It was just about a century ago that America — with no distinct culture of its own — began to build shrines to the music of Europe.
By creating institutions such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra, America would rank right up there with its European forebears — or at least that’s what civic boosters in Chicago, Philadelphia and other up-and-coming American cities believed.
Even the most visionary urban planners, however, could not have imagined the turnabout that would take place toward the end of the 20th Century: America has begun building institutions that honor not Beethoven and Brahms but Ellington and Basie, as Kansas City did over the weekend.
Nearly a decade in the planning, the $12 million Kansas City Jazz Museum (part of a $26 million complex called The Museums at 18th and Vine) stands as the first of its kind.
But the opening of the Jazz Museum — a state-of-the-art facility with computerized archives, an intimate jazz club (with bar) and a 500-seat theater — is just the latest instance of a larger movement: America in the 1990s has been spending millions to study, celebrate and honor its own culture.
Following closely on the heels of Kansas City’s new venture, for example, comes the Jazz Museum of Chicago, a project that was unveiled last year and has been gaining momentum ever since. Jazz Unites, the non-profit organization that has championed the museum, has won the support of two major players in Chicago business and culture: United Airlines and the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architecture firm.
In addition, pianist Ramsey Lewis, veteran impresario Joe Segal, composer-bandleader William Russo and documentary filmmaker Bill Kurtis have joined the Jazz Museum board, giving weight and clout to a project that already has garnered national media attention. Plans call for the museum to break ground by the year 2000.
Meanwhile, Down Beat, the famed magazine based in Elmhurst, has begun construction on a Jazz Hall of Fame, which will open next year in Orlando, Fla. And the San Francisco Jazz Festival, widely admired as the best in the United States, plans to build its own concert hall for year-round performances.
“What’s happening is that America is becoming a true multicultural society, and the creation of all these institutions is clear evidence of that,” says Randall Kline, artistic director of the San Francisco Jazz Festival. “The demographics of this country are changing so rapidly that the institutions have had to catch up.
“So if the style of American culture in the 1890s was essentially European — with an emphasis on music by Bach and Beethoven — the style of the 1990s is world culture, which jazz addresses perfectly. Jazz, in other words, is a music that embraces African-American traditions, Latin influences, Asian ideas, everything, which is why everyone is suddenly creating buildings and programs devoted to jazz.”
Certainly the rush of activity throughout the ’90s has been unprecedented. Even apart from buildings, jazz advocates have been organizing ambitious programs that present the music in serious, concert settings akin to their symphonic counterparts:
– Lincoln Center in New York — long synonymous with highbrow European symphony, opera and ballet — has created the year-round Jazz at Lincoln Center program, an ambitious lineup of concerts, lectures and films with a resident orchestra, $5 million annual budget and famous artistic director in Wynton Marsalis.
– The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and Carnegie Hall, in New York, have established resident orchestras to explore and perform the music of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and the like.
– The Music Center of Los Angeles, home of the L.A. Philharmonic, announced plans to start a year-round jazz program later this year, with jazz star Herbie Hancock as artistic director.
So why now? If jazz is “America’s classical music,” as singer Tony Bennett and others assert, why has it taken nearly a century for the nation to begin building bricks-and-mortar institutions to nurture it?
“When you come down to it, jazz came out of the music of the slaves and, early on, was relegated to houses of ill-repute,” says Geraldine de Haas, president of Jazz Unites and a prime mover behind the proposed Jazz Museum of Chicago. “The music has had to struggle to get to more dignified places, and that has taken a long time. The people who gave this music to the world have struggled very hard for their place in society, so the journey for the music has been difficult too.”
By the 1960s, American jazz had appeared to be on its last legs, with clubs folding across the country, while ever-younger record buyers began snapping up rock ‘n’ roll records.
When jazz artists such as Chicago’s William Russo began performing orchestral masterworks of Ellington and Stan Kenton, resistance was stiff.
“It was extraordinarily difficult — we couldn’t find places to work, we couldn’t find a great deal of support,” remembers Russo, whose Chicago Jazz Ensemble survived only briefly in the ’60s.
As recently as the 1980s, “a lot of people were looking at jazz as an endangered musical species,” says Rowena Stewart, executive director of the Kansas City Jazz Museum. “The fact of the matter was that you could only really hear this music in a bar, and not too often at that. But many people, myself included, felt that jazz should be brought out to places where a wider public could hear it.”
Yet the music might still be ignored by “serious” concert halls if the nation hadn’t begun to change so dramatically in the 1980s.
The well-documented graying and shrinking of the classical music audience has forced symphony administrators to reach out to the new and younger listeners that jazz attracts, and the emergence of the compact disc brought back to record stores long-forgotten masterpieces by Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and scores more.
Today, Russo’s revived Chicago Jazz Ensemble not only has a home base — Columbia College Chicago — but stands as one of the most highly praised bands in America.
It wasn’t until the emergence of Cleveland’s $92 million Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, however, that jazz devotees realized it was possible to build edifices of their own.
“The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame showed that you could do it,” says Stewart. “It showed that you can use music to reach all people, that education through music can entertain people as well as enlighten them.”
The opening of the Kansas City Jazz Museum suggests that America — still a comparatively young nation — may be coming of age, at least culturally. Certainly the national media attention that the opening of the Jazz Museum attracted, with major print and television magazines on hand all weekend, suggested that history was being made.
The stars who came to perform at the opening — including Bennett, Al Jarreau, Dianne Reeves and Pat Metheny — clearly understood the significance of the occasion.
“The millennium is coming up,” Bennett told the crowd at the museum’s Gem Theater. “And all the countries in the world are going to have to put their cards on the table and say: `This is what we’ve contributed to the world.’ And with all the money that has been made in this country . . . the thing we’ve invented that’s our own is jazz.”
Finally, America has begun acknowledging just that.
