesler Way, which moved two years later to its present site on First Avenue South.

The New Orleans – a 200-capacity, brick-walled club colorfully decorated with oil paintings of musicians and Mardi Gras paraphernalia – hosted music seven nights a week, from blues and zydeco to jazz and Americana.

It was ground zero for traditional New Orleans jazz, but over the years also presented modernists such as trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Denny Zeitlin.

Traditional jazz cornetist Dave Holo summed up the club’s eclecticism nicely: “When a 23-year-old waitress comes up to me, a 60-year-old guy playing 100-year-old music, and says, ‘You rock!’ – how often can that happen?”

The New Orleans was also known for its welcoming atmosphere, much of that due to the spirit Miss Anderson emanated as she darted around the club, waiting tables, chatting with customers and working the bar.

“Everybody was welcome,” said Acox. “People would come after going to black-tie events. People would come in there after the Mardi Gras celebration. It was completely unpretentious.”

Miss Anderson was nice, but she was no fool.

Recalled longtime Seattle jazz advocate Lola Pedrini: “She and I went up the street one night, and it was late, and she grabbed a shot glass and wrapped her hand around it. That was her weapon of choice, this petite, demure looking woman. She was feisty as all get-out. But she had a heart twice as big as she was. The salt of the earth.”

The New Orleans Restaurant is still open, and Miss Anderson’s family is assessing whether it will continue to run the business.

Besides her mother, of Seattle, Miss Anderson is survived by a brother, Joseph B. Anderson, of Tukwila; and several nieces and nephews.

No memorial is currently scheduled, but musicians are planning one.

Reprinted with permission from the Seattle Times, copyright 2012.

Celebrations in honor of the life of Gaye Anderson were held at the New Orleans Creole Restaurant during the week of September 24-28.