For 70 years, that alliterative name has swung in 4/4 time, marking the center of the known jazz universe to an international circle of musicians and music fans. To the uninitiated, the small club at the bottom of 15 well-trodden steps below street level may seem little more than a cramped, triangular-shaped room. But to a hip populace its where the ghosts of past jazz giants still play, where the best living jazz talent aspire to record, and where sound waves seem to reverberate in a manner unlike any other club, anywhere.

"I call it the Carnegie Hall of jazz because most jazz clubs just don't have the sound that that place has," says pianist Jason Moran, whose last album was recorded at the Vanguard. "It's the place where Moses and Mohammed and Jesus walked!"

Saxophonist Joe Lovano, whose most recent live album was also a Vanguard gig, agrees. "It might affect you to be sitting in that room, imagining, 'Oh, [Thelonious] Monk was here!' 'Man, Miles [Davis] and Hank Mobley played here, and Bill Evans's trio!' You're feeling the spirits. Well, that's how I feel when I record there -- we're calling the spirits."

Other jazz venues once claimed that kind of primacy. "The corner of the jazz world" was the boast of the original Birdland at Broadway and 55th. But the Vanguard, seven decades old this Feb. 21 -- still at 178 Seventh Avenue South, still with a seating capacity of 123 -- has survived them all.