Maloe Melo is Amsterdam's blues bar — a Jordaan institution on Lijnbaansgracht that has been running live music almost every night of the week since 1983. The room holds around a hundred people; on a busy Friday it is standing room only. The band sets up in the corner of the bar rather than on a raised stage, and the audience forms around them. This informality is the whole point.

The booking policy centres on blues, jazz, roots, and soul, with regular appearances from Dutch and Belgian musicians alongside visiting American and European acts. The quality is consistently high and the atmosphere is unpretentious in a way that has become rarer as the Jordaan has gentrified around it. Most nights you can walk in off the street and find a full live set already in progress.

Entry is usually free or very cheap (a few euros for ticketed nights). The bar is open until 3am on weekends. Maloe Melo is the kind of place that people who move to Amsterdam eventually discover and then stop leaving — a neighbourhood bar where something genuinely musical happens every evening without fuss.