Steve Rubie marks 50 years running the 606 Club, London's basement jazz room

Steve Rubie took over the 606 Club in 1976, when it was a poky musicians' hangout on the Kings Road, and he is still running it half a century later. The room moved in 1988 to a basement off Lots Road in Chelsea, reached through an unremarkable metal gate and a flight of narrow stairs, and it has been one of the steadiest addresses in British jazz ever since. Asked by UK Jazz News how it feels to be the one still going, Rubie answered: "I'm the last man standing." Ronnie Scott and Peter Boizot, who founded the Pizza Express Jazz Club, are both gone.

The Lots Road site was "a hole in the ground" when he found it. What sits there now is low-ceilinged and warm, licensed for 170 but seating closer to 100 on a normal night, and Rubie has never tried to make it grand. Few of the people in the glass towers at nearby Chelsea Harbour ever come down the stairs. The regulars drive in from Luton and from Dorset instead.

The anniversary is being marked with a fortnight of music from 12 to 25 October, and the bill is a roll call of players the club backed early: Julian Joseph, Gwilym Simcock, Tim Garland, Jason Rebello, Gwyneth Herbert. The full running order was published last month and is listed in the festival tracker alongside the club's own programme announcement.

Liane Carroll, who plays on 18 October, is a case in point. A trumpet player sent Rubie a demo cassette in the early nineties hoping for a gig of his own. Rubie thought the playing was fine, but on three tracks the pianist also sang, and nobody he asked knew who she was. He ended up phoning the trumpeter back for her number. Carroll came up from Hastings for an early evening set, and that was how she got a foothold in London.

The fastest sellout of the festival was Jamie Cullum's 13 October show. Cullum spent a year at the 606 with his trio in the early 2000s, the run that led to his Universal deal, and Rubie still remembers being told he could not sit in one night because people from the record company were coming down.

Bonnie Raitt and Will Young have both played the room, but Rubie is blunt about not trading on it. "We're not a celebrity-based operation and we don't like to talk about it," he said. The point, as he puts it, is good music seven nights a week, and that has never meant only jazz: soul, groove, gospel, singer-songwriters and the occasional rock band all get a night. "It's not some kind of church."

What has changed, he says, is the listening. In the nineties the 606 doubled as a late-night local and keeping a Friday crowd quiet was hard work. Now people travel to it on purpose. He puts some of that down to younger audiences caring less about genre boundaries, and cites his own son switching between the rapper Dave and Art Blakey.

The economics are less comfortable. Rubie laughed off the question of whether the club will keep going, saying it is constantly challenging. The restaurant is central to the model, new customers are expected to eat, and food, wages and fees all keep climbing. When Cullum was serving his apprenticeship the trio were paid at most 50 pounds each on a weeknight, because the club was struggling to survive. Pay is a lot better now. Twenty-five to thirty people work there.

He is not worried about Blue Note opening in Covent Garden, which he reckons is closer to Ronnie Scott's territory than his own. He still books two artists new to the club every month, and he still plays: flute with his band Samara, and a quintet with the trombonist Geoff Mason. The festival closes on 25 October with an all-star band featuring Imaani and Wayne Hernandez, and Rubie in the horn section.