New home for Jazz at Lincoln Center

[mgraham333]

New home for Jazz at Lincoln Center

NEW YORK (AP) -- As jazz enters its second century, the music that had its humble origins in street parades, dance halls and brothels is moving to one of the world's most prestigious addresses.

The new home of Jazz at Lincoln Center is the $128 million Frederick P. Rose Hall, a 100,000-square-foot palace occupying two floors in the new Time Warner Center -- the first performance, education and broadcasting facility custom-built for jazz. It's just a block from the site of the former dance hall where, in 1917, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band gave the first public jazz performance in New York City.

"I never could have imagined this when I came to New York," said trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, JALC's artistic director, who arrived here in 1979 as a teenage prodigy to attend the Juilliard School. "We were always playing in the most raggedy clubs, or if not raggedy, just smaller spaces."

Now, "we have a hall where you can do operas, ballets and more formal presentations. We have a place for public dancing and a club for people who like to hang out day and night. We've designed studios for people to record in and spaces for teaching kids," said Marsalis, interviewed in the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, as pictures of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and other charter inductees flashed by on a video wall.

In an homage to their roots, Marsalis and members of his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra will kick off the dedication ceremonies on Monday, October 18 -- also the trumpeter's 43rd birthday -- with a traditional New Orleans-style street parade starting at the Lincoln Center plaza's fountain. They will march five blocks down Broadway to their new home, playing a fanfare entitled "The Gift" and written for the occasion by trombonist Slide Hampton.

The first order of business will be to open the 3,500-square-foot Irene Diamond Education Center, which includes a combined rehearsal hall and recording studio large enough to hold a symphony orchestra and choir, as well as two smaller classrooms where everyone from preschoolers to world-renowned musicians will teach and learn. The hall of fame, designed using materials such as cork, wood and brass found in jazz instruments, also plays an educational role with its interactive kiosks and touch-activated virtual plaques.

On Monday evening, JALC will launch its grand opening festival with simultaneous programs in its three performance venues, to be broadcast by NPR and PBS' "Live From Lincoln Center." They will celebrate the theme of "One Family of Jazz," in which the musicians will be performing with family members, including Marsalis with father Ellis on piano and brothers Branford on saxophone, Jason on drums and Delfeayo on trombone.

In the Rose Theater concert hall, Marsalis will lead the LCJO in a program with such guests as saxophonist Joe Lovano, violinist Mark O'Connor, pianist Marcus Roberts, and singers Abbey Lincoln and Tony Bennett. JALC's second ensemble, the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, led by pianist Arturo O'Farrill, will play in The Allen Room, a romantic cabaret-ballroom where a 50-by-90-foot glass wall offers panoramic views of Central Park and the Fifth Avenue skyline. Pianist Bill Charlap and his mother, singer Sandy Stewart, will open the intimate Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola.

"We really have created a unique collection of spaces and experiences not only for New York but really for the world to experience this music, to see it in a different light and really become connected to it in a new way," said Derek Gordon, who took over this summer as JALC's executive director after 12 years at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where he created its jazz program.

Lorraine Gordon (no relation), owner of the venerable Village Vanguard club, which in February will celebrate its 70th anniversary, wasn't afraid of competition from the city's newest jazz venue.

"It's a welcome addition to the cultural scene where maybe jazz is elevated another step upward," she said. "I don't think it can hurt jazz."

'Core program and values'

But some from the city's more cutting-edge "downtown" jazz scene feel the new facility's "Welcome" theme doesn't extend to musicians who don't fit Marsalis' neo-traditional jazz ideology that has little room for either jazz-rock fusion or free-form improvisation.

"The problem I have is that you're going to have this enormous institution ... but it's taking the few resources that are put into jazz and putting it into one guy's hands," said saxophonist Roy Nathanson, leader of the Jazz Passengers, an avant-jazz group which has collaborated with Elvis Costello and Debbie Harry. "It gives people the illusion that jazz is being supported when many great musicians I know don't get supported."

Marsalis insists that JALC won't change its programming philosophy just because it is expanding, adding that "there's room in the whole city" for everything to be played.

"The heart of Jazz at Lincoln Center is about swinging and playing the blues ... because we feel that's the heart of what jazz is about," said Marsalis. "We're not against any type of improvised music playing ... but we have a core program and values that we stick to."

"And as long as I'm the artistic director," he says, "we'll be dealing with swing with jazz."

Marsalis has stuck to his principles since he was asked in 1987 to produce a three-concert "Classical Jazz" summer series at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. In 1996, JALC became a full constituent of Lincoln Center, putting it on an equal footing with the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic, even though it lacked its own home.

Plans for the new jazz center began to take shape six years ago when $18 million in city funding was made available. JALC has raised all but $3 million of the $128 million construction budget, with about 30 percent coming from government funding and the remainder from private donors.

JALC then brought in the world-renowned, Uruguayan-born architect Rafael Vinoly, whose works include the Tokyo International Forum and Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia. But none of these experiences prepared Vinoly, a classically trained pianist, for the challenge ahead.

"You have no precedents," he said, speaking in a box in the Rose Theater over the din of hammers and power saws as workers readied the hall for opening night. "You have no culture of how you approach this art form in terms of physical space. ... In jazz, there is this amazing process of interaction with the audience ... and intimacy."

Vinoly successfully battled the complex's main developer to get the jazz center moved from the back to the front of the building, where the glass windows not only create a dramatic cityscape backdrop for the musicians but enable passers-by in the street to see the bands performing.

"There is no better advertising for jazz ... than an orchestra playing," said Vinoly. "And the whole thing here is that you see the art form right in the guts, at the center of gravity, of this whole enormous monument to commercial activities."

JALC also brought together specialists from two leading acoustics design firms to form a special consulting team, "The Sound of Jazz." Marsalis was well aware of the limitations of Lincoln Center's Alice Tully and Avery Fisher halls, which were designed for unamplified classical music but muddied the sound of a jazz ensemble.

"It's safe to say," Marsalis said after leading rehearsals at the Rose Theater, "that this will be the best concert space to play in and hear jazz."

Respecting an American art

The new facility is state of the art, yet still embraces the jazz tradition. The 1,100-1,231-seat Rose Theater, whose design was inspired by small Italian opera houses, builds on the legacy of concert hall jazz that began in 1938 when Benny Goodman performed at nearby Carnegie Hall for the first time.

The Rose Theater, paneled with African movingui wood, has 11 movable towers with tiers of seats that can be positioned for in-the-round seating to create an intimate setting for jazz performances with the farthest seat only 88 feet from the stage. The room can also be converted into a traditional proscenium theater for opera and dance by leaving the towers backstage and raising the retractable ceiling.

The hall can even be tuned to fit a classical or jazz performance because the acoustic devices overhead and along the side walls can all be adjusted. The entire hall itself is a floating "box within a box" that sits on rubber isolation pads to eliminate vibrations from the subway below and other background noise.

The 300- to 600-seat Allen Room, done in light maple wood, has seven tiers of seats that resemble a Greek amphitheater. But it can also be turned into a ballroom-like setting by raising alternate tiers hydraulically to create four levels that are wide enough for banquet tables and dancing.

The 140-seat Dizzy's Club, with its curvy bamboo walls, offers the intimacy of a typical New York jazz club, but without packing the patrons in like sardines. The club will offer music 365 days a year, including low-price Monday night shows featuring jazz bands from area colleges and special late-night hang sets for jam sessions.

As he walks through the House of Swing, Marsalis can't help but reflect on how attitudes toward jazz have changed over the music's first century.

"In the early days, everybody liked jazz but because it was played by black musicians, it was looked down upon due to racism and ignorance," Marsalis said. "And then you can add the fact that Americans also have a natural disdain for their own arts.

"Now we have Jazz at Lincoln Center, which is a sign of the maturation of our culture that we can respect an American art and a sign of the abatement of racism and ignorance -- although we have a long way to go."

source: CNN

[sal]

There's an article on this in the new Downbeat. It looks beautiful. Hopefully the programing will be worthy of the venue.

[Dan Gould]

My only problem with it is the sale of the naming rights to the club, and then calling it Dizzy's Club Coca Cola. To link Dizzy with the drink ...

If they needed Coke's $$, well, I don't have to like it, but OK. But to create such an awkward, ridiculous sounding name is just sad.

But I guess they couldn't name it the Coke Club-the Association of Pushers and Affiliated Scum would have filed a trademark infringement suit, right?

Seriously, while I may hold my nose at the commercialization, linking Dizzy to this travesty makes it far worse. Is there any other example of linking a real life person to a facility bought and paid for by a corporation? Do the Heat play at Shaq's American Airlines Arena?

Edited October 14, 2004 by Dan Gould

[PHILLYQ]

Will they allow electric bass & a Fender Rhodes in the hall?

[Free For All]

Will they allow electric bass & a Fender Rhodes in the hall?

Which reminds me- how is our ol' buddy hardbop doing, anyway? B-)

You just know he's lovin' this.

[Rooster_Ties]

Will they allow electric bass & a Fender Rhodes in the hall?

Which reminds me- how is our ol' buddy hardbop doing, anyway? B-)

You just know he's lovin' this.

Damn it, Free For All, I was just about to say... "not over hardbop's dead body!!" - will they let anything electric in that hall.

But seriously, probably not if Wynton has anything to say about it. /

[jlhoots]

Will they allow electric bass & a Fender Rhodes in the hall?

Which reminds me- how is our ol' buddy hardbop doing, anyway? B-)

You just know he's lovin' this.

hardbop is over at AAJ posting & fighting (as usual) with Chris.

Chris should be all over this thread soon.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

As we slurp down those super-size Cokes with their high fructose corn syrup, let's please remember that Gillespie suffered from diabetes.

Mike

[Jazzmoose]

But I guess they couldn't name it the Coke Club-the Association of Pushers and Affiliated Scum would have filed a trademark infringement suit, right?

You laugh, but they were powerful enough to get Marion Barry back in politics...

[frank m]

The band that reads the blues.

[Big Wheel]

Will they allow electric bass & a Fender Rhodes in the hall?

Which reminds me- how is our ol' buddy hardbop doing, anyway? B-)

You just know he's lovin' this.

Still trolling, it appears.

What I don't get is WHY he does it. Does he just like getting people worked up? I mean, wading into a thread about an artist to register your own negative opinion is one thing. Starting a thread for the sole purpose of soliciting like-minded negative opinions is quite another. "Does Anyone Else Think David Murray is Overrated?"

Edit: I guess there's nothing really terrible about it if it doesn't convince people to forgo giving people's music at least a try. But there's never any substantive discussion that comes out of this crap from him. I mean, we all KNOW why he really doesn't like David Murray--because he played with Don Pullen, the WSQ, and in other "out" contexts. If he at least backed it up with some real critique it might be ok--eg, "I don't like Murray's tone, and he doesn't use the large group to its full potential, and the compositions sound uninspired." But he never does; it's all about just shitting on people.

Edited October 15, 2004 by Big Wheel

[Rooster_Ties]

Still trolling, it appears.

What I don't get is WHY he does it. Does he just like getting people worked up? I mean, wading into a thread about an artist to register your own negative opinion is one thing. Starting a thread for the sole purpose of soliciting like-minded negative opinions is quite another. "Does Anyone Else Think David Murray is Overrated?"     

And this recent classic....

AAJ thread: Wallace Roney's "Prototype" Looks Like A Real Stinker

Damn. I dig Wallace Roney, but Prototype, his debut on the HighNote label, looks like it belongs in the growing circular file along with Roy Hargrove's "Rh Factor" discs and Nicholas Payton's "Sonic Trance" band.

What has gotten into trumpet players these days.

Here's the line-up:

Personnel: Wallace Roney (trumpet); Don Byron (bass clarinet); Antoine Roney (saxophone, soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone); Clifton Anderson (trombone); Adam Holzman (piano, Fender Rhodes piano, keyboards); Geri Allen (piano, Fender Rhodes piano); Matt Garrison (double bass, bass guitar); Eric Allen (drums); DJ Logic (turntables).

Fender Rhodes. Bass guitar. Turntables. Oy.

Oy, indeed.

[jlhoots]

I'm not hardbop, nor am I a hardbop apologist, but I don't think the Murray thread at that other place has been fairly characterized here. Some might want to read it & some of the comments more carefully. I seem to recall some harsh criticism of Murray in the past by a very esteemed member of this board.

The Roney thread is another story, although I'm cautious about the inclusion of

D. J. Logic. On the other hand (& way off topic) artists like Uri Caine have used "turntableists" effectively, so I'll have to listen more carefully.

Disclaimer: I'm not a big hip hop fan.

[7/4]

... but we have a core program and values that we stick to."

"And as long as I'm the artistic director," he says, "we'll be dealing with swing with jazz."

Is there a way to vote Wynton off the island?

[Big Wheel]

I'm not hardbop, nor am I a hardbop apologist, but I don't think the Murray thread at that other place has been fairly characterized here. Some might want to read it & some of the comments more carefully. I seem to recall some harsh criticism of Murray in the past by a very esteemed member of this board.

The Roney thread is another story, although I'm cautious about the inclusion of

D. J. Logic. On the other hand (& way off topic) artists like Uri Caine have used "turntableists" effectively, so I'll have to listen more carefully.

Disclaimer: I'm not a big hip hop fan.

Ok, I looked at some of the posts again. While you have a point--hardbop isn't completely dismissive of Murray and actually admits to liking some of his work--why didn't he just name the thread something like "Why is David Murray's Work So Uneven?" or even better, "What do you think of David Murray's Recorded Work?" The point of the thread still seems to be to encourage other people to sling shit on Murray for his alleged crimes against jazz.

While other people here have come down on Murray, my point was that they don't go out of their way and START THREADS trashing him.

Edited October 15, 2004 by Big Wheel

[Leeway]

Discussion of J@LC inevitably (for rather good reasons) becomes a discussion of Wynton Marsalis, and then of his admirer Hardbop (Wynton should be giving Hardbop free tickets and the best seat in the house, the guy does so much PR for him; then again, maybe he already does).

Anyway, I'm more interested in some of the other questions raised by J@LC.

For example, is it to the benefit of jazz to instituionalize it in the way that J@LC has?

Is it a good thing to have a resident jazz orchestra?

What will be the effect of J@LC on the New York club scene, Blue Note, Village Vanguard, Iridium, etc? Will it hurt their attendance? their ability to book performers?

What will be the effect on jazz in general if J@LC can't fill its seats? Will that add to the "death of jazz" syndrome?

How ill J@LC affect new developments in jazz? Will its commercial pre-eminence tend to stifle innovation in jazz? Or will it give jazz the sort of prominence that will help jazz maintain and advance

It seems to me that J@LC is a fairly radical project when you think of it. I'm surprised more analysis hasn't been given to it.

The latest extended article is Ben Ratliffe's in the NY Times.

Ratliffe Article on J@LC

J@LC Web Site

J@LC Web Site

Edited October 16, 2004 by Leeway

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Any chance we could just leave that idiot over at All About Jazz? He's not here and that's a good thing.

I like the questions that are being raised about whether the Jazz At Lincoln Center mission is a worthy one - how about asking whether a high school jazz competition is a good thing. How about asking whether Duke Ellington's music should be the ONLY music performed in this competition. I mean, yes, it's great to get those charts out to schools, yes, Duke Ellington is wonderful, but - THERE'S SO MUCH MORE!!!!!

And I like even more "The Band That Reads The Blues" sobriquet.

Mike

[cannonball-addict]

Following is an excert by David Adler from Jazztimes' website. He wrote two pieces on the new venues. I am familiar with his writing as I'm sure many of you are as well. And of course I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Fitzgerald has harsh words for me for citing another writer, as he seems to have an axe to grind with any and everybody I mention B-) :

Dizzy’s will often hold a late-night “hang set,” the first of which featured pianist John Hicks and bassist Curtis Lundy. There’s talk of this becoming the new after-gig spot, in the manner of the sorely missed Bradley’s. Again, we shall see. New York could always use more community-building spaces, and if Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola can rise above the cold corporate feel of its name, more power to it.

We shall see....I can just imagine security at Rose Hall letting a bunch of working jazz musicians and students into their castle...

[Christiern]

Ratliff is a shameless Marsalis supporter, not a critic.

I agree with Mike re keeping the idiot at AAJ, but think his infantile swooning over all things J@LC may backfire and not be as beneficial to those people as Mike suggests.

[neveronfriday]

I'm sick and tired of this Wynton Marsalis discussion regularly erupting all over the place. By giving so much room to this reactionary @@@@ you more than likely support his cause rather than fight it.

And where does the notion come from that Wynton is the biggest enemy?As if that @@@@ was a giant and not the whiny little puppy he often turns out to be.

Just keep the name off the board and keep the people happy. Buy jazz, go and see jazz, and stop talking about the death of jazz brought about by that Marsalis dude. Those people who listen to him are beyond hope anyway, and that Wynton has such substantial influence on so many people I just seriously doubt. You guys are giving him much more recognition than he deserves ... and the general audience too little respect.

From a European perspective, I think that nobody in his right mind actually believed the limited Burns view to be a definitive history of jazz. Most people are not that dumb (although there are exceptions).

Why is it that some people seem to have a personal axe to grind with Wynton ... and need to do so in public view constantly? Who the fu*k cares (... about Wynton)?

Sorry, but just my 2c worth.

P.S.: And that Dizzy/Coke thing is just sickening, but hardly surprising. Hey, it's the land of opportunity.

[Christiern]

Deus62, you are not practicing what you preach!