At last, this essential American music gets a museum.

BY NAT HENTOFF
Wall Street Journal
Thursday, March 18, 2004 12:01 a.m.

NEW YORK--Some years ago, a Swedish tourist much immersed in the music and lore of jazz asked me, when he came to New York to visit Harlem, "Is there a statue of Charlie Parker there, or anywhere?" Surprised there was not, he wondered if there was some kind of jazz research center in the city, and was disappointed again.

At last, however, a Jazz Museum in Harlem is taking shape, and is in the process of acquiring a building, possibly at the site of the Victoria Theater, next to the fabled Apollo Theater. The first development money was a $1 million line item in the 2000 federal budget. Among its proposers were then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem and Rep. John Conyers, very knowledgeable about the historic Detroit jazz scene. Particularly important was the enthusiasm of Senate Appropriations committee chairman Ted Stevens of Alaska, a jazz fan who, as a Yale undergraduate, spent weekends digging the New York jazz scene.

There is no more obvious site for a jazz museum than Harlem. In his memoir, "Music Is My Mistress," Duke Ellington told of when he was a fledgling bandleader in Washington, D.C., and "Harlem, to our minds, did indeed have the world's most glamorous atmosphere. We had to go there." So did many who became part of the jazz pantheon--from Count Basie to Charlie Parker.

Directing the planning for The Jazz Museum in Harlem (www.jazzmuseuminharlem.org) is multi-instrumentalist, arranger, conductor and jazz historian Loren Schoenberg, who, like Ellington, sees and performs the music as a wholly living continuum, not contentiously locked into categories and styles.

The resourceful chairman of the museum's board is Leonard Garment, an equally skilled attorney and writer (as in his beguiling memoir, "Crazy Rhythm," published by Da Capo Press). A former White House counsel to Richard Nixon, Mr. Garment was the only presidential counsel to have, in his youth, been in Woody Herman's reed section.

"The museum," Mr. Schoenberg emphasizes, "must be deeply rooted in the Harlem community," and it already has encouragement from such community leaders as Lloyd Williams, head of the Harlem Chamber of Commerce. But vital in the long run is the determination of Mr. Schoenberg to connect to the museum the schools of Harlem, and, for that matter, those of the rest of the city.

Museum docents, who will be musicians, will guide school groups through the museum, bringing history alive through performances, storytelling and interactive exhibits. For all visitors, there will be--among other adventures--a "Jazz Way," invoking each decade of the music's history.

During the big-band era (1931-40), for example, visitors, in a circular environment, will see different musicians from such bands as Ellington's or Benny Goodman's, each projected so his playing can be heard as it interacts with the whole arrangement. Then, standing in the center, the visitors will experience the score in its reverberating entirety.

The museum will have a jazz theater, a jazz club and a learning center with a library and other research sources. And there'll be live sessions, lectures and workshops.

I suggested to Mr. Schoenberg that the museum could also be particularly valuable to young players, because missing from the jazz scene for years has been the opportunity for newcomers to learn from their elders, who helped shape the language. As alto saxophonist Phil Woods recalls, that used to happen when the generations were mixed into the big bands, and newcomers could tune in, on the bus as well as the bandstand, to the "oral history of the tribe."

Accordingly, Mr. Schoenberg is planning to have, at the museum, conversations among musicians across generations, and those will be open to visitors and transcribed for historians.

When Charlie Parker died in 1955, drummer and leader Art Blakey--a persistent proselytizer for jazz--said forlornly, "I doubt if many black kids knew who Charlie Parker was." Soon, there will be a vivid source of immersion in jazz past and future. And since the music has long been an international language, tourists from around the world will be coming to Harlem in ever greater numbers. They won't see a statue of Charlie Parker, but they'll be in his presence, along with that of his progenitors.

They, and visitors of all ages, will learn, interactively, dimensions of American history through the lives of embodiments of what Ellington called the "unhampered expression of complete freedom reflecting the ideals of American Independence."

Ralph Ellison said of blacks, and other Americans, "We all do have institutions. We have the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And we have jazz."

And we have Ellington's "Harlem Air Shaft, a Tone Parallel to Harlem," and his band's occasional theme, written by Billy Strayhorn, the infectious "Take the 'A' Train" to--as the song says--"find the quickest way to get to Harlem."