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By Rachel Donadio
The New York Sun, Tuesday, January 21, 2003
The tempo is picking up in the complex improvisation
that is the creation of a national jazz museum in Harlem.
Buoyed by a fruitful all-star planning conference last month,
museum officials have begun raising money and will visit prospective
sites in Harlem in the coming weeks. "Momentum is definitely
building," said David Levy, a member of the nascent museum's
board and the president and director of the Corcoran Gallery
in Washington.
At the December conference, two dozen jazz experts
and musicians laid out their visions of an institution that
would be part history museum, art museum, school, listening
library, and jazz club, where schoolchildren and experts can
learn something new. "It will be living, pulsating, hearing,
seeing, thumping, rhythmic, swinging," said the jazz
museum's president, Leonard, Garment, a Washington lawyer,
former Nixon White House staffer, and occasional jazz saxophonist
who's moving back to New York next month to focus on museum
planning.
And it will definitely be in Harlem. Jazz may
have been born in turn-of-the-century New Orleans and nurtured
in Chicago, but it came of age in Harlem. "Harlem was
really a port of call in a way no other place was," said
jazz musician Loren Schoenberg, executive director of the
jazz museum. "Here, it's going to resonate in a way it
won't resonate anywhere else." "We make so much
of New Orleans - God bless it - but it's had its moment,"
he said. "Harlem is still having its moment, and the
Jazz Museum can really play a vital role in making Harlem
a place for the future."
Founded as a not-for-profit organization in
1999, the museum has a board of four: Mr. Garment; Mr. Levy;
Daryl Libow, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP; and
Billy Taylor, the renowned jazz pianist and head of the music
department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
A boost came in 2000, when Congress allocated
$1 million through the Small Business Administration for the
museum's development. The board is planning a fund-raising
drive. No major corporate sponsors have emerged. As for local
government, "We're really waiting to talk to the city
and the state when we have something finite to talk about,"
Mr. Schoenberg said. The museum doesn't intend to partner
with any other institutions. "We're looking to be our
own stand-alone entity," said Mr. Schoenberg. And they'll
raise the money themselves. "There is no jazz museum
in the world and there's a lot of support for it," he
said.
The shape the museum will take looms large.
"If will not be object based," Mr. Garment said.
"Our focus will be more on musical history and the way
musical history evokes the American experience, the narrative
nature of the jazz experience."
It won't feature display cases with album covers
and famous musicians' instruments. The museum can "help
people understand the nature of jazz as a kind of metaphor
for how American society has come together," Mr. Levy
said. "There's a very deep message here," he said.
"It has to do with race, with the coming together of
society, with the problems of society as well as the solutions.
It's a very embracing medium here." Alfred Appel, a retired
professor at Northwestern and author of "Jazz Modernism:
From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce," sees
the museum as having a "schizoid mission."
"My notion is ideally of a dialectic between
the kind of populist institution and the smaller, more specialist
part of the institution devoted to temporary exhibitions,"
he said. He'd like to see an exhibition on the jazz paintings
of Stuart Davis, for instance, or one exploring jazz themes
in Krazy Cat, the 1930s-era cartoon, or another displaying
a recently discovered trove of programs from the Cotton Club.
Some musicians are fearful the act of creating
a jazz museum may send the message that jazz is dead. They
want the museum to present the art form as a living glory.
"What I was impressed by was the potential for this to
not be a museum/mausoleum per se," said Steve Kirby,
a jazz bassist who attended the conference. He envisions residencies
for musicians, and ongoing workshops. Others think a museum
could educate new generations about a genre that is no longer
the currency of the young.
"Jazz has about the same market as classical
music," acknowledged Mr. Levy. "It has become music
of the educated, not the music of the street, which it was
in the 1940s."
Still, with Jazz at Lincoln Center preparing
to open a new facility, the planners don't think the museum
should primarily be a performance space. "This would
be fabulous, because we wouldn't be competing but complementary
organizations," said the director of education and performance
at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Laura Johnson. Nor do the planners
see it as an archive. "We don't want to reinvent the
wheel," Mr. Schoenberg said, noting that it will be close
to the country's leading jazz archive, the Center for Jazz
Studies at Rutgers, as well as to the Louis Armstrong archive
at Queens College and the New York Public Library.
As for the timing: "In the end it's
all about money," Mr. Levy said. "If someone came
in and wrote a check adequate to start building tomorrow,
we'd start building tomorrow."
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