Every room has a founder, but not every founder builds something designed to outlive them. Dale Triguero did. He opened Chickie Wah Wah in 2006, ran it as a genuine listening room until his death in 2021, and left behind a place worth saving — which is exactly what happened. This is a tribute to the man who made the room, told with the facts we can stand behind and none of the ones we can’t.
Dale Triguero opened Chickie Wah Wah in 2006 and ran it as a genuine listening room until his death on July 8, 2021. A group of music-industry veterans and local investors then purchased the club from his estate and reopened it as the listening room he built.
A Brooklyn Kid Who Belonged in New Orleans
Dale Triguero was, improbably, a Brooklyn kid. He drove cabs in Manhattan and performed in theaters in New York and Los Angeles before he found his way to New Orleans — and then never left. Plenty of people fall in love with New Orleans on a visit. Very few actually become part of it. Dale did.
The proof is that he turned up as a bartender in HBO’s Tremé, the definitive screen portrait of post-Katrina New Orleans. He wasn’t cast as an outsider playing local color; he was cast because he genuinely was a fixture of the city’s culture. When a show about the soul of New Orleans needs someone to stand behind a bar and be real, they don’t hire a tourist.
He got his real start in New Orleans music at the Old Point Bar in Algiers, and it was there he discovered his actual gift. It wasn’t performing. It was creating the conditions in which performers could do their best work — knowing how to book a room, how to set it, and how to build an audience that would show up and actually listen. That is a rarer and more valuable talent than it sounds, and it’s the one the whole city would eventually benefit from.
The guitarist Alex McMurray described him about as well as anyone could: “a stocky New Yorker with a take-no-shit persona but a creamy vanilla center.” The persona protected the softness underneath — a real love for music and for the people who make it.
What He Built at 2828 Canal Street
The building that became Chickie Wah Wah was formerly the Canal Bus Stop, a spot where brass bands occasionally played. Dale took it over under a lease-to-own arrangement, rehabilitated the space, and opened in 2006 — while much of the city was still trying to find its footing after the flood. Opening a music room in New Orleans in 2006 was not a safe bet. It was an act of faith in the city’s recovery, made with his own money and his own back.
How he ran it tells you everything about what he valued:
- He paid musicians out of pocket when the crowds were thin — treating the players as the priority even on the nights the math didn’t work.
- He banned indoor smoking before the city required it, because a clear room is a better room to hear music in.
- He kept weekday start times early, so people could come after work, catch a real show, and still function the next morning.
- He hung signs from shuttered New Orleans businesses on the walls — a small, deliberate museum of what the city had lost, wrapped around a room built on the belief that not everything had to be.
Each of those is a small decision. Together they add up to a philosophy: that a music venue is a public trust, not just a business, and that the room exists to serve the artists and the listening, in that order.
The recognition followed. In 2012 he won OffBeat Magazine’s Best Club Owner award. The musician Dave Jordan called Chickie Wah Wah “the only listening room in town” — no small compliment in a city where music is usually a backdrop rather than the point.
A Music Church
The singer Meschiya Lake, who recorded a live album in the room, described what Dale had made better than any brochure could:
“Dale built the place to be kind of like a music church — a place where artists can come do what they want, to do their best, and be treated with some respect.”
You can see the truth of that phrase in who chose to play here. Jon Cleary — one of the finest pianists New Orleans has produced — made the club a regular home. Papa Mali, Paul Sanchez, Alex McMurray, Bonerama, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band all played the room, artists who could fill bigger, louder places and chose this one instead. And in the kind of moment that only happens at a music church: the night before his 2019 Jazz Fest set, Tom Jones turned up unannounced to sing alongside Jon Cleary. No stadium, no press release — just a legend walking into a Mid-City listening room because that’s where the music was.
The Signs on the Walls
Of all the things Dale did, the one that says the most is the collection of signs on the walls — salvaged signage from New Orleans businesses that had closed. It’s easy to walk past them as decoration. They’re not. They’re a statement of purpose, hung deliberately around a room that Dale built specifically so it would not join them.
Think about what that means for a man who opened a music venue in 2006, in a city still counting its losses after the flood. He surrounded his brand-new room with the ghosts of places that hadn’t made it — not as a downer, but as a daily reminder of the stakes. Every business on those walls is a thing New Orleans used to have and doesn’t anymore. Chickie Wah Wah was his argument that the list didn’t have to keep growing, that with enough stubbornness and care a good room could survive.
The signs are also, now, unbearably fitting in a way Dale couldn’t have planned. When he died, his own room came within an inch of becoming another shuttered sign — another lost New Orleans business. That it isn’t one is the whole point of what came next.
How It Ended, and Why It Didn’t
Dale Triguero died on July 8, 2021, at 68, from complications following heart surgery at University Medical Center. He was, at that point, nearly finished paying off the building he had spent fifteen years bringing back to life. His death could easily have been the end of the room — the venue his vision built now belonging to an estate, its future uncertain.
It wasn’t the end. A group of music-industry veterans and local investors bought the club and reopened it, determined to keep it exactly what Dale had made it: a listening room where the cover charge goes to the musicians on stage. The full account of who stepped up, and what it took, is on our About page — it’s a story worth reading, because it’s ultimately a story about a city refusing to lose one of its good rooms.
The best tribute to a man who built a room for listening is to use it as intended. Come hear somebody play. Sit close. Be quiet during the quiet parts. The cover still goes to the musicians, exactly the way Dale would want — and in a room like this, that’s not nostalgia. It’s just how the place still works.