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Curating Community at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem
“I’d rather be a fly on a lamppost in Harlem than a millionaire anywhere else”
– Willie the Lion Smith, as quoted on the National Jazz Museum in Harlem website.1
My membership card came in the mail: “Jazz,” it said in an understated cursive
font against a plain blue background, and then below, in smaller capital letters, “BRINGS
PEOPLE TOGETHER”
(figure 1). It seemed a fitting motto for the National Jazz Museum in
Harlem (NJMH), an institution that offers a variety of public programs out of its Visitor’s
Center at 104 East 126th Street in New York City. Starting shortly after the museum
opened its doors to the neighborhood in 2004 I began attending the Harlem Speaks series
of interviews with musicians and other individuals who have had some connection to
Harlem and to jazz. What struck me at these events was the intimate sense of local-ness,
and, in fact, a feeling that a sort of community was enabled and enacted through these
oral history sessions. Rather than a controlled distance between the guests of honor and
the audience members, the setting has tended to be very informal, with a kind of giveand-take between the interviewee and the public. Guests let down their guard somewhat
at this space and often speak more frankly than they might in a more mainstream media
setting.
For example, bandleader Johnny Colon prefaced comments about race and
Harlem politics by saying, “Now I’m going to speak like I wouldn’t normally on camera
because I feel so comfortable here.” Other moments I documented were not so much
1
“Overview,” http://jazzmuseuminharlem.org/overview.php (accessed Aug. 13, 2011).
The quotation can be found in Willie the Lion Smith with George Hoefer, Music on My
Mind: The Memoirs of an American Pianist (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965), 6.
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frank as they were emotional, such as when trumpeter Clark Terry looked at his audience
before his interview began and said, “I’m so overwhelmed to be here, to see so many old
friends back from the Apollo [Theater] days … to see so many beautiful people of such
stature. Just makes me want to cry.” 2 Often, audience members – many of whom are
seniors – would be called upon to supply a date or name when the guest’s or host’s
memory failed. Alternatively, something a guest said might remind one of the more
senior persons present of events marked by music from her or his younger days. At times,
audience affirmations of speakers’ statements almost seemed to build to a call-andresponse kind of cadence.
In this article I draw on my ethnography of museum events and my interviews
with patrons over the course of several years to examine how the assertion that jazz
brings people together is central to this institution’s mission. I consider how the concept
of community has been theorized, specifically in relation to what is commonly referred to
as “the jazz community.” I am concerned, too, with the museum’s place in the rapidly
developing “New Harlem,” as a participant in a trend that some have called a Second
Harlem Renaissance. What is the significance of location for this museum’s activities? 3
2
Author’s fieldnotes, Harlem Speaks: Johnny Colon, NJMH, Sept. 22, 2005; and Harlem
Speaks: Clark Terry, NJMH, Dec. 1, 2005. Subsequent direct quotations herein from
NJMH events are also from my fieldnotes for the respective dates described (without
footnoted citations). Quotations from my interviews are cited accordingly.
3
Harlem comprises much of the northern part of the island of Manhattan; roughly,
between 110th and 155th street, with East Harlem extending a little lower (sometimes the
Morningside Heights area in the western part of this space is excluded from popular ideas
of Harlem, presumably because it is a more exclusive neighborhood dominated by
Columbia University). Harlem has historically been home to concentrations of various
2
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What kinds of discussions and relationships emerge between older and younger
individuals at NJMH events, between experts and enthusiasts or aficionados? How might
memory influence the production of history there? How can new experiences of jazz
shape memories of previous ones, or revise perceptions of canon? How does the social
aspect of museum events color the experience of jazz at this space?
<< INSERT FIGURE # 1 AROUND HERE: Museum Membership Card >>
Ken Prouty observes that there is an “implicit hierarchy” in discourse about jazz
communities, in which “artists, journalists, industry figures, [and] scholars” have each
played a role.4 Jazz audiences, on the other hand, tend to be “conceptualized simply as
something that is there, either as consumers … or as unnamed actors in the social play
that intersects with jazz at various points.”5 He contrasts the New Jazz Studies paradigm,
which initially found its intellectual center at the Institute for Jazz Studies at Columbia
University (in the Morningside Heights part of West Harlem), with “other ‘questioning’
moves in jazz” that can emerge “from the ground up.”6 It may not be especially useful (or
accurate) to locate the thoughtful scholarship associated with the New Jazz Studies as
coming from “above,” but Prouty’s point about the relative under-theorization of
audiences’ roles in jazz communities is constructive.7
different ethnicities, including Jewish and Italian. East Harlem is also known as an
important center of Latino culture.
4
Ken Prouty, Knowing Jazz: Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 8.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
New Jazz Studies scholar Sherrie Tucker has, however, noted the importance of jazz
audiences to the historiography of the music. See, for example, her chapter, “‘But This
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At the NJMH, scholars associated with the New Jazz Studies have in fact been
featured guests (in the Harlem Speaks series), including the Columbia University
professors Robert O’Meally, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and George E. Lewis. Nevertheless,
one would not likely describe the museum’s programming as geared toward academic
discourse about, for example, problems of representation or canon. Jazz knowledge is
certainly incrementally revised and augmented in events that often highlight the music
and lives of under-appreciated figures (the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell and the trumpeter
Frankie Newton, for example; the pianist Marty Napoleon; the singer Sathima Bea
Benjamin), or of individuals who are not necessarily performers (e.g., the New York
Times sports columnist William C. Rhoden; the filmmaker Jean Bach), or jazz around the
world (sessions on Asia, Africa, Israel, Latin America, for instance). Whether pertaining
to canonical figures and repertoire or not, however, museum events are typically
occasions for relaxed discussion and appreciation. The message is: everyone possesses
knowledge pertaining to their particular experiences of jazz music and history, and
sharing it is a valuable community endeavor.
With limited exhibition space and relatively few physical holdings the NJMH has
thus far had little need for professional curators of the sort more typical to the visual fine
Music Is Mine Already!’ White Woman as Jazz Collector in the Film New Orleans
(1947),” in Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, ed. Nichole T. Rustin and
Sherrie Tucker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 235-266. Ingrid Monson, too,
acknowledged the importance of listeners in the construction of jazz community, as I
describe below.
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arts.8 In fact, its mission thus far has only partly been to preserve and archive.9 Rather,
the jazz museum strives to foster a public forum for talking about, learning about,
appreciating, reflecting upon, and experiencing jazz. In this manner, the NJMH curates
(from Latin cura, curare – care; to care) a dialogic notion of jazz as community.
“Curators” with expert knowledge may conduct the sessions there, but “ground up”
discussion is encouraged and valued. Social moments of affective engagement with
musical sound, history, and performance, and with other listeners present at this space,
give real texture to the notion of community here.
The community concept, and “the jazz community”
The term community, as one scholar observed, is “difficult to define yet easy to
use.”10 It has been described as based on cultural criteria such as common traditions; on
8
In the context of the visual arts especially, the curator has assumed a more creative and
“neo-critical” role in recent decades, reflecting a “curatorial turn” in discourse about
museums and exhibitions. Paul O’Neill, “The Curatorial Turn: From Discourse to
Practice,” in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, eds. Judith Rugg
and Michèle Sedgwick, 13-28 (Chicago: Intellect Books, 2007), 14. Outside of museum
spaces, “to curate” has been adopted as “a fashionable code word among the aesthetically
minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting,” such
as “curating” a musical happening, or even a window display. Alex Williams, “On the
Tip of Creative Tongues,” New York Times, October 4, 2009.
9
One reason for this is that the NJMH directors recognize that the Institute of Jazz
Studies at Rutgers University in neighboring New Jersey is already known for its
extensive archive of papers, articles, photographs, and the like.
10
Patricia Hill Collins, “The New Politics of Community.” American Sociological
Review 75 no. 1 (2010): 24
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affective criteria such as shared interests; on proximity in a given locality; or in
functional terms as pertaining to more-or-less structured and reproducible relationships
between individuals and social institutions. Older sociological models tended to view
communities as empirical things-in-themselves with relatively stable relationships
between individuals (as in the “community study”). Later, the imagination came to be
seen as vital to communities (e.g., Benedict Anderson’s conceptualization of the nation as
an “imagined community”). “Taste communities” are said to form around specific artistic
manifestations. The Internet hosts “virtual” communities. Recently, municipalities and
states trimming the budgets for social programs have promoted “community service.”11
The concept’s ability to evoke a sphere of meaningful sociality, however ambiguous,
helps it to persist in scholarly and public discourse.
The literature on jazz, whether journalistic or academic, abounds with references
to community. Often the phrase “the jazz community” is evoked (“by banding together,
the jazz community will help the music survive and thrive”).12 It can even be cited as a
primary source for specific oral traditions.13 At times sub-categories are identified, such
as “the Chicago jazz community” (or New York, Harlem, etc.), “the avant-garde jazz
community,” “the Latin jazz community,” “the black jazz community,” “the out jazz
community,” “the American jazz community,” “the Japanese jazz community,” “the
wartime jazz community”; or super-categories such as “the international jazz
11
For example, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron placed community at the center of
his “Big Society” agenda. See David Cameron, “We will tackle poverty by building
strong community ties.” The Independent, Nov. 11, 2009, 32.
12
Jon Pareles, “Jazz Displays a Unified Spirit,” New York Times, Sept. 8, 1985.
13
Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 763.
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community.”14 Clearly, the idea of community is important in discourse about jazz, but it
is not always apparent which community is being evoked, or how it is constituted.15
Indeed, the community concept’s flexibility, feel-good associations, and potential for
vagueness led the anthropologists Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport to protest that it can
serve primarily as “a convenient conceptual haven,” one that may be particularly useful
“in a world where bounded fieldwork sites seem no longer to exist.”16
There have, however, been a few attempts to theorize the concept of jazz
community with some rigor. Early behavioral and functional definitions from the 1950s
and 1960s tended to portray it as a self-selecting subculture, one that deviated from a
normative notion of the social order (in particular, Merriam’s and Mack’s 1960 article).17
14
I take all these examples from scholarly publications on jazz. This journal makes a
reference to “the academic jazz community” in its statement of aims and scope.
15
Jazz discourse, Sherrie Tucker observes, “is a curious mix of romance about modernist
geniuses who appear to have no communities, and nostalgic communities for whom
playing jazz seems to achieve historical and social and political transcendence.” S.
Tucker, “Bordering on Community: Improvising Women Improvising Women-in-Jazz,”
in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed.
Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 247248.
16
Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport, The Trouble with Community: Anthropological
Reflections on Movement, Identity, and Collectivity (London: Pluto, 2002), 17.
17
Alan P. Merriam and Raymond W. Mack, “The Jazz Community,” Social Forces 38,
no. 3 (1960): 211-222. In a subsequent article published in 1968, Robert A. Stebbins
described a subcultural “status community” (from Weber), that espouses values opposed
to the commercialization of music. Robert A. Stebbins, “A Theory of the Jazz
Community,” The Sociological Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1968): 331. In a 2005 article Peter J.
Martin revisited Merriam’s and Mack’s analysis. Expanding on their idea of a
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Jazz’s place in American life has changed in recent decades, perhaps most visibly in its
institutionalization at the Jazz at Lincoln Center venue. Nevertheless, some of the older
speakers in the NJMH Harlem Speaks series still recalled the days of being made to feel
like social deviants.18
In Saying Something Ingrid Monson recognized musical performance as the “most
prestigious” activity that “goes into constituting the jazz community,” but she also
acknowledged that it requires the active participation of informed listeners.19 The
interaction between the musician and audience members who listen “within the context of
the richly textured aural legacy of jazz and African American music,” Monson wrote,
“community of interest,” Martin proposed that we think of the jazz community as an art
world (using Howard S. Becker’s concept), whereby numerous actors collaboratively
contribute toward maintaining a sense of community oriented around jazz as artistic
production. The social significance of the “jazz aesthetic,” in Martin’s view, is that
improvisation can effect a reconciliation of “individual inspiration and established
conventions, spontaneity and organization, the individual and the social.” Peter J. Martin,
“The Jazz Community as an Art World: A Sociological Perspective,” The Source:
Challenging Jazz Criticism 2 (2005), 11. With respect to the jazz community as an “art
world” and a “community of interest,” see also Paul Berliner Thinking in Jazz, pp. 7 and
772. Ken Prouty’s Knowing Jazz (op. cit.), which coincidentally saw publication as this
article was under review, offers a very good critical reading of the literature on jazz and
community, with particular attention to what it means for jazz program pedagogy.
18
In commenting on a draft of this article, a colleague pointed out that although the term
“jazz” may today “signal an elite art that resides in affluent institutions, there are still
musicians who define themselves as playing jazz who scrape by and who purposely
embrace marginal status – albeit out of complex motives” (Matthew Somoroff, pers.
comm., 5 Nov. 2011).
19
Ingrid T. Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), 14.
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takes a given jazz moment “beyond technical competence, beyond the chord changes, and
into the realm of ‘saying something.’”20 The resulting “interaction of musical sounds,
people, and their musical and cultural histories” establishes “a moment of community,
whether temporary or enduring.”21
Sherrie Tucker, on the other hand, has proposed that scholars consider not only
the “possibilities of jazz as a site of community-formation, improvisation, and
collaboration,” but also the limitations of concepts and spaces of jazz community.22 She
sees community as a terrain of changing-same power relations. So with respect to women
and “the jazz community,” for example, individuals “may imagine themselves as active
community members … yet find themselves unimaginable and unrepresentable at many
community functions.” Tucker calls for critical investigations that might “yield possible
theories and practices of community formation that are porous, flexible, strategic, and
liberatory, as opposed to ideas about belonging and unbelonging that are conservative,
comfy, and entrenched.” As she puts it, this means examining “edginess” as well as
collectivity.23 Extending Monson’s metaphor, we might ask, Who gets to say something?
What do they get to say? Is talking about musical sound as important as making it when
it comes to the jazz community? And we might also wonder if there is any “edginess” to
the goings on at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.
One of the more entrenched ideas relating to jazz is that specialized or even
arcane knowledge is required to participate in the community. This knowledge may be
20
Ibid., 1-2
21
Ibid., 2.
22
Tucker, “Bordering on Community,” 250.
23
Ibid.
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technical and musical, or it may be historical. Outsiders might feel that some who are
“in” the jazz community attribute exaggerated significance to seemingly trivial
biographical and other details at the expense of allowing less invested listeners to
appreciate the music. In my previous research in Brazil, for example, I asked a musician
known for mixing North American (U.S.) influences with Brazilian ones if she was into
jazz. “No,” she responded, because it seemed “like a closed club,” adding that she felt it
was “best not to get involved.”24 The “curating” that takes place at the NJMH Visitor’s
Center invites locals to get involved, and to say something about jazz (without needing to
be a performer). Moreover, as already noted, the NJMH has fostered a space that, while
not specifically targeted to seniors, has welcomed their contribution to its mission. Older
adults may in fact hold some “comfy” values, or they may in some aspects be more
progressive in outlook than younger ones. How can they speak to changing-same power
relations? We recognize aging jazz legends; what about aging jazz enthusiasts? Let’s
examine the setting more closely.
A new museum for a New Harlem
One of the conditions of possibility for the NJMH was the re-development of its
decayed urban setting. There is general agreement that parts of Harlem have been
experiencing a kind of “rebirth” in terms of business investment, real estate development,
24
Fernanda Abreu, interview with the author, Aug. 9, 2007. See Frederick Moehn,
Contemporary Carioca: Technologies of Mixing in a Brazilian Music Scene (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 131.
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and support for cultural institutions after decades of neglect.25 From around 113th to
125th Streets on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, perhaps the most obviously gentrified
part of the “New Harlem,” an astonishing number of new residence buildings has risen in
the past seven years or so. Dozens of new restaurants, bakeries, and cafés, as well as two
wine shops, have been established and are packed with customers. A three-floor
supermarket with an extensive selection of boutique and imported beer is doing brisk
business on one block, with a Chase bank and a Starbucks coffee shop on either corner,
all of which were not there seven years ago. The recently opened Harlem Tavern at 116th
Street is a burger and beer sports bar with a large outdoor seating area. It found instant
popularity. The latest addition to this stretch is a sushi restaurant, not far from a new yoga
studio.
Demographic changes have accompanied this process. A recent New York Times
article noted that Harlem is no longer majority African American, with four in ten
residents being black.26 In March 2009 I photographed a large sign that promoted a new
25
One journalist suggested that president Bill Clinton’s establishment of offices in
Harlem in 2001 after leaving the White House helped facilitate the new effervescence of
the neighborhood. DeWayne Wickham, “Clinton Paves Way for Second ‘Harlem
Renaissance,’ “ USA Today, Aug. 6, 2001. David Dunlap’s Feb. 10, 2002 New York
Times article, “The Changing Look of the New Harlem,” further signaled to the general
public that the neighborhood was seeing a new phase of development.
26
Sam Roberts, “No Longer Majority Black, Harlem Is in Transition,” New York Times,
Jan. 6, 2010. An African American NJMH patron I interviewed questioned the research
upon which this article based its conclusions. She noted that while the lower, western
portion of Harlem had seen an obvious increase in white residents, other parts of Harlem,
particularly above 125th Street, seemed to her to still be overwhelmingly black. One
reader of this essay wondered if I meant to associate Starbucks and yoga studios with
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reality series on the BET cable channel about young black professionals in Harlem. In
black capital letters against a white background it stated, “HARLEM IS …” A month
later someone had added the words “FED UP” in black paint (figure 2). Perhaps this was
intended as an expression of frustration with the rapid redevelopment of the
neighborhood and the influx of new residents.
<< INSERT FIGURE # 2 AROUND HERE: Harlem is Fed Up Image >>
At the same time, precisely because of Harlem’s iconic status as a kind of
“capital” of black U.S. culture, there are certain distinguishing characteristics to the way
its second renaissance is unfolding. Real estate developers and tourism agencies, for
example, market and have a stake in the neighborhood’s legacy. But there are also
laudable efforts at local institutions such as Harlem Stage, the Studio Museum, or the
Apollo Theater, among various others, to recognize and promote black cultural
expression and a sense of artistic community. In May 2011, for example, the Apollo
Theater, in collaboration with Harlem Stage, Jazzmobile, and Columbia University,
promoted the Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival to celebrate the neighborhood’s several
historically important jazz venues, among them Minton’s Playhouse, the jazz club where
whiteness. I do not. Rather, these are businesses that tend to move in to neighborhoods
where there is a substantial population of middle-class “professionals” and/or students.
While more whites have moved into this part of Harlem in recent years, the clientele and
staff at the local Starbucks, the Best Yet Supermarket, or the Chase Bank, for example, is
very diverse in terms of “race,” tending toward African American and Hispanic. The
same goes for many of the new restaurants such as Harlem Tavern, Harlem Food Bar,
and Cedric’s French Bistro. There are several yoga studios in Harlem run by African
American yoga instructors.
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many would say bebop was “born” in the 1940s.27 One ethnographer observed that the
majority of the neighborhood’s “professional residents, both newly arrived and longterm, are on record as saying they chose to live in Harlem because of its illustrious
history, architectural riches, affordable rents, and proximity to a black majority.”28 Azure
Thompson, a young African American Jazz Museum patron, expressed similar
sentiments. She grew up in Seattle and attended Howard University, where she wrote for
The Hilltop, a newspaper co-founded in 1924 by Zora Neal Hurston (with Louis Eugene
King). “Ideas of what Harlem used to be” attracted her to want to live there, Thompson
told me. In some way, she felt she was following the spirit of Hurston.29
The initial idea for the NJMH came from jazz impresario Art D’Lugoff, owner of
the legendary downtown Village Gate jazz club. Around 1996 D’Lugoff suggested to
27
Minton’s Playhouse, on 118th St. near St. Nicholas Ave., was open from 1938-1974. In
2006 Earl Spain, former manager of St. Nick’s Pub, another classic Harlem spot (now
closed) reopened the space as the Uptown Jazz Lounge at Minton’s Playhouse. The
reopened Minton’s never really became a jazz hotspot. One journalist suggested that
Spain did not market the club’s history sufficiently; in May 2010 Minton’s closed down
again. Ron Scott, “Jazz Notes; Minton's closes, Great Night in Harlem,” New York
Amsterdam News, May 13-19, 2010, 25.
28
Sabiyha Prince, “Race, Class, and the Packaging of Harlem,” Identities 12 no. 3
(2005): 399. This is an interesting claim, but I am skeptical that the majority of Harlem’s
professional residents are “on record” about their reasons for living there.
29
As an African American professional, Azure Thompson may feel that she is following
the spirit of certain black Americans who moved to Harlem before her. White
professionals who have recently chosen to live in Harlem, however, necessarily have a
different relationship to that history—one more of consumption than of continuation or
participation (except perhaps in the sense of continuing a pattern of whites taking an
interest in Harlem, and in general, black culture).
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David C. Levy, then director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, that New
York City needed a jazz museum and hall of fame.30 Levy in turn brought Washington
power lawyers and jazz aficionados Leonard Garment and Daryl Libow on board to begin
planning a museum that they envisioned as a “companion” to the emergent Jazz at
Lincoln Center institution. They thought Harlem should be its home.31 Garment later
acknowledged that, under difficult economic circumstances, the neighborhood’s second
“renaissance” helped keep the board’s project to secure a permanent space alive.32
Meanwhile, the NJMH has had an impact in the local cultural landscape through the
outreach programming it administers out of its offices on an unremarkable block just off
of Park Avenue. Initially, the museum lacked any identifying markers on the exterior of
30
Art D’Lugoff passed away in 2009.
31
Leonard Garment, “The Genesis of the Musuem,”
http://www.jazzmuseuminharlem.org/genesis.html (accessed June 6, 2011). Journalist
Nat Hentoff observed in a profile of the incipient museum that there was “no more
obvious site for a jazz museum than Harlem.” Nat Hentoff, “Jazz Is Coming Home to
Harlem,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2004, 10.
32
Despite winning some financial support from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment
Zone with matching funds from Abe and Marian Sofaer, early plans for the museum
foundered. However, through his connections in Washington, Leonard Garment
persuaded influential congressmen such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan to establish a $1
million line item in the year 2000 federal budget to establish the museum. Moreover, in
the “changed urban setting” of the New Harlem, Garment wrote, “the jazz museum came
back to life like a rim shot.” Previous to this moment, Garment suggested, “the Harlem
community was not ready for a jazz museum.” Leonard Garment, “The Genesis of the
Museum.” For more on the donation from the Sofaers, see: http://abesofaer.com/2011pdfs/THE-NATIONAL-JAZZ-MUSEUM-IN-HARLEM.pdf (accessed 31 August 2012).
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the building. In 2008 it raised a large banner featuring a photograph of Louis Armstrong
blowing his trumpet (figure 3).
<< INSERT FIGURE # 3 AROUND HERE: NJMH building >>
During the time I was conducting some of my ethnography of NJMH events at the
second floor Visitor’s Center, the room featured an attractive photo exhibit of local
musicians, a small library, a couple of audiovisual computer setups, a baby grand piano
(on loan from Dick Katz), and foldable steel chairs for public events.33 Now located on
the third floor, it remains an unassuming space that might be contrasted with the highprofile polish of Jazz at Lincoln Center. For a while, an announcement printed on an 8
1/2 x 11-inch sheet of white paper and taped outside the door advised, “You KNOW we
love you but … no food or beverages inside.” The warmly welcoming stance of the space
owes in good measure to the personality, enthusiasm, and leadership of the Museum’s
artistic director, Loren Schoenberg, a saxophonist, pianist, band-leader, former radio host,
and author (figure 4). “A museum like this will only succeed,” Schoenberg stated in an
early press interview, “if there is a perception that it comes from the community and it
receives support from the community leaders, and all others in the locality, who have
everything to gain from this.”34
33
The exhibit was Hank O’Neal’s “Ghosts of Harlem,” which included photographs from
O’Neal’s book of the same name (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009). It
focuses on musicians who worked in Harlem during its artistic peak, both well-known
names and lesser-known. Dick Katz, who lent the NJMH the baby grand piano, has since
passed away.
34
John Robert Brown, “A Jazz Museum for Harlem,”
http://www.jazzmuseuminharlem.org/ajazz.html (accessed Aug. 16, 2011). Schoenberg
has been involved in the New York-New Jersey jazz scene since the 1970s; he worked
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<< INSERT FIGURE # 4 AROUND HERE: G. Thomas, L. Schoenberg >>
Here Schoenberg evokes, perhaps not entirely intentionally, a particular usage of
the term “the community” in the local context, where it can mean, specifically, “the black
community” of Harlem. This allows him to present the museum as a kind of grass roots
organization that seeks (and merits) the support of that community, and it highlights
another way that the NJMH’s location contrasts with that of Jazz at Lincoln Center (at
Columbus Circle; the value of real estate in the area is another obvious point of
contrast).35 This is not to say that the museum directors sought to appeal only to African
American residents; the ambiguity of the community concept permits an ecumenical and
fluid profile for the museum’s local public. But that ambiguity also lets Schoenberg make
overtures to an intensely local sense of community as a kind of yardstick of the
museum’s success in its mission. Patricia Hill Collins has proposed that the flexibility of
the term community can be put to good use. Like Sherrie Tucker, she sees it as a terrain
of changing-same power relations. It “may be especially suitable in helping people
with Benny Goodman in the 1980s (until the latter’s death in 1986); he released several
albums with his big band and he has participated in a number of other recordings. He
won two Grammy Awards for Best Album Notes on jazz releases, and he published The
NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jazz in 2002 (New York: Perigee/Berkley), the year he
was appointed executive director of the Museum. He concedes that his tastes in jazz lean
toward the more traditional. Schoenberg’s title was later changed to artistic director (Bill
Terry is, at the time of this writing, interim executive director).
35
A recent article on the progress of Harlem redevelopment described the immediate
surroundings of the NJMH as blighted and ignored, but possibly ready for change. It
mentions a developer who recently purchased five plots of vacant land in this area for
$1.35 million. Kia Gregory, “Change May Be Coming to a Block Skipped by Harlem’s
Rebirth,” New York Times, Oct. 11, 2012.
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manage ambiguities associated with changing configurations of intersecting power
relations,” she notes.36 People “imagine new forms of community,” Collins proposes,
“even as they retrieve and rework symbols from the past.”37 Harlem has been alive to
such re-imaginings in recent years.
At the NJMH Visitor’s Center, Schoenberg seeks to emphasize the relationships
between jazz as history or tradition, on the one hand, and jazz as live performance, as
improvisation, as a medium for bringing people together, on the other. The intimacy and
informality of the museum offices, Schoenberg felt, made possible “an interchange
between the subject and the audience that just cannot happen on a stage with a podium
and a microphone.”38 My fieldwork confirms this. Azure Thompson, the museum patron
I introduced above, told me that, although the Jazz for Curious Listeners sessions she has
attended are actually classes, she sees the space as more of a social club. There was
something very soothing to her about being around the older patrons (Thompson is in her
mid-thirties), as if they offered a kind of informal mentoring. She felt that she was getting
something from them that she did not find in any other kind of space, and that she was “a
valued person in this kind of social club.” There was a kind of “comfort,” she said, “in
talking about the music.” And “maybe afterwards a little bit of dialogue I might have
with someone there. … That’s the social aspect. Not the actual music but just being able
to have this discussion. … It takes a person like Loren [Schoenberg] to create a space
where you feel comfortable talking, and you don’t feel stupid for not knowing, for not
36
Collins, “The New Politics of Community,” 24.
37
Ibid., 25.
38
Loren Schoenberg, interview with author, March 19, 2008, Harlem.
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being a musician, or whatever.”39 Thompson’s observations suggest that the “comfort”
one can experience in a given community – in this case, a jazz community – is not
necessarily normative; it may require a welcoming personality to set the tone. It may
require work.
In 2005 the museum board brought in bassist Christian McBride to serve as
artistic advisor and global ambassador for the NJMH. Equally at home in jazz as in funk
and other popular music styles, McBride sees himself as capable of reaching out to
African American listeners who think of jazz as yesterday’s music, and also to draw to
Harlem those who already appreciate the music. “Too many people worldwide have a
sense that jazz has lost its standing in the black community,” McBride noted when he
assumed the position. “In a sense it has,” he added. His aim was “not only to find a home
in Harlem for jazz -- the most celebrated black community in the world – but also to see
if people who claim they love this music will travel uptown.” For Azure Thompson, the
museum’s location in Harlem is important not only because of the historical significance
of the neighborhood in which she prefers to socialize, but also precisely because she does
not have to travel downtown to get to it. “I haven’t gone to Jazz at Lincoln Center in a
while,” she said. “I prefer the simplicity of being able to walk over to 126th Street. I feel
like this is … my home and it feels so good just to be able to walk up the street and go to
the museum, [to] walk upstairs and people look familiar.”40 The NJMH, therefore, has a
decidedly “neighborhoody” feel to it; it feels like “home.”
39
Azure Thompson, interview with author, Nov. 17, 2010, Harlem.
40
Ibid.
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Jazz, hip-hop, and the generational divide
“What I am kind of critical of,” Thompson said during our interview, referring not
just to the jazz museum but also to other inter-generational social contexts, “is the limited
views that the older people have of youth – ‘They don’t do this, they don’t listen to this,’
or whatever.” This was troubling, she said. There was a need for “more inter-generational
music dialogues.” There ought to be, for example, “a class about jazz and hip-hop.” After
all, “there was a whole period of hip-hop music where it was like jazz hip-hop. [For
example, the group] Digable Planets … they were sampling all kinds of jazz
musicians.”41 Thompson’s friend from Howard University, Courtney Liddell, who also
attends Jazz for Curious Listeners, grew interested in jazz precisely because of hip-hop.
She recalled how in the late 1980s and early 1990s hip-hop artists tried to find obscure
jazz musicians to sample for their grooves. “I’m pretty sure that’s how I got familiar with
who certain [jazz] artists were, where such and such was sampled, and then I got more
interested in the record that it came from.”42 Some jazz aficionados who grew up before
hip-hop, however (and perhaps some who grew up with hip-hip), see the music as an
inferior, commodified phenomenon, a vehicle for vulgar lyrics expressing violence,
misogyny, and crass displays of hedonistic stardom. Liddell and Thompson saw things
differently and lamented the chasm between the jazz and hip-hop communities (figure 5).
<< INSERT FIGURE # 5 AROUND HERE: A. Thompson, C. Liddell >>
One evening at the NJMH, an awkward moment arose precisely around this
theme. It was a “Harlem Speaks” event on 24 March 2005, with drummer and vocalist
41
Ibid.
42
Courtney Liddell, interview with the author, July 12, 2011, Harlem.
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Grady Tate as guest of honor. Loren Schoenberg and jazz journalist Greg Thomas hosted
the interview. Mr. Tate, dressed sharply in a brown suit with matching shirt, tie, and
handkerchief, and lightly tinted eyeglasses, was in good spirits. He spoke frankly,
confidently, and proudly about his life in music, and about being a black man in the
United States (in his case, growing up in Durham, North Carolina in the 1930s and 1940s,
then serving in the Air Force in Waco, Texas, where he played drums in the service band,
and his subsequent versatile career in the music business).43 The Visitor’s Center was full
(about 60 people). The audience was enthralled, voicing affirmations to some of his
statements, laughing appreciatively at others.
At some point during the lively question and answer portion after the interview,
however, the issue of how things have changed with younger generations arose. Someone
mentioned hip-hop, and a couple of people expressed ambivalence toward or even
disapproval of the genre. Loren Schoenberg, too, professed his own lack of
comprehension of the misogyny and violence he heard in hip-hop. An audience member
in the back of the room, by the door and apparently about to leave, seemed to take
offence and paused to accuse the museum director of over-generalizing about the genre.
The atmosphere in the Visitor’s Center quickly grew tense; the fact that Schoenberg is
white while the vexed audience member, as well as the guest of honor, co-interviewer
43
Grady Tate is a drummer and singer associated with hard bop and soul-jazz. He
performed with a long list of legendary jazz musicians, including Jimmy Smith, Wes
Montgomery, and Quincy Jones. He played drums and percussion for the 1981 Simon
and Garfunkel concert in Central Park, and he was the drummer for The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson for several years. Tate also recorded vocals for the Sesame Street
Schoolhouse Rock series, such as “Naughty Number 9.” He served on the faculty of
Howard University for twenty years (1989-2009).
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Greg Thomas, and much of the audience were black suddenly seemed more apparent than
it had previous to this moment, even though the critical view of hip-hop was shared by
some African American audience members (as well as, seemingly, by Grady Tate, at
first). The NJMH’s prized sense of community was momentarily threatened as the
discussion floundered.
Or was it? Was it perhaps a moment to forge community? A moment of changingsame power relations and the conscientious negotiation of difference? Debate resumed
and at one point Schoenberg said, “I’m glad we’re having this talk tonight.” Then he
turned to his guest, “Grady?” “I’m glad I started it,” Tate responded. A young audience
member now rose to address Mr. Tate. “Hi. As one of the younger people here,” she
slowly began. “Yeah, go ahead, go ahead,” several audience members interjected,
perhaps eager for someone to ease the tension. “I’m sorry, I’m nervous,” she blurted.
“Tell us old folks,” Loren Schoenberg said. “Make peace, make peace,” a man in the
audience exclaimed. “Yeah,” she responded. “On both levels,” she continued, motioning
to the man in the doorway and then to the front of the room where Tate sat next to
Schoenberg, “I just want to point something out.” “Please,” said Schoenberg,
encouragingly. “The energy in the room has completely shifted in a moment,” she went
on. “You know, just by going from what’s of now [i.e., the topic of hip-hop], coming
from what’s of then [that is, before the discussion turned] – of the jazz, and the music
getting into you,” she continued, making expressive hand gestures. “And just to go back
to that for just a moment.” “Thank you,” Schoenberg said. “First of all I wanna say,” she
offered, now beginning to smile broadly. “I am so inspired by you, as a vocalist, as an
artist,” now motioning with her open hand toward Grady Tate, and then gently crossing
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her open palms over her heart for the word “artist.” “I wanna know two things. The first
is …” She paused, and then shook the tension out of her shoulders and head to exclaim,
“Oh, I’m so nervous!” her bodily expression as important as her words. “Don’t be
nervous,” Schoenberg said. “You’re amongst friends,” a woman in the audience added as
a few people gently chuckled sympathetically. The young woman continued:
The first one is, I’d like to know your favorite Shakespeare play. I know you said
you performed in Richard III, but I was wondering if you had a preference for
another? And the second is: you said 90% of the time you were scared. You didn’t
know what you was doin’, you know. And as a performer I take that with me. And
if you have any advice, especially for younger people who feel like, you know,
some of the hip-hop world is – like the gentleman said [motioning to the man in
the doorway] – it’s not all the same thing, it’s different, it’s give-and-take. But the
music industry right now is so – it’s not like it used to be at all. Not like when my
parents came up. I’m 25 years old, and if you ask an average … say, 15 to 25year-old what their favorite group is, they’re gonna tell you something
commercial – mine’s Earth Wind and Fire … You know what I mean? … That’s
what I came up on – [and] jazz in New Orleans. That’s where I’m from. And I
basically wanted to get back to the point: What do you have to say to younger
people, as far as to encourage [them] … And also your favorite Shakespeare play.
Thank you.
She apologized for the long discourse.
Grady Tate absorbed this information. “Um,” he said haltingly, in his rich
baritone, amplified by a microphone. “I started, um, I started this thing, and I was trying
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to let everyone that can hear me know that, um, all the kids are not bad. All the kids are
not products of their environment, as one would, uh, suggest. There are individualists out
here, and they’re doing what they want to do. And some of it is great, just as some of the
music is great – the jazz. Some of it’s sad. You have to be very discerning in what you
listen to and what you want to hear, continually. It’s your judgment. Whatever you like is
what you should listen to. I don’t tell anybody what to like. I can’t. I tell me what I enjoy
hearing, and if you ask me about it I can explain to you why I like it, and how much I like
it. But I don’t explain it to you so that you can like it too. You make your own decisions.
These kids are, these kids are marvelous. Some of them are wild – look at our jazz
musicians, man!” A few audience members laughed knowingly. “Yeah. You know, they
came through some terrible periods.” “Um hum,” several people murmured. “And [back
then] everybody was saying ‘Whatever you do, don’t be a jazz musician, that’s the worst
thing --’ You know?” “Yeah,” several older folks in the room affirmed, nodding to their
neighbors. “It’s about growth,” Tate continued, authoritatively. “This will work itself
out.” The room grew quiet.
“And one of the things that’s so interesting,” Tate continued. “If this description
of women [in hip-hop] is so degrading, why aren’t the women more up in arms about it?”
“They don’t know any better,” responded an older African American woman in the
audience, without hesitation. “Is that what it is?” Tate asked. “Yes,” replied another
woman. “Yes,” affirmed another. “Well maybe they know a little better than you think,”
said Tate. “Yeah, thank you,” said a younger African American woman, chuckling.
“Some of us have been steeped in certain, uh, little traits and certain little things we do,”
Tate reflected. “And sometimes as we grow older we think, ‘This is the only way it
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should be.’ You know, the older we get, the more we should be looking to the kids, to see
what they’re doing. And to make comments on it. … But, you know, just don’t, don’t
blanket it – ‘It’s all bad!’” he exclaimed with a sweeping downward motion of his hand.
“Right,” someone agreed. “You know?” Tate reiterated. “Um hum,” folks affirmed.
“Leave them alone, they’ll grow up,” Tate added, drawing snickers and single word
expressions of approval (although the woman who said that young women didn’t know
any better seemed to shake her head in disagreement). “They’ll grow up,” he repeated.
There was a silent pause in the room. “Uh, Much Ado About Nothing,” Tate stated
dryly. “Oh,” someone gasped. “Does that answer you?” Tate said to the young woman
who had asked the question.
“Yeah,” she gratefully responded, almost breathless at Tate’s rhetorical skill in
answering her question about Shakespeare plays while simultaneously making a metacommentary about the entire hubbub over hip-hop. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome darling. Thank you,” Tate laughed heartily. The audience
joined him in laughter as the sense of community in the Visitor’s Center was redeemed.
The process of publicly reflecting on his young interlocutor’s question while considering
the intimate but momentarily edgy social dynamic of the room – and also thinking about
his own life in music – prompted Tate to find a way to both restore a sense of community
for those present in the Visitor’s Center, and to express his own feelings in a more
balanced and thoughtful manner. Meanwhile, in using the word “darling” to refer to his
young female interlocutor, Tate may be drawing on a southern linguistic custom from his
youth in North Carolina. The woman, also from the South, may possibly have appreciated
the endearment. (Consider how she momentarily switched to vernacular forms more
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common in the South when she said to Mr. Tate, “You didn’t know what you was doin.’
”) In the context of this exchange, however, it also underscores Tate’s gendered and
generational discursive authority vis-à-vis the questioner. It was, plausibly, a retreat to
the “comfort” of a changing-same power relation that remained unchallenged in this
episode.
Now Loren Schoenberg took over to close:
We have got just a couple of minutes left here, folks. Unfortunately, it’s been
going by so quick. Before I introduce Mr. [Greg] Thomas … I’d just like to say
something about the audience tonight. On the one hand it’s an old ploy of a
bandleader, of an entertainer, to look at the audience and say “I want you all to
give a round of applause for yourselves.” But, having said that, actually a bunch
of people commented on this during the break tonight, and I felt it. First of all I
want to thank my friend back there for bringing that good feeling back [meaning
the young woman who asked the question] … and I’ll admit some responsibility
on my part for what happened there. But, having said that, uh, the feeling in the
room tonight in general – […] I’ve been in a lot of rooms hearing a lot of people
interviewed, and I’ve never heard quite a combination of someone speaking and
the people in the room. There’s been a simpatico and a concentration. I feel like
I’m in someone’s living room, and just hanging out with someone.
“That’s what it is,” Grady Tate interjected, opening his arms out wide to the audience.
“We’re all hanging out.” The informality and comparative lack of structure lends this
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setting an improvisatory feeling, and again the notion of it being like a “home” is
highlighted.44
“It’s a very, very special feeling,” continued Schoenberg. So I want to thank
everyone who came here to participate. … Greg?” He passed the microphone to his coproducer Greg Thomas (figure 4). “For how many of you is this the very first time that
you’ve been here?” Thomas asked. Several people raised a hand. “OK. All right. Well, I
want to especially welcome all of you who are here for the first time. And I ask you to
please, please come back. Each time is wonderful and different in its own way, and we’re
particularly proud to have Mr. Grady Tate tonight. … Loren mentioned about the
simpatico in the room, and I just want to say that, you know, if you look around, in this
room [there] is one of the most diverse audiences you can imagine, I mean, age, ethnicity,
culture. I mean, look. Right here. And it’s about Mr. Tate. It’s about this music. It’s about
the Jazz Museum in Harlem. And I’d like you to please, please keep supporting us. Make
sure you give a dollar on the way out. And tell all the people … If you put your name and
information on the mailing list, we’ll stay in touch, and we’d love to see you again. So
thank you very much.” There was applause all around.
“I have one last thing to say,” Grady Tate spoke up. “If this, if this could only be
the whole world, wouldn’t we be into something?” “Oooh,” someone swooned, to more
laughter and handclapping. “Sure would be!” Greg Thomas acknowledged.
44
The ethnomusicologist Matthew Somoroff discovered a similar sentiment in his
fieldwork in New York City among musicians invested in avant-garde jazz. They “really
valued the performance venues that gave a feeling of intimacy, of informality, of not
being in an official arts institution,” he found. Pers. comm., 5 Nov. 2011.
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Schoenberg’s, Thomas’s, and Tate’s concluding remarks evoke what Paul
Austerlitz has identified as “jazz consciousness,” a humanist “ethos of ecumenicity,” and
“an aesthetic of inclusion.”45 To Tate, it represents of model of community lacking in the
wider society. At first glance, it may seem like a “comfy” or perhaps even naïve idea of
community, but Tate is no ingénue. The sentiment was sincere. At the same time, we
observe a kind of “edginess” to community as enacted here. Once hip-hop was introduced
into the discussion, the conversation almost left the ecumenical space of the Visitor’s
Center to enter into what Guthrie P. Ramsey calls a “community theater” in black
American cultural life, that is, “public and private spaces” that “provide audiences with a
place to negotiate with others – in a highly social way – what cultural expressions such as
music mean.”46 The metaphor of hanging out in someone’s living room seems
appropriate. It is “comfy.” Yet, it also threatened, momentarily, to become a volatile
discussion about black youth, a discussion in which hip-hop (or, more specifically, the
lyrics in rap music) inevitably looms large.
I mentioned this episode to Jazz for Curious Listeners patron Azure Thompson in
our interview, after she brought up the need for more dialogue about jazz and hip-hop.
Like the woman who asked the question of Grady Tate, Thompson first noted that hiphop culture was much more diverse than it tends to be portrayed in such discussions (she
45
Paul Austerlitz, Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 2005), xxi.
46
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-hop (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 77.
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cited as an example the group The Roots, which she used to see perform at Howard
University). “It always happens that older people are critical of youth culture,” she said,
“so it’s not anything new.” I asked if she thought this dynamic was the same for older
white patrons of the Jazz Museum as for older black ones. For older black folks,
Thompson thought, there was often an “additional weight to those kinds of
conversations,” a narrative that holds black youth responsible for the African American
condition. The behavior of black youths – or the way their behavior is represented in the
media and elsewhere – tends to be taken as a signal of the successes or failures of African
Americans as a whole in the social order (recall Grady Tate’s desire that not all black
youths be seen as “products of their environment” but rather as individualists). It is a
narrative of “linked fate” that echoes what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham identified as the
“politics of respectability” in certain strands of early twentieth-century African American
culture, Thompson observed in a follow up e-mail message.47 Upstanding moral behavior
in the black community (which, for the time period Higginbotham analyzed, included
staying clear of the emergent jazz music scenes) could prove white supremacists wrong
about the purported inferiority of African Americans.48 By contrast, Thompson felt, when
there is “an inter-generational conversation among whites, you’re not thinking about the
whole condition of white people.”49
47
Azure Thompson, e-mail message to the author, Sept. 4 2012.
48
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the
Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
49
Azure Thompson, interview with author, Nov. 17, 2010, Harlem. As Thompson
observed in this interview, many of the older white NJMH patrons are Jewish residents of
the Upper West Side, and hence not from Harlem.
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Thompson would sometimes go from the Jazz for Curious Listeners sessions to
Creole restaurant six blocks south on Third Avenue for what was at the time (2010-11)
known as the Revive da Live jazz jam. Revive da Live was founded by Meghan Stabile
with some friends while she was a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Stabile
grew up listening to rock and pop and had very little exposure to jazz. When she got to
Berklee, however, she became an enthusiast for the music and began promoting live
shows. She moved to New York City and started the jam in Harlem. The young
musicians who participated in the Creole Restaurant jam were, as Thompson put it,
“trained jazz musicians who do hip-hop very well.”50 Most of them studied jazz at
schools (such as Berklee College of Music and The New School’s jazz program), but
they grew up with and appreciate hip-hop, and they incorporate influences from it into
their live, acoustic music. The Revive musicians might play with, for example, jazz
trumpeter Terence Blanchard, but they also play with rappers and hip-hop artists such as
Q-Tip or Common, or with bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding. “They’re not just jazz
… you know, they’re in popular culture,” Thompson observed. Jazz was still present, but
“in another form,” in hip-hop and R&B, she thought.51 In 2011 the Revive Da Live jazz
collective also held a jam at Minton’s Playhouse as part of the Harlem Jazz Shrines
Festival I mentioned above.
The jazz museum’s artistic advisor Christian McBride attended the Creole jam on
at least one occasion, and one of the young volunteers at the museum, a Juilliard student,
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid. A good example of this new generation of musicians is keyboardist Robert
Glasper, whose music combines soul, gospel, jazz, and hip-hop influences. Stabile has
produced live shows of the Robert Glasper Experiment in New York City.
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told me he regularly went there to jam after closing the Visitor’s Center. While such
genre crossings may seem fairly natural to the listener, however, for the musician, they
require effort and attention to detail. One of the musicians Stabile promotes, the
trumpeter Igmar Thomas (27 at the time of our interview), described how, in his
experience, many of the popular music fans of his generation are not used to the kinds of
harmonic changes common in jazz. “One of my battles as a composer [has been to] try to
reintroduce a lot of chords to the mainstream audience,” he related. “Jazz is much more
colorful than most of the grooves that are, you know, taken in a mainstream way.”
Thomas noted that, although he likes The Roots, what he does is distinct. “The Roots stay
away from jazz, and they’ll tell you that. They do not want to be considered that.”
“They’re amazing musicians,” he said, but “some people would say that, to achieve some
of these other levels [of mainstream popularity], you don’t have to spend quite as much
time in the shed. You don’t need to learn your craft quite as in-depth to get to that level.
I’m talking about the things that, like, John Coltrane achieved … guys like Miles, the
people that we look up to.”52
Thomas would later lead the Revive da Live Big Band at Harlem Stage in a
tribute to the influential hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest (on 2 March 2012). Like
The Roots, A Tribe Called Quest pioneered hip-hop with jazz influences and some
acoustic instrumentation. At Harlem Stage the big band accompanied and swung to the
rapping of MCs in Thomas’s exciting arrangements of this group’s iconic hip-hop
repertoire. Such productions would seem to validate Grady Tate’s reflection that older
generations should not “blanket” the hip-hop of youths (and specifically of black youths)
52
Igmar Thomas, interview with author, 13 Jan. 2011, New York City.
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as “all bad.” “Leave them alone, they’ll grow up,” he said at the decisive moment in the
“community theater” described above. The conversation that Azure Thompson called for
regarding cross-influences between jazz and hip-hop is worth having at the NJMH (and I
would not be surprised if it does eventually take place there). Young musicians are
already having this conversation, but it is noteworthy that old debates over, for example,
“craft” and virtuosity versus commercial success, or the canonical legacy of “great men”
can still mark out the borders between jazz and certain other musical styles.
At one of the sessions for “Jazz for Curious Listeners: A Month with Christian
McBride,” the bassist noted that a similar, albeit less pronounced, tension used to arise
between some, perhaps comparatively “purist” jazz musicians, and the funk, soul, or pop
scenes in which he has worked. McBride demonstrated an eclectic range of bass players
who influenced him as he shared tracks featuring his father Lee Smith, also a bassist,
Jaco Pastorius, Paul Chambers, Ray Brown, and finally, Bernard Odum in James
Brown’s 1960s band and the young Bootsy Collins in Brown’s early 1970s group.53 Still,
53
From the 29 December 2009 “Jazz for Curious Listeners: A Month with Christian
McBride.” The musical examples included selections with Billy Paul’s 1974 band and
with Mongo Santamaria in 1980), and others with Jaco Pastorius (“Portrait of Tracy” and
“Donna Lee,” from 1976), Paul Chambers (“No Blues” with Miles Davis in 1967, and
Chambers’s arco solo on Bennie Golson’s “Stroller” from 1959), Ray Brown (his classic
bass line on “Killer Joe” with the Quincy Jones Big Band, 1969), One memorable
moment occurred when, as we listened to “Soul Power,” McBride performed his long
since internalized fingering of Bootsy Collins’s influential funk lines on “air bass” (that
is, without a physical instrument), enthralling those present at the Visitor’s Center with a
vivid visual narrative of how Bootsy produced the sound (or at least how McBride
learned to reproduce it).
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hip-hop remains a more edgy topic in some jazz circles. This is partly because of the
lyrics and the “politics of respectability” pertaining to black youths as described above,
but also because the genre, as Igmar Thomas noted, is not typically associated with the
kind of instrumental genius or virtuosity attributed to canonical jazz performances and
recordings, or indeed, to James Brown’s music.
Sound recordings, memory, and canon
In jazz communities, sound recordings tend to be regarded as windows to an
authentic past. As seemingly transparent registers of genius they are prized primary
sources for the construction and maintenance of a jazz canon. Unreleased recordings can
excite jazz communities with their potential to augment knowledge. In 2010 the NJMH
made a unique archival acquisition when it purchased the Savory Collection of audio
recordings, named after the engineer who made them, Bill Savory. In the late 1930s
Savory captured onto disc live jazz sessions from radio broadcasts. He held on to them
for years, showing little interest in releasing them to an archive. Loren Schoenberg knew
that the recordings included sessions of Benny Goodman’s band. They were of special
significance for Schoenberg because he worked with Goodman in the 1980s before the
bandleader’s death in 1986. Despite Schoenberg’s pleas to Bill Savory, it was the latter’s
son, Gene, who finally allowed Schoenberg to examine the collection and to make an
offer for it after Bill had passed away.
The journalist Larry Rohter wrote a feature article for the New York Times on the
acquisition. “Museum Acquires Storied Trove of Performances by Jazz Greats,” was the
headline on the front page of the Arts section. A companion page titled, “Jazz Lost and
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Found,” offers abridged streamed audio samples from the Savory collection, including
performances by Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Charlie Christian with Benny
Goodman and Lionel Hampton.54 Reader comments posted to the New York Times web
site about these samples evidence tremendous enthusiasm for the collection and reveal
one way that the Internet can enable virtual jazz communities. One reader/listener wrote
the following in reference to an editorial discussing how the NJMH may not be able to
release most of the tracks on CD format for copyright reasons: “National Jazz Museum,
please do not hold these recordings hostage. With all due respect, coming there to stand
in a room wearing headphones, then remembering the sounds, is not what we had in
mind. We who care will be happy to pay for copies of our own, make donations to the
museum, or both. Whatever it takes.”55
In an age when people have grown accustomed to having access to extensive
catalogs of recorded repertoire via the Internet (whether paid or pirated), curious listeners
can only hear the Savory collection – aside from the brief samples mentioned above – at
104 E. 126th Street. Following the press release, Loren Schoenberg organized a series of
public listening sessions at the NJMH Visitor’s Center. These featured special guests
such as Gene Savory, producer George Avakian, and Coleman Hawkins’s daughter,
54
Larry Rohter, “Museum Acquires Storied Trove of Performances by Jazz Greats,” New
York Times, Aug. 16, 2010; “Jazz Lost and Found,” New York Times, June 16, 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/17/arts/music/savorycollection.html?ref=music (accessed Aug. 11, 2011). See also, Larry Rohter, “The Savory
Collection Likely to Hold More Surprises for Jazz Fans,” New York Times, Aug. 17,
2011.
55
“Jazz Lost and Found,” reader comment # 76, “dan” in New York, Aug. 31, 2010,
accessed Oct. 26 2012. See also “Free That Tenor Sax,” New York Times, Aug. 17, 2011.
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Colette (the collection includes Coleman Hawkins performing “Body and Soul”). On 28
September 2010, for example, the museum hosted a Savory event titled, “Jam Sessions:
Benny Goodman/Bobby Hackett/Lionel Hampton/Slim and Slam.” “Gaps in jazz lore are
filled to overflowing in the Savory Collection,” the publicity announcement read. “Come
listen and be one of the first to hear these fascinating records.”56
Schoenberg’s excitement about the acquisition was palpable (the Savory events
also gave him the opportunity to appeal for donations to aid in properly restoring and
archiving the collection). My field notes document how, at one point during this 28
September session Schoenberg played a version of “Jazz me Blues” for the audience. It
featured Bobby Hackett on cornet, Joe Marsala on clarinet, Ernie Caceres on baritone
sax, Joe Bushkin on piano, Artie Shapiro on bass, and George Wettling on drums. The
track had special resonance for audience member Bill Crow, a bassist who performed
with George Wettling many years ago (figure 6). Crow was hearing something new and
old at the same time, and remembering personal experiences from the past, which he
shared with the public at the museum. Those present could thus appreciate this recording
in its immediate historical connection to someone’s life there, while also feeling a kind of
thrill in hearing something apparently unearthed for the first time. When Loren
Schoenberg needed a few minutes to find his next audio example on his iPod, older
audience members reminisced about their younger days. I overhead someone lean toward
Morris Hodara in the front row – then 86 years old – and say to him, “Ernie Caceres was
a fantastic musician.” Elder members of the jazz museum public can claim to having
witnessed jazz’s past, whether as a participant in the music making, like Bill Crow or the
56
http://www.jazzmuseuminharlem.org/archive.php?id=699 (accessed Oct. 21, 2012).
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legendary producer George Avakian, or as a listener and fan.57 History is thus
experienced as part of the present.
<< INSERT FIGURE # 6 AROUND HERE: B. Crow, G. Avakian >>
Loren Schoenberg often arranges to mix live performance into museum sessions
that simultaneously commemorate the past. In this manner, another layer of musical
meaning that weaved past and present, live and remembered now occurred as the young
Sullivan Fortner jumped in with version of the song “Mac the Knife“ on the piano of the
Visitor’s Center. An older man noted that Fortner’s version of the standard was in a
distinct style, and he asked the pianist what it was. Fortner answered that he had chosen
to play a Harlem stride interpretation, with influences of Erroll Garner (who, in the
1940s, developed his own style in New York, drawing on earlier stride greats such as
James P. Johnson). An iconic era from jazz’s past – stride was most popular in the 1920s
and 1930s – was performatively brought into the present as part of a listening, teaching,
talking and remembering session.
In another example from the Jazz for Curious Listeners classes, on 5 October
2010 Dominick Farinacci, a young trumpet player and graduate of the Juilliard jazz
program, led a session on Miles Davis’s seminal Kind of Blue album (1959). He asked
the audience to listen closely to Bill Evans’s piano on the track “So what.“ An older man
commented, “You know, I've heard this album hundreds of times but now I'm hearing the
piano different.” A middle-aged woman added, “It sounds like the piano was answering
the trumpet.” There was a pause as we listened. Eighty-year-old Jackie “Taja” Murdock,
57
George Avakian has had a storied career as a record producer. While at Columbia
Records in the 1940s and 50s, for example, he signed Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis,
among others, as well as popular music artists.
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Revised submission to Jazz Perspectives, Oct 2012
a longtime regular at the NJMH Visitor’s Center, interjected, “Like a call-and-response”
(figure 7). A little later, the first man said, “I think it has a lot to do with the
characteristics of Miles. I mean, he was a pretty cool guy. Miles was really cool.”
Farinacci demonstrated the Dorian mode employed in “So What” on the piano. Now
another audience member suddenly spoke up: “I just wanted to throw this into the mix. I
was seventeen when I saw Miles for the first time ... I saw Miles about fifty times over
the years, and each time I could hear the evolution ... One time opposite Dizzy, who was
still playing that busy bebop harmony and Miles got on stage and did his cool thing. I
came all the way down from The Bronx because I just had to hear this. I remember the
day in 1959 when my father brought this album home, and I knew that it was very
special.”
<< INSERT FIGURE # 7 AROUND HERE: T. Murdock, F. Woodford >>
While jazz lore sometimes veers into the anecdotal like this, the kinds of talk I
just described at NJMH Curious Listeners sessions interested Azure Thompson a good
deal. She had not previously thought about the details of musical lives in that way, she
related. Now when she goes to see live jazz she is more cognizant that she is witnessing
certain people coming together to create a given musical sound at a particular time and
place, engaging with specific influences. She situates musical events in a more historical
context, she explained:
You have people at [the Jazz Museum] say, ‘I remember when I saw so-and-so in
this club, and they played with so-and-so. So when I go to [see live music] … I
feel like I’m part of a moment [in] history as well, like I’m going to be telling
similar stories twenty or thirty years from now. … So that’s why I really
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appreciate just having that available to me. … Who was working with whom?
Who signed whom? How [did] certain musicians become known to music execs?
Those kinds of relationships.
This is a kind of socialization into jazz community that is not about “shedding”
(practicing long hours in solitary) or “paying one’s dues” in clubs or on the road, or about
being in-the-know, but about feeling free to talk about one’s personal experience or
tastes. The excitement at witnessing live performance, moreover, can become heightened
when connected to the impulse to historicize that tends to prevail in jazz narratives. The
mix of generations at NJMH events – of witnesses, doers, and curious listeners – fosters
this kind of consciousness.
For Thompson’s friend, Courtney Liddell, the Jazz for Curious Listeners sessions
are “an odd experience” because the classes are taught by deeply knowledgeable experts,
but the audience comprises an odd mix of enthusiasts. The conversations that happen
after classes are important to her. “I always wind up sticking around until they kick us
out,” she said. “Everybody there seems really happy to see younger people out listening
to the music,” Liddell observed. One time she went with one of the older “students” of
the NJMH classes to watch a Chicago Bulls basketball game at the local Applebee’s
restaurant after class (Liddell is originally from Chicago). They talked for hours, she
related. Applebee’s, she joked, was the “official after-party” of the NJMH. “We’re in the
bar, watching the game,” she remembered, “and in walks Burt.”
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Burt Westridge is 75 years old; he has lived on the Upper West Side of New York
City since the 1970s, currently on Duke Ellington Boulevard (figure 8).58 I have seen him
at nearly every Jazz Museum event I have been to since 2004. He’s a longtime member
of New York City’s Duke Ellington Society. “Burt was one of the first people I talked to
[at the NJMH],” Liddell remembered. “And he came to me right away with the whole
Ellington Society thing.” Burt and Morris Hodara (introduced above) often hand out
flyers about The Duke Ellington Society as they seek to recruit new members. “A lot of
our members are old,” Burt told Liddell as she was leaving the museum one day, which
she interpreted to mean that the society was in danger of folding if it could not recruit
younger members (figure 9).59
<< INSERT FIGURE # 8 AROUND HERE: B. Westridge >>
<< INSERT FIGURE # 9 AROUND HERE: M. Hodara >>
On 25 September 2010, the NJMH held one of what it calls its Saturday Panels—
longer weekend sessions of listening, debate, and discussion. The “Who Was Bill
Savory?” panel featured guests Gene Savory, George Avakian, and Larry Rohter (the
58
In 1977 The Duke Ellington Society, of which Burt Westridge is a member,
successfully lobbied the city to rename W. 106th St. Duke Ellington Boulevard. Edward
Kennedy “Duke” Ellington and his son had homes on this street (Duke’s was at Riverside
Dr.), and Burt lives on the street as well. In our interview, he told me how, as a minor,
living with his family in Brooklyn, he borrowed a friend’s draft card to get into the Basin
Street nightclub and see Louis Armstrong in 1953.
59
As far as I can tell, Westridge’s and Hodara’s efforts to recruit new members for The
Duke Ellington Society at the NJMH have not been terribly successful. As we have seen,
for some Harlem residents, the NJMH’s location uptown increased its attractiveness.
(Additionally, a society devoted to one composer’s music may have too narrow an appeal
for some.)
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Revised submission to Jazz Perspectives, Oct 2012
New York Times reporter), as well as the Library of Congress jazz specialist Larry
Applebaum and the history professor Susan Schmidt-Horning. The listening for this
session included a Savory recording of Coleman Hawkins performing “Body and Soul.”
Hawkins’s October 1939 recording of this song contains one of the best known and most
admired solos in jazz history. Many have memorized his extemporization and can
perform it note-for-note; it is probably as canonized as an improvisation can get. Included
in the Savory Collection, however, is a slightly later Hawkins improvisation. In keeping
with Schoenberg’s aim to “have musicians create around the classics [and thus] bring
them back to life,” as he put it at one of these listening sessions, he invited the young
guitarist Marty Napoleon and the saxophonist Scott Robinson to perform musical
interludes for the Saturday Panel. Seemingly spontaneously, Schoenberg asked Robinson
to accompany the Savory “Body and Soul” recording on his tenor for the museum public.
Imagine the saxophonist’s surprise upon receiving this request, for he had never heard
this Hawkins recording. Robinson obligingly put the reed to his mouth but failed to blow
a single note. “I’m supposed to just step all over it?” he asked. “I’d kind of like to hear
it.” Schoenberg grasped the saxophonist’s sentiment and allowed the recording to play
without live accompaniment. After a break, Robinson performed an improvisation and
Schoenberg explained to the audience how he wants to keep live music a part of the
NJMH jazz experience. “As a musician,” Robinson reflected on the previous moment,
“sometimes you gotta know when not to touch something” (figure 10).
<< INSERT FIGURE # 10 AROUND HERE: S. Robinson >>
Conclusions
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Revised submission to Jazz Perspectives, Oct 2012
As I too listened to Hawkins’s later solo that evening at the National Jazz
Museum in Harlem, I was comparing it with my memories of the canonical one. This was
now the third time I had heard the Savory version at the Visitor’s Center. The first time I
quickly concluded that it could not compare to the better-known version, which today
hardly seems like an “improvisation” and rather more like a perfect “composition.” The
second time I listened with a more open mind. By the third time, the firmly inscribed
memory of the October 1939 solo was beginning to loosen up, allowing me to appreciate
this different improvisation more.60 I wondered if other listeners had similar experiences,
or if perhaps their memories of the canonical solo were different from mine. Maybe there
were even some listeners who heard the later recording with little or no experience of the
earlier, famous one. Whatever the case, our individual listening experiences on this
occasion and many others were also social ones. For a few people, the better-known
recording of Hawkins performing “Body and Soul” was placed into a new perspective. In
the interactions between doers, listeners, learners, older and younger individuals, and
between museum patrons of different heritages (perhaps predominantly African
American and Jewish, but not exclusively so), a kind of dialogic jazz community is given
voice at the Visitor’s Center. Prouty has observed that “every person, every jazz
community, understands canon differently,” and “these differences are critical to
60
A brief excerpt of the Savory “Body and Soul” can be heard at the New York Times
interactive feature on the collection. The excerpt demonstrates how different the
improvisation is, although the listener may notice some similarities in the melodic leaps
20 seconds into the example:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/17/arts/music/savory-collection.html
(accessed 12 October 2011). Visitors to the museum can request to hear any of the
Savory examples in their entirety there.
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understanding how different communities come to know jazz.” “To know jazz, to relate
oneself to canon, and to identify with the jazz community,” Prouty writes, “are conscious
acts that require a degree of self-identification.” We live in an era of social networking,
as it is called, in which we can parse our friends into virtual communities. The NJMH,
too, has a useful Facebook site for announcing upcoming events, and for friends of the
museum to post commentary. But it is at the Visitor’s Center in the New Harlem where
the real work of the museum takes place: the curating of – if not “the jazz community” –
a community of curious listeners and talkers.
It should be clear that I do not mean to propose an ideal of harmonious social
relations here. Ingrid Monson described the ability of jazz-oriented interactions to
establish “a moment of community, whether temporary or enduring.” Certainly, the
question whether the sociability that takes place at the Jazz Museum amounts to fleeting
moments or something more lasting is pertinent. The folklorist Burt Feintuch has
lamented the casual use of the term community to describe occasional musical gettogethers (such as revivalist music sessions). Community, he holds, is “more than what
happens in one, occasional sphere of interaction.” Rather, it “is to participate in a web of
connectedness to others that continues beyond special events.”61 The social web that
congregates at Jazz Museum events probably does not attain this standard of
sustainability and extension. Indeed, it seems quite specific to the space of the Visitor’s
Center. But it may also be the case that, for some of the museum patrons, few webs do
meet Feintuch’s definition.
61
Burt Feintuch, “Longing for Community,” Western Folklore 60 2/3 (2001): 149. See
also Prouty, Knowing Jazz, 14.
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Meanwhile, live jazz in Harlem is becoming scarcer. Like Minton’s Playhouse,
the much-loved St. Nick’s Pub closed recently, in what one reporter described as “yet
another blow to Harlem jazz.”62 A similar fate may await the storied Lenox Lounge, this
reporter worried. (Meanwhile, a Whole Foods Market is planned for 125th Street and
Lenox Avenue, doors away from the Lounge.)63 Will the jazz museum be able to move
into its hopeful permanent building on 125th Street, near the Apollo Theater, and offer
expanded exhibitions and programming? If so, will its public change? Will it be able to
serve both the Harlem community and visitors from the world over, as it currently does?
What will be the nature of “the Harlem community” five years hence? The Revive Music
Group (formerly Revive da Live) no longer hosts jams at Creole restaurant near the
museum. However, the musicians who have been a part of Revive are performing
steadily elsewhere and attracting critical acclaim.64 At the same time, the NJMH has
added personnel and maintains a full program of events. Both Azure Thompson and
Courtney Lidell informed me that, after time away from museum events, they have
recently resumed their attendance. The Visitor’s Center has been serving the public for
nearly a decade; whatever happens going forward, the NJMH, which records on video
62
Kia Gregory, “Frustration Builds Over Closed Harlem Nightspot,” New York Times,
July 29, 2012.
63
See Michael J. Feeney, “Mixed reaction to Harlem Whole Foods,” Daily News,
October 18, 2012, NYDailyNews.com, accessed Oct. 28, 2012. See also, Michael J.
Feeney, “Lenox Lounge, Harlem’s famed jazz club, could be on last set,” Daily News,
March 8, 2012, NYDailyNews.com, accessed Oct. 28, 2012.
64
A good example of this new generation is keyboardist Robert Glasper, whose music
combines soul, gospel, jazz, and hip-hop influences, and who has gained international
attention with The Robert Glasper Experiment.
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and in photographs the Harlem Speaks sessions and other public events, has amassed a
rich archive of materials documenting how jazz can bring some people together some of
the time.
43