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GREENSBORO — On some evenings, you can hear Sonya Bennett-Brown sing opera, but after midnight in Boston’s House of Jazz, a music club in downtown Greensboro, she gets a lot funkier.

“Don’t mess with me, y’all,” she tells the Friday night crowd. “I got my shoes off and I’ll tear this floor up!”

Backed by a tight three-piece band, the barefoot Bennett-Brown belts out recent R&B hits (“Need U Bad” by Jazmine Sullivan) and classic ones (“Ain’t Nobody” by Rufus and Chaka Khan). Every table is occupied, couples dance in the little space in front of the low corner stage, and the brick walls throb from the thumping bass guitar. Owner Mike Boston says the club has been entertaining the “grown and sexy” crowd since July 4, 2009.

When Bennett-Brown takes a hard-earned break, Boston steps to the microphone in a crisp white shirt and black fedora.

“Let’s hear it for Sonya Bennett-Brown,” he tells the crowd. “Can she sing, or what? My name is Mike Boston, and I own this liquor house.”

Boston has spent almost two years establishing his music club on Edgeworth Street in downtown Greensboro, housed in the former Left Field Tavern behind the outfield fence at NewBridge Bank Park. But he never stops looking for ways to expand his operations. It’s a family tradition: His grandparents and parents ran their own businesses, his extended family serves as the club’s board of directors, and the website for Boston’s House of Jazz even lists his grandchildren as entrepreneurs.

“Entrepreneurship is in their blood, in their spirit,” Boston said during a recent interview at the club. “They’re either gonna be forced into it by inheritance or they’re gonna choose to do it because they’ve been around it all their lives.”

Music also is a family tradition.

Boston, 57, grew up in Reidsville, started playing keyboards at age 6, and toured with R&B bands from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. He routinely welcomes crowds to his “liquor house,” a throwback to his childhood.

“When I was coming up, there were neighborhood liquor houses, which were illegal,” Boston says. “But that’s where everybody in the neighborhood went. These were places where you go in and you knew the people, and they would feed you. It may be a bowl of pinto beans and cornbread.”

Boston’s House of Jazz doesn’t serve food, but it does offer light jazz, R&B, spoken word, open-mike nights and other forms of entertainment five nights a week.

Most of the patrons are older than 35, Boston said, distinguishing the club from its more youth-oriented counterparts on Elm Street.

“There’s not a lot of places that do live music or are willing to pay for live music,” said Vincent Crenshaw, who plays at Boston’s House of Jazz about once a month with his jazz duo The Destiny Brothers or backing his wife in The Saundra Crenshaw Band. “He gave a lot of people a new place to play.”

A separate business, Mike Boston Entertainment, also produces events at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, and Boston has plans to launch a record label and extend the reach of his club beyond the Greensboro city limits.

“We are taking Boston’s House of Jazz on the road,” he said.

Since May 2010, the private club has hosted “Boston’s House of Jazz Live” on the first Friday of every month at the Sundance Plaza Hotel in Winston-Salem.

“That has gone so well that the hotel would really like for me to open a permanent location in there,” he said.

Now, he is making plans to stage similar shows in Danville, Va., and Elizabeth City.

He would also like to resurrect a popular talent show he used to host in the auditorium at Reidsville Senior High School, which Boston said attracted about 2,000 people a year for several years.

“That’s where most people know me from, is The Showcase,” he said.

Open-mike nights at Boston’s House of Jazz have provided a steady source of new talent for the club, said Boston’s “right-hand man,” production coordinator Stephen “Hawk” Garner.

“We have put bands together,” Garner said. “We’ve got people now that are going out and playing in other venues.”

Contact Eddie Huffman at ehuffman@triad.rr.com