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Curating Community at the NationalJazz Museum in HarlemFrederick J. MoehnPublished online: 20 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Frederick J. Moehn (2013) Curating Community at the National Jazz Museum inHarlem, Jazz Perspectives, 7:1, 3-29, DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2013.824136

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Curating Community at the NationalJazz Museum in HarlemFrederick J. Moehn

“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 fontagainst a plain blue background, and then below, in smaller capital letters, “BRINGS

PEOPLE TOGETHER” (figure 1). It seemed a fitting motto for the National JazzMuseum in Harlem (NJMH), an institution that offers a variety of public programsout of its Visitor’s Center at 104 East 126th Street in New York City. Starting shortlyafter the museum opened its doors to the neighborhood in 2004, I began attendingthe Harlem Speaks series of interviews with musicians and other individuals whohave had some connection to Harlem and to jazz. What struck me at these eventswas the intimate sense of local-ness, and, in fact, a feeling that a sort of communitywas enabled and enacted through these oral history sessions. Rather than a controlleddistance between the guests of honor and the audience members, the setting has tendedto be very informal, with a kind of give-and-take between the interviewee and thepublic. Guests let down their guard somewhat at this space and often speak morefrankly than they might in a more mainstream media setting.

For example, bandleader Johnny Colon prefaced comments about race and Harlempolitics by saying, “Now I’m going to speak like I wouldn’t normally on camera becauseI feel so comfortable here.” Other moments I documented were not so much frank asthey were emotional, such as when trumpeter Clark Terry looked at his audience beforehis interview began and said, “I’m so overwhelmed to be here, to see so many oldfriends back from the Apollo [Theater] days … to see so many beautiful people ofsuch stature. Just makes me want to cry.”2 Often, audience members—many ofwhom are seniors—would be called upon to supply a date or name when the guest’sor host’s memory failed. Alternatively, something a guest said might remind one ofthe more senior persons present of events marked by music from her or his younger

1“Overview,” http://jazzmuseuminharlem.org/overview.php (accessed Aug. 13, 2011). The quotation can be foundin Willie the Lion Smith with George Hoefer, Music on My Mind: The Memoirs of an American Pianist (London:MacGibbon & Kee, 1965), 6.2Author’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 forthe respective dates described (without footnoted citations). Quotations from my interviews are cited accordingly.

Jazz Perspectives, 2013Vol. 7, No. 1, 3–29, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2013.824136

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days. At times, audience affirmations of speakers’ statements almost seemed to build toa call-and-response kind of cadence.

In this article I draw on my ethnography of museum events and my interviews withpatrons over the course of several years to examine how the assertion that jazz bringspeople together is central to this institution’s mission. I consider how the concept ofcommunity has been theorized, specifically in relation to what is commonly referredto as “the jazz community.” I am concerned, too, with the museum’s place in therapidly developing “New Harlem,” as a participant in a trend that some have calleda Second Harlem Renaissance. What is the significance of location for this museum’sactivities?3 What kinds of discussions and relationships emerge between older andyounger individuals at NJMH events, between experts and enthusiasts or aficionados?How might memory influence the production of history there? How can new experi-ences of jazz shape memories of previous ones, or revise perceptions of canon? Howdoes the social aspect of museum events color the experience of jazz at this space?

Ken Prouty observes that there is an “implicit hierarchy” in discourse about jazz com-munities, inwhich “artists, journalists, industryfigures, [and] scholars”have each playeda role.4 Jazz audiences, on the other hand, tend to be “conceptualized simply as some-thing that is there, either as consumers … or as unnamed actors in the social play thatintersects 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 ColumbiaUniversity (in theMorningside Heights part ofWest Harlem), with “other ‘questioning’moves in jazz” that can emerge “from the ground up.”6 Itmay not be especially useful (oraccurate) to locate the thoughtful scholarship associated with the New Jazz Studies as

Figure 1 Jazz Museum membership card.

3Harlem comprises much of the northern part of the island of Manhattan; roughly, between 110th and 155thstreet, with East Harlem extending a little lower (sometimes the Morningside Heights area in the western partof this space is excluded from popular ideas of Harlem, presumably because it is a more exclusive neighborhooddominated by Columbia University). Harlem has historically been home to concentrations of various different eth-nicities, including Jewish and Italian. East Harlem is also known as an important center of Latino culture.4Ken Prouty, Knowing Jazz: Community, Pedagogy, and Canon in the Information Age (Jackson: University Press ofMississippi, 2012), 8.5Ibid.6Ibid.

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coming from “above,” but Prouty’s point about the relative under-theorization of audi-ences’ roles in jazz communities is constructive.7

At the NJMH, scholars associated with the New Jazz Studies have in fact been featuredguests (in the Harlem Speaks series), including the Columbia University professors RobertO’Meally, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and George E. Lewis. Nevertheless, one would not likelydescribe the museum’s programming as geared toward academic discourse about, forexample, problems of representation or canon. Jazz knowledge is certainly incrementallyrevised and augmented in events that often highlight themusic and lives of under-appreci-ated figures (the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell and the trumpeter Frankie Newton, forexample; the pianist Marty Napoleon; the singer Sathima Bea Benjamin), or of individualswho are not necessarily performers (e.g., the New York Times sports columnist WilliamC. Rhoden; the filmmaker Jean Bach), or jazz around the world (sessions on Asia,Africa, Israel, Latin America, for instance). Whether pertaining to canonical figures andrepertoire or not, however, museum events are typically occasions for relaxed discussionandappreciation.Themessage is: everyonepossesses knowledgepertaining to their particu-lar experiences of jazzmusic and history, and sharing it is a valuable community endeavor.

With limited exhibition space and relatively few physical holdings the NJMH hasthus far had little need for professional curators of the sort more typical to the visualfine 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, learningabout, appreciating, reflecting upon, and experiencing jazz. In this manner, theNJMH curates (from Latin cura, curare—care; to care) a dialogic notion of jazz as com-munity. “Curators” with expert knowledge may conduct the sessions there, but“ground up” discussion is encouraged and valued. Social moments of affective engage-ment with musical sound, history, and performance, and with other listeners present atthis 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 touse.”10 It has been described as based on cultural criteria such as common traditions;

7New Jazz Studies scholar Sherrie Tucker has, however, noted the importance of jazz audiences to the historiogra-phy of the music. See, for example, her chapter, “‘But This Music Is Mine Already!’WhiteWoman as Jazz Collectorin the Film New Orleans (1947),” in Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, edited by Nichole T. Rustin andSherrie Tucker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 235–266. Ingrid Monson, too, acknowledged the impor-tance of listeners in the construction of jazz community, as I describe below.8In the context of the visual arts especially, the curator has assumed a more creative and “neo-critical” role inrecent decades, reflecting a “curatorial turn” in discourse about museums and exhibitions. Paul O’Neill, “TheCuratorial Turn: From Discourse to Practice,” in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, editedby Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick (Chicago: Intellect Books, 2007), 13–28. Outside of museum spaces, “tocurate” has been adopted as “a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste itonto any activity that involves culling and selecting,” such as “curating” a musical happening, or even awindow display. Alex Williams, “On the Tip of Creative Tongues,” New York Times, October 4, 2009.9One reason for this is that the NJMH directors recognize that the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University inneighboring New Jersey is already known for its extensive archive of papers, articles, photographs, and the like.10Patricia Hill Collins, “The New Politics of Community,” American Sociological Review 75 no. 1 (2010): 24.

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on affective criteria such as shared interests; on proximity in a given locality; or infunctional terms as pertaining to more-or-less structured and reproducible relation-ships between individuals and social institutions. Older sociological models tended toview communities as empirical things-in-themselves with relatively stable relation-ships between individuals (as in the “community study”). Later, the imaginationcame to be seen as vital to communities (for example, Benedict Anderson’s concep-tualization of the nation as an “imagined community”). “Taste communities” are saidto form around specific artistic manifestations. The Internet hosts “virtual” commu-nities. Recently, municipalities and states trimming the budgets for social programshave promoted “community service.”11 The concept’s ability to evoke a sphere ofmeaningful sociality, however ambiguous, helps it to persist in scholarly and publicdiscourse.

The literature on jazz, whether journalistic or academic, abounds with referencesto community. Often the phrase “the jazz community” is evoked (“by bandingtogether, the jazz community will help the music survive and thrive”).12 It caneven be cited as a primary source for specific oral traditions.13 At times sub-categoriesare identified, such as “the Chicago jazz community” (or New York, Harlem, etc.),“the avant-garde jazz community,” “the Latin jazz community,” “the black jazz com-munity,” “the out jazz community,” “the American jazz community,” “the Japanesejazz community,” “the wartime jazz community”; or super-categories such as “theinternational jazz community.”14 Clearly, the idea of community is important in dis-course about jazz, but it is not always apparent which community is being evoked, orhow it is constituted.15 Indeed, the community concept’s flexibility, feel-good associ-ations, and potential for vagueness led the anthropologists Vered Amit and NigelRapport to protest that it can serve primarily as “a convenient conceptual haven,”one that may be particularly useful “in a world where bounded fieldwork sitesseem no longer to exist.”16

There have, however, been a few attempts to theorize the concept of jazz communitywith some rigor. Early behavioral and functional definitions from the 1950s and 1960stended to portray it as a self-selecting subculture, one that deviated from a normative

11For 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, 32.12Jon Pareles, “Jazz Displays a Unified Spirit,” New York Times, Sept. 8, 1985.13Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994),763.14I take all these examples from scholarly publications on jazz. This journal makes a reference to “the academic jazzcommunity” in its statement of aims and scope.15Jazz discourse, Sherrie Tucker observes, “is a curious mix of romance about modernist geniuses who appear tohave no communities, and nostalgic communities for whom playing jazz seems to achieve historical and social andpolitical transcendence.” Sherrie Tucker, “Bordering on Community: Improvising Women Improvising Women-in-Jazz,” in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, Edited by Daniel Fischlinand Ajay Heble (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 247–248.16Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport, The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity,and Collectivity (London: Pluto, 2002), 17.

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notion of the social order (in particular, Merriam’s and Mack’s 1960 article).17 Jazz’splace in American life has changed in recent decades, perhaps most visibly in its insti-tutionalization at the Jazz at Lincoln Center venue. Nevertheless, some of the olderspeakers in the NJMH Harlem Speaks series still recalled the days of being made tofeel like social deviants.18

In Saying Something Ingrid Monson recognizes musical performance as the “mostprestigious” activity that “goes into constituting the jazz community,” but she alsoacknowledges that it requires the active participation of informed listeners.19 The inter-action between the musician and audience members who listen “within the context ofthe richly textured aural legacy of jazz and African American music,” Monson writes,takes a given jazz moment “beyond technical competence, beyond the chord changes,and into the realm of ‘saying something.’”20 The resulting “interaction of musicalsounds, people, and their musical and cultural histories” establishes “a moment ofcommunity, whether temporary or enduring.”21

Sherrie Tucker, on the other hand, has proposed that scholars consider not onlythe “possibilities of jazz as a site of community-formation, improvisation, and collab-oration,” but also the limitations of concepts and spaces of jazz community.22 Shesees community as a terrain of changing-same power relations. So with respect towomen and “the jazz community,” for example, individuals “may imagine themselvesas active community members … yet find themselves unimaginable and unrepresen-table at many community functions.” Tucker calls for critical investigations thatmight “yield possible theories and practices of community formation that areporous, flexible, strategic, and liberatory, as opposed to ideas about belonging andunbelonging that are conservative, comfy, and entrenched.” As she puts it, this

17Alan P. Merriam, and Raymond W. Mack, “The Jazz Community,” Social Forces 38, no. 3 (1960): 211–222. Ina subsequent article published in 1968, Robert A. Stebbins described a subcultural “status community” (fromWeber), that espouses values opposed to the commercialization of music. Robert A. Stebbins, “A Theory ofthe Jazz Community,” The Sociological Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1968): 331. In a 2005 article Peter J. Martin revisitedMerriam’s and Mack’s analysis. Expanding on their idea of a “community of interest,” Martin proposed that wethink of the jazz community as an art world (using Howard S. Becker’s concept), whereby numerous actorscollaboratively 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 JazzCriticism 2 (2005), 11. With respect to the jazz community as an “art world” and a “community of interest,” seealso Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, pp. 7 and 772. Ken Prouty’s Knowing Jazz (op. cit.), offers a good criticalreading of the literature on jazz and community, with particular attention to what it means for jazz programpedagogy.18In commenting on a draft of this article, a colleague pointed out that although the term “jazz”may today “signalan elite art that resides in affluent institutions, there are still musicians who define themselves as playing jazz whoscrape by and who purposely embrace marginal status—albeit out of complex motives” (Matthew Somoroff, pers.comm., 5 Nov. 2011).19Ingrid T. Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1996), 14.20Ibid., 1–2.21Ibid., 2.22Tucker, “Bordering on Community,” 250.

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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 aboutmusical sound as important as making it when it comes to the jazz community? Andwe might also wonder if there is any “edginess” to the goings on at the National JazzMuseum in Harlem.

One of the more entrenched ideas relating to jazz is that specialized or even arcaneknowledge is required to participate in the community. This knowledge may be tech-nical and musical, or it may be historical. Outsiders might feel that some who are “in”the jazz community attribute exaggerated significance to seemingly trivial biographicaland other details at the expense of allowing less invested listeners to appreciate themusic. In my previous research in Brazil, for example, I asked a musician known formixing 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 itwas “best not to get involved.”24 The “curating” that takes place at the NJMH Visitor’sCenter invites locals to get involved, and to say something about jazz (without needingto 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 itsmission. Older adults may in fact hold some “comfy” values, or they may in someaspects be more progressive in outlook than younger ones. How can they speak tochanging-same power relations? We recognize aging jazz legends; what about agingjazz 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 itsdecayed urban setting. There is general agreement that parts of Harlem have beenexperiencing a kind of “rebirth” in terms of business investment, real estate develop-ment, and support for cultural institutions after decades of neglect.25 From around113th to 125th Streets on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, perhaps the most obviouslygentrified part of the “New Harlem,” an astonishing number of new residence build-ings has risen in the past seven years or so. Dozens of new restaurants, bakeries, andcafés, 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 isdoing brisk business on one block, with a Chase bank and a Starbucks coffee shop oneither corner, all of which were not there seven years ago. The recently opened HarlemTavern at 116th Street is a burger and beer sports bar with a large outdoor seating area.

23Ibid.24Fernanda Abreu, interview with the author, Aug. 9, 2007. See Frederick Moehn, Contemporary Carioca: Technol-ogies of Mixing in a Brazilian Music Scene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 131.25One journalist suggested that president Bill Clinton’s establishment of offices in Harlem in 2001 after leaving theWhite House helped facilitate the new effervescence of the neighborhood. DewayneWickham, “Clinton PavesWayfor Second ‘Harlem Renaissance,’”USA Today, Aug. 6, 2001. David Dunlap’s Feb. 10, 2002New York Times article,“The Changing Look of the New Harlem,” further signaled to the general public that the neighborhood was seeinga new phase of development.

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It found instant popularity. The latest addition to this stretch is a sushi restaurant, notfar from a new yoga studio.

Demographic changes have accompanied this process. A recent New York Timesarticle noted that Harlem is no longer majority African American, with four in ten resi-dents being black.26 In March 2009 I photographed a large sign that promoted a newreality series on the BET cable channel about young black professionals in Harlem. Inblack capital letters against a white background it stated, “HARLEM IS …” A monthlater someone had added the words “FED UP” in black paint (figure 2). Perhaps thiswas intended as an expression of frustration with the rapid redevelopment of the neigh-borhood and the influx of new residents.

At the same time, precisely because of Harlem’s iconic status as a kind of “capital” ofblack U.S. culture, there are certain distinguishing characteristics to the way its secondrenaissance is unfolding. Real estate developers and tourism agencies, for example,market and have a stake in the neighborhood’s legacy. But there are also laudableefforts at local institutions such as Harlem Stage, the Studio Museum, or the ApolloTheater, among various others, to recognize and promote black cultural expressionand a sense of artistic community. InMay 2011, for example, the Apollo Theater, in col-laboration with Harlem Stage, Jazzmobile, and Columbia University, promoted theHarlem Jazz Shrines Festival to celebrate the neighborhood’s several historically impor-tant jazz venues, among themMinton’s Playhouse, the jazz club where many would saybebop was “born” in the 1940s.27 One ethnographer observed that the majority of theneighborhood’s “professional residents, both newly arrived and long-term, are onrecord as saying they chose to live in Harlem because of its illustrious history, architec-tural riches, affordable rents, and proximity to a black majority.”28 Azure Thompson, ayoung African American Jazz Museum patron, expressed similar sentiments. She grewup in Seattle and attended Howard University, where she wrote for The Hilltop, a news-paper co-founded in 1924 by Zora Neal Hurston (with Louis Eugene King). “Ideas of

26Sam Roberts, “No Longer Majority Black, Harlem Is in Transition,” New York Times, 6 January 2010. An AfricanAmerican NJMH patron I interviewed questioned the research upon which this article based its conclusions. Shenoted that while the lower, western portion of Harlem had seen an obvious increase in white residents, other partsof Harlem, particularly above 125th Street, seemed to her to still be overwhelmingly black. One reader of this essaywondered if I meant to associate Starbucks and yoga studios with whiteness. I do not. Rather, these are businessesthat 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 thelocal 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 asHarlem Tavern, Harlem Food Bar, and Cedric’s French Bistro. There are several yoga studios in Harlem run byAfrican American yoga instructors.27Minton’s Playhouse, on 118th St. near St. Nicholas Ave., was open from 1938–1974. In 2006 Earl Spain, formermanager of St. Nick’s Pub, another classic Harlem spot (now closed) reopened the space as the Uptown JazzLounge at Minton’s Playhouse. The reopened Minton’s never really became a jazz hotspot. One journalistsuggested 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, 13–19 May 2010: 25.28Sabiyha Prince, “Race, Class, and the Packaging of Harlem,” Identities 12 no. 3 (2005): 399. This is an interestingclaim, but I am skeptical that the majority of Harlem’s professional residents are “on record” about their reasonsfor living there.

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what Harlem used to be” attracted her to want to live there, Thompson toldme. In someway, 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 thelegendary downtown Village Gate jazz club. Around 1996 D’Lugoff suggested to DavidC. Levy, then director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, that New YorkCity needed a jazz museum and hall of fame.30 Levy in turn brought Washingtonpower lawyers and jazz aficionados Leonard Garment and Daryl Libow on board tobegin planning a museum that they envisioned as a “companion” to the emergentJazz at Lincoln Center institution. They thought Harlem should be its home.31

Garment later acknowledged that, under difficult economic circumstances, the neigh-borhood’s second “renaissance” helped keep the board’s project to secure a permanentspace alive.32 Meanwhile, the NJMH has had an impact in the local cultural landscapethrough the outreach programming it administers out of its offices on an unremarkable

Figure 2 HARLEM IS … FED UP billboard, 4 May 2009 (Photo F. Moehn)

29As an African American professional, Azure Thompson may feel that she is following the spirit of certain blackAmericans 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 continuationor participation (except perhaps in the sense of continuing a pattern of whites taking an interest in Harlem, and ingeneral, black culture).30Art D’Lugoff passed away in 2009.31Leonard Garment, “The Genesis of the Musuem,” http://www.jazzmuseuminharlem.org/genesis.html (accessed6 June 2011). Journalist Nat Hentoff observed in a profile of the incipient museum that there was “no moreobvious site for a jazz museum than Harlem.” Nat Hentoff, “Jazz Is Coming Home to Harlem,” Wall StreetJournal, 18 March 2004: 10.32Despite winning some financial support from the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone with matching fundsfrom Abe and Marian Sofaer, early plans for the museum foundered. However, through his connections inWashington, Leonard Garment persuaded influential congressmen such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan to establisha $1 million line item in the year 2000 federal budget to establish the museum. Moreover, in the “changed urbansetting” of the New Harlem, Garment wrote, “the jazz museum came back to life like a rim shot.” Previous to thismoment, Garment suggested, “the Harlem community was not ready for a jazz museum.” Leonard Garment, “TheGenesis of the Museum.” For more on the donation from the Sofaers, see: http://abesofaer.com/2011-pdfs/THE-NATIONAL-JAZZ-MUSEUM-IN-HARLEM.pdf (accessed 31 August 2012).

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block just off of Park Avenue. Initially, the museum lacked any identifying markers onthe exterior of the building. In 2008 it raised a large banner featuring a photograph ofLouis Armstrong blowing his trumpet (figure 3).

During the time I was conducting some of my ethnography of NJMH events at thesecond floor Visitor’s Center, the room featured an attractive photo exhibit of localmusicians, a small library, a couple of audiovisual computer setups, a baby grandpiano (on loan from Dick Katz), and foldable steel chairs for public events.33 Nowlocated on the third floor, it remains an unassuming space that might be contrastedwith the high-profile polish of Jazz at Lincoln Center. For a while, an announcementprinted on an 8 ½ x 11-inch sheet of white paper and taped outside the dooradvised, “You KNOW we love you but … no food or beverages inside.” The warmlywelcoming 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 thiswill only succeed,” Schoenberg stated in an early press interview, “if there is a percep-tion that it comes from the community and it receives support from the communityleaders, and all others in the locality, who have everything to gain from this.”34

Figure 3 NJMH building, 1 April 2008. (Photo F. Moehn).

33The exhibit was Hank O’Neal’s “Ghosts of Harlem,” which included photographs from O’Neal’s book of thesame name (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009). It focuses on musicians who worked in Harlemduring its artistic peak, both well-known names and lesser-known. Dick Katz, who lent the NJMH the babygrand piano, has since passed away.34John Robert Brown, “A Jazz Museum for Harlem,” http://www.jazzmuseuminharlem.org/ajazz.html (accessed16 August 2011). Schoenberg has been involved in the New York–New Jersey jazz scene since the 1970s; heworked with Benny Goodman in the 1980s (until the latter’s death in 1986); he released several albums withhis big band and he has participated in a number of other recordings. He won two Grammy Awards for Best

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Here Schoenberg evokes, perhaps not entirely intentionally, a particular usage of theterm “the community” in the local context, where it can mean, specifically, “the blackcommunity” of Harlem. This allows him to present the museum as a kind of grass rootsorganization that seeks (and merits) the support of that community, and it highlightsanother way that the NJMH’s location contrasts with that of Jazz at Lincoln Center (atColumbus Circle; the value of real estate in the area is another obvious point of con-trast).35 This is not to say that the museum directors sought to appeal only to AfricanAmerican residents; the ambiguity of the community concept permits an ecumenicaland fluid profile for the museum’s local public. But that ambiguity also lets Schoenbergmake overtures to an intensely local sense of community as a kind of yardstick of themuseum’s success in its mission. Patricia Hill Collins has proposed that the flexibility ofthe term community can be put to good use. Like Sherrie Tucker, she sees it as a terrainof changing-same power relations. It “may be especially suitable in helping peoplemanage ambiguities associated with changing configurations of intersecting powerrelations,” she notes.36 People “imagine new forms of community,” Collins proposes,

Figure 4 Jazz writer and producer Greg Thomas (L) with NJMH Executive DirectorLoren Schoenberg, 24 March 2005. Note the cut-out of Dizzy Gillespie in the back-ground. (Photo F. Moehn).

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 injazz lean toward the more traditional. Schoenberg’s title was later changed to artistic director (Bill Terry is, atthe time of this writing, interim executive director).35A recent article on the progress of Harlem redevelopment described the immediate surroundings of the NJMH asblighted and ignored, but possibly ready for change. It mentions a developer who recently purchased five plots ofvacant land in this area for $1.35 million. Kia Gregory, “Change May Be Coming to a Block Skipped by Harlem’sRebirth,” New York Times, 11 October 2012.36Collins, “The New Politics of Community,” 24.

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“even as they retrieve and rework symbols from the past.”37 Harlem has been alive tosuch re-imaginings in recent years.

At the NJMH Visitor’s Center, Schoenberg seeks to emphasize the relationshipsbetween 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 intimacyand informality of the museum offices, Schoenberg felt, made possible “an interchangebetween the subject and the audience that just cannot happen on a stage with a podiumand a microphone.”38 My fieldwork confirms this. Azure Thompson, the museumpatron I introduced above, told me that, although the Jazz for Curious Listeners ses-sions she has attended are actually classes, she sees the space as more of a socialclub. There was something very soothing to her about being around the olderpatrons (Thompson is in her mid-thirties), as if they offered a kind of informal men-toring. She felt that she was getting something from them that she did not find in anyother kind of space, and that she was “a valued person in this kind of social club.” Therewas a kind of “comfort,” she said, “in talking about the music.” And “maybe afterwardsa little bit of dialogue I might have with someone there.… That’s the social aspect. Notthe actual music but just being able to have this discussion. … It takes a person likeLoren [Schoenberg] to create a space where you feel comfortable talking, and youdon’t feel stupid for not knowing, for not being a musician, or whatever.”39 Thomp-son’s observations suggest that the “comfort” one can experience in a given commu-nity—in this case, a jazz community—is not necessarily normative; it may require awelcoming personality to set the tone. It may require work.

In 2005 the museum board brought in bassist Christian McBride to serve as artisticadvisor and global ambassador for the NJMH. Equally at home in jazz as in funk andother popular music styles, McBride sees himself as capable of reaching out to AfricanAmerican listeners who think of jazz as yesterday’s music, and also to draw to Harlemthose who already appreciate the music. “Too many people worldwide have a sense thatjazz has lost its standing in the black community,”McBride noted when he assumed theposition. “In a sense it has,” he added. His aim was “not only to find a home in Harlemfor jazz—the most celebrated black community in the world—but also to see if peoplewho claim they love this music will travel uptown.” For Azure Thompson, themuseum’s location in Harlem is important not only because of the historical signifi-cance of the neighborhood in which she prefers to socialize, but also preciselybecause she does not have to travel downtown to get to it. “I haven’t gone to Jazz atLincoln Center in a while,” she said. “I prefer the simplicity of being able to walkover to 126th Street. I feel like this is … my home and it feels so good just to beable to walk up the street and go to the museum, [to] walk upstairs and people lookfamiliar.”40 The NJMH, therefore, has a decidedly “neighborhoody” feel to it; it feelslike “home.”

37Ibid., 25.38Loren Schoenberg, interview with author, 19 March 2008, Harlem.39Azure Thompson, interview with author, 17 November 2010, Harlem.40Ibid.

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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 justto the jazz museum but also to other inter-generational social contexts, “is the limitedviews 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-genera-tional 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 jazzhip-hop. [For example, the group] Digable Planets … they were sampling all kindsof jazz musicians.”41 Thompson’s friend from Howard University, Courtney Liddell,who also attends Jazz for Curious Listeners, grew interested in jazz precisely becauseof hip-hop. She recalled how in the late 1980s and early 1990s hip-hop artists triedto find obscure jazz musicians to sample for their grooves. “I’m pretty sure that’show I got familiar with who certain [jazz] artists were, where such and such wassampled, and then I got more interested in the record that it came from.”42 Somejazz aficionados who grew up before hip-hop, however (and perhaps some who grewup with hip-hop), see the music as an inferior, commodified phenomenon, a vehiclefor vulgar lyrics expressing violence, misogyny, and crass displays of hedonisticstardom. Liddell and Thompson saw things differently and lamented the chasmbetween the jazz and hip-hop communities (figure 5).

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 GradyTate as guest of honor. Loren Schoenberg and jazz journalist/producer Greg Thomashosted 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 spokefrankly, confidently, and proudly about his life in music, and about being a blackman in the United States (in his case, growing up in Durham, North Carolina in the1930s and 1940s, then serving in the Air Force in Waco, Texas, where he playeddrums 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, voicingaffirmations 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 towardor even disapproval of the genre. Loren Schoenberg, too, professed his own lack ofcomprehension of the misogyny and violence he heard in hip-hop. An audiencemember in the back of the room, by the door and apparently about to leave, seemed

41Ibid.42Courtney Liddell, interview with the author, 12 July 2011, Harlem.43Grady Tate is a drummer and singer associated with hard bop and soul-jazz. He performed with a long list oflegendary jazz musicians, including Jimmy Smith, Wes Montgomery, and Quincy Jones. He played drums andpercussion for the 1981 Simon and Garfunkel concert in Central Park, and he was the drummer for TheTonight Show with Johnny Carson for several years. Tate also recorded vocals for the Sesame Street SchoolhouseRock series, such as “Naughty Number 9.” He served on the faculty of Howard University for 20 years (1989–2009).

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to take offence and paused to accuse the museum director of over-generalizing aboutthe genre. The atmosphere in the Visitor’s Center quickly grew tense; the fact thatSchoenberg is white while the vexed audience member, as well as the guest ofhonor, co-interviewer Greg Thomas, and much of the audience were black suddenlyseemed more apparent than it had previous to this moment, even though the criticalview of hip-hop was shared by some African American audience members (as wellas, seemingly, by Grady Tate, at first). The NJMH’s prized sense of community wasmomentarily threatened as the discussion floundered.

Or was it? Was it perhaps a moment to forge community? A moment of changing-same power relations and the conscientious negotiation of difference? Debate resumedand at one point Schoenberg said, “I’m glad we’re having this talk tonight.” Then heturned to his guest, “Grady?” “I’m glad I started it,” Tate responded. A young audiencemember now rose to address Mr. Tate. “Hi. As one of the younger people here,” sheslowly began. “Yeah, go ahead, go ahead,” several audience members interjected,perhaps eager for someone to ease the tension. “I’m sorry, I’m nervous,” sheblurted. “Tell us old folks,” Loren Schoenberg said. “Make peace, make peace,” aman in the audience exclaimed. “Yeah,” she responded. “On both levels,” she contin-ued, motioning to the man in the doorway and then to the front of the room whereTate sat next to Schoenberg, “I just want to point something out.” “Please,” saidSchoenberg, encouragingly. “The energy in the room has completely shifted in amoment,” she went on. “You know, just by going from what’s of now [i.e., the topicof hip-hop], coming from what’s of then [that is, before the discussion turned]—ofthe jazz, and the music getting into you,” she continued, making expressive hand

Figure 5 Museum patrons Azure Thompson (L) and friend Courtney Liddell (to herimmediate right), 25 September, 2010. (Photo F. Moehn).

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gestures. “And just to go back to that for just a moment.” “Thank you,” Schoenbergsaid. “First of all I wanna say,” she offered, now beginning to smile broadly. “I amso inspired by you, as a vocalist, as an artist,” now motioning with her open handtoward Grady Tate, and then gently crossing her open palms over her heart for theword “artist.” “I wanna know two things. The first is …” She paused, and thenshook 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,” Schoenbergsaid. “You’re amongst friends,” a woman in the audience added as a few peoplegently chuckled sympathetically. The young woman continued:

The first one is, I’d like to know your favorite Shakespeare play. I know you said youperformed 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 knowwhat you was doin’, you know. And as a performer I take that with me. And if youhave any advice, especially for younger people who feel like, you know, some ofthe hip-hop world is—like the gentleman said [motioning to the man in thedoorway]—it’s not all the same thing, it’s different, it’s give-and-take. But themusic industry right now is so—it’s not like it used to be at all. Not like when myparents came up. I’m 25 years old, and if you ask an average … say, 15 to 25-year-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 upon—[and] jazz in New Orleans. That’s where I’m from. And I basically wanted toget back to the point: What do you have to say to younger people, as far as to encou-rage [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 to leteveryone that can hear me know that, um, all the kids are not bad. All the kids are notproducts of their environment, as one would, uh, suggest. There are individualists outhere, and they’re doing what they want to do. And some of it is great, just as some of themusic is great—the jazz. Some of it’s sad. You have to be very discerning in what youlisten to and what you want to hear, continually. It’s your judgment. Whatever you likeis what you should listen to. I don’t tell anybody what to like. I can’t. I tell me what Ienjoy hearing, and if you ask me about it I can explain to you why I like it, and howmuch I like it. But I don’t explain it to you so that you can like it too. You makeyour 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,” severalpeople murmured. “And [back then] everybody was saying ‘Whatever you do, don’tbe a jazz musician, that’s the worst thing—’ You know?” “Yeah,” several older folksin 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 ofwomen [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 theaudience, without hesitation. “Is that what it is?” Tate asked. “Yes,” replied another

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woman. “Yes,” affirmed another. “Well maybe they know a little better than youthink,” said Tate. “Yeah, thank you,” said a younger African American woman, chuck-ling. “Some of us have been steeped in certain, uh, little traits and certain little things wedo,” Tate reflected. “And sometimes as we grow older we think, ‘This is the only way itshould be.’ You know, the older we get, the more we should be looking to the kids, tosee 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 ofhis hand. “Right,” someone agreed. “You know?” Tate reiterated. “Um hum,” folksaffirmed. “Leave them alone, they’ll grow up,” Tate added, drawing snickers andsingle word expressions of approval (although the woman who said that youngwomen didn’t know any better seemed to shake her head in disagreement). “They’llgrow up,” he repeated.

There was a silent pause in the room. “Uh, Much Ado About Nothing,” Tate stateddryly. “Oh,” someone gasped. “Does that answer you?” Tate said to the youngwoman who had asked the question.

“Yeah,” she gratefully responded, almost breathless at Tate’s rhetorical skill inanswering her question about Shakespeare plays while simultaneously making ameta-commentary about the entire hubbub over hip-hop. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome darling. Thank you,” Tate laughed heartily. The audience joinedhim 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 consider-ing the intimate but momentarily edgy social dynamic of the room—and also thinkingabout his own life in music—prompted Tate to find a way to both restore a sense ofcommunity for those present in the Visitor’s Center, and to express his own feelingsin 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 linguisticcustom from his youth in North Carolina. The woman, also from the South, may poss-ibly have appreciated the endearment. (Consider how she momentarily switched tovernacular forms more common in the South when she said to Mr. Tate, “Youdidn’t know what you was doin.’ ”) In the context of this exchange, however, it alsounderscores Tate’s gendered and generational discursive authority vis-à-vis the ques-tioner. It was, plausibly, a retreat to the “comfort” of a changing-same power relationthat 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 byso quick. Before I introduce Mr. [Greg] Thomas … I’d just like to say somethingabout the audience tonight. On the one hand it’s an old ploy of a bandleader, ofan entertainer, to look at the audience and say “I want you all to give a round ofapplause for yourselves.” But, having said that, actually a bunch of people commen-ted on this during the break tonight, and I felt it. First of all I want to thank my friendback there for bringing that good feeling back [meaning the young woman who askedthe question] … and I’ll admit some responsibility on my part for what happenedthere. 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 neverheard quite a combination of someone speaking and the people in the room.

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There’s been a simpatico and a concentration. I feel like I’m in someone’s livingroom, 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 thissetting an improvisatory feeling, and again the notion of it being like a “home” ishighlighted.44

“It’s a very, very special feeling,” continued Schoenberg. So I want to thank everyonewho came here to participate.… Greg?” He passed the microphone to his co-producerGreg Thomas (figure 4). “For howmany of you is this the very first time that you’ve beenhere?” Thomas asked. Several people raised a hand. “OK. All right. Well, I want toespecially 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 par-ticularly proud to haveMr. GradyTate tonight.… Lorenmentioned about the simpaticoin 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’sabout the Jazz Museum in Harlem. And I’d like you to please, please keep supportingus. Make sure you give a dollar on the way out. And tell all the people … If you putyour name and information on the mailing list, we’ll stay in touch, and we’d love tosee 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 thewhole world, wouldn’t we be into something?” “Oooh,” someone swooned, to morelaughter and handclapping. “Sure would be!” Greg Thomas acknowledged.

Schoenberg’s, Thomas’s, and Tate’s concluding remarks evoke what Paul Austerlitzhas identified as “jazz consciousness,” a humanist “ethos of ecumenicity,” and “an aes-thetic of inclusion.”45 To Tate, it represents a model of community lacking in the widersociety. At first glance, it may seem like a “comfy” or perhaps even naïve idea of com-munity, but Tate is no ingénue. The sentiment was sincere. At the same time, weobserve a kind of “edginess” to community as enacted here. Once hip-hop was intro-duced into the discussion, the conversation almost left the ecumenical space of the Visi-tor’s Center to enter into what Guthrie P. Ramsey calls a “community theater” in blackAmerican cultural life, that is, “public and private spaces” that “provide audiences witha place to negotiate with others—in a highly social way—what cultural expressionssuch as music mean.”46 The metaphor of hanging out in someone’s living roomseems appropriate. It is “comfy.” Yet, it also threatened, momentarily, to become avolatile discussion about black youth, a discussion in which hip-hop (or, more specifi-cally, the lyrics in rap music) inevitably looms large.

44The ethnomusicologist Matthew Somoroff discovered a similar sentiment in his fieldwork in New York Cityamong musicians invested in avant-garde jazz. They “really valued the performance venues that gave a feelingof intimacy, of informality, of not being in an official arts institution,” he found. Pers. comm., 5 Nov. 2011.45Paul Austerlitz, Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005),xxi.46Guthrie P. Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-hop (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 2003), 77.

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I mentioned this episode to Jazz for Curious Listeners patron Azure Thompson inour 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 notedthat hip-hop culture was much more diverse than it tends to be portrayed in such dis-cussions (she cited as an example the group The Roots, which she used to see performat Howard University). “It always happens that older people are critical of youthculture,” she said, “so it’s not anything new.” I asked if she thought this dynamicwas 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 tothose kinds of conversations,” a narrative that holds black youth responsible for theAfrican American condition. The behavior of black youths—or the way their behavioris represented in the media and elsewhere—tends to be taken as a signal of the successesor failures of African Americans as a whole in the social order (recall Grady Tate’sdesire that not all black youths be seen as “products of their environment” butrather as individualists). It is a narrative of “linked fate” that echoes what EvelynBrooks Higginbotham identified as the “politics of respectability” in certain strandsof early twentieth-century African American culture, Thompson observed in afollow-up e-mail message.47 Upstanding moral behavior in the black community(which, for the time period Higginbotham analyzed, included staying clear of the emer-gent jazz music scenes) could prove white supremacists wrong about the purportedinferiority of African Americans.48 By contrast, Thompson felt, when there is “aninter-generational conversation among whites, you’re not thinking about the wholecondition of white people.”49

Thompson would sometimes go from the Jazz for Curious Listeners sessions to theCreole 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 Stabilewith some friends while she was a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Stabilegrew up listening to rock and pop and had very little exposure to jazz. When she got toBerklee, however, she became an enthusiast for the music and began promoting liveshows. She moved to New York City and started the jam in Harlem. The young musi-cians who participated in the Creole Restaurant jam were, as Thompson put it, “trainedjazz musicians who do hip-hop very well.”50 Most of them studied jazz at schools (suchas Berklee College of Music and The New School’s jazz program), but they grew upwith and appreciate hip-hop, and they incorporate influences from it into their live,acoustic music. The Revive musicians might play with, for example, jazz trumpeterTerence Blanchard, but they also play with rappers and hip-hop artists such asQ-Tip or Common, or with bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding. “They’re not justjazz … you know, they’re in popular culture,” Thompson observed. Jazz was still

47Azure Thompson, e-mail message to the author, 4 September 2012.48Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).49Azure Thompson, interview with author, 17 November 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.50Ibid.

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present, but “in another form,” in hip-hop and R&B, she thought.51 In 2011 the ReviveDa Live jazz collective also held a jam at Minton’s Playhouse as part of the Harlem JazzShrines Festival I mentioned above.

The jazz museum’s artistic advisor Christian McBride attended the Creole jam onat least one occasion, and one of the young volunteers at the museum, a Juilliardstudent, 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, forthe musician, they require effort and attention to detail. One of the musiciansStabile 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 generationare not used to the kinds of harmonic changes common in jazz. “One of my battles asa composer [has been to] try to reintroduce a lot of chords to the mainstream audi-ence,” he related. “Jazz is much more colorful than most of the grooves that are, youknow, 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 main-stream popularity], you don’t have to spend quite as much time in the shed. Youdon’t need to learn your craft quite as in-depth to get to that level. I’m talkingabout the things that, like, John Coltrane achieved … guys like Miles, the peoplethat we look up to.”52

Thomas would later lead the Revive da Live Big Band at Harlem Stage in a tribute tothe 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 instru-mentation. At Harlem Stage the big band accompanied and swung to the rapping ofMCs 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 generationsshould not “blanket” the hip-hop of youths (and specifically of black youths) as “allbad.” “Leave them alone, they’ll grow up,” he said at the decisive moment in the “com-munity theater” described above. The conversation that Azure Thompson called forregarding 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 musiciansare already having this conversation, but it is noteworthy that old debates over, forexample, “craft” and virtuosity versus commercial success, or the canonical legacy of“great men” can still mark out the borders between jazz and certain other musicalstyles.

At one of the sessions for “Jazz for Curious Listeners: A Month with ChristianMcBride,” the bassist noted that a similar, albeit less pronounced, tension used toarise between some, perhaps comparatively “purist”, jazz musicians, and the funk,

51Ibid. A good example of this new generation of musicians is keyboardist Robert Glasper, whose music combinessoul, gospel, jazz, and hip-hop influences. Stabile has produced live shows of the Robert Glasper Experiment inNew York City.52Igmar Thomas, interview with author, 13 January 2011, New York City.

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soul, or pop scenes in which he has worked. McBride demonstrated an eclectic range ofbass players who influenced him as he shared tracks featuring his father Lee Smith, alsoa bassist, as well as Jaco Pastorius, Paul Chambers, Ray Brown, and finally, BernardOdum in James Brown’s 1960s band and the young Bootsy Collins in Brown’s early1970s group.53 Still, hip-hop remains a more edgy topic in some jazz circles. This ispartly because of the lyrics and the “politics of respectability” pertaining to blackyouths as described above, but also because the genre, as Igmar Thomas noted, isnot typically associated with the kind of instrumental genius or virtuosity attributedto 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 authenticpast. As seemingly transparent registers of genius they are prized primary sources forthe construction and maintenance of a jazz canon. Unreleased recordings can excitejazz communities with their potential to augment knowledge. In 2010 the NJMHmade a unique archival acquisition when it purchased the Savory Collection ofaudio recordings, named after the engineer who made them, Bill Savory. In the late1930s Savory captured onto disc live jazz sessions from radio broadcasts. He held onto them for years, showing little interest in releasing them to an archive. Loren Schoen-berg knew that the recordings included sessions of Benny Goodman’s band. They wereof special significance for Schoenberg because he worked with Goodman in the 1980sbefore the bandleader’s death in 1986. Despite Schoenberg’s pleas to Bill Savory, it wasthe latter’s son, Gene, who finally allowed Schoenberg to examine the collection and tomake an offer for it after Bill had passed away.

The journalist Larry Rohter wrote a feature article for the New York Times on theacquisition. “Museum Acquires Storied Trove of Performances by Jazz Greats,” wasthe headline on the front page of the Arts section. A companion page, titled “JazzLost and Found,” offers abridged streamed audio samples from the Savory collection,including performances by Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, and Charlie Christianwith Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton.54 Reader comments posted to theNew York Times web site about these samples evidence tremendous enthusiasm forthe collection and reveal one way that the Internet can enable virtual jazz communities.

53From the 29 December 2009 “Jazz for Curious Listeners: A Month with Christian McBride.” The musicalexamples included selections with Billy Paul’s 1974 band and with Mongo Santamaria in 1980), and otherswith Jaco Pastorius (“Portrait of Tracy” and “Donna Lee,” from 1976), Paul Chambers (“No Blues” with MilesDavis in 1967, and Chambers’s arco solo on Bennie Golson’s “Stroller” from 1959), Ray Brown (his classicbass line on “Killer Joe” with the Quincy Jones Big Band, 1969). One memorable moment occurred when, aswe listened to “Soul Power,” McBride performed his long since internalized fingering of Bootsy Collins’s influen-tial funk lines on “air bass” (that is, without a physical instrument), enthralling those present at the Visitor’s Centerwith a vivid visual narrative of how Bootsy produced the sound (or at least how McBride learned to reproduce it).54Larry Rohter, “Museum Acquires Storied Trove of Performances by Jazz Greats,” New York Times, 16 August2010; “Jazz Lost and Found,” New York Times, 16 June 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/17/arts/music/savory-collection.html?ref=music (accessed 11August 2011). See also, Larry Rohter, “The SavoryCollection Likely to Hold More Surprises for Jazz Fans,” New York Times, 17 August 2011.

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One reader/listener wrote the following in reference to an editorial discussing how theNJMH may not be able to release most of the tracks on CD format for copyrightreasons: “National Jazz Museum, please do not hold these recordings hostage. Withall due respect, coming there to stand in a room wearing headphones, then remember-ing the sounds, is not what we had in mind. We who care will be happy to pay for copiesof 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 cat-alogs of recorded repertoire via the Internet (whether paid or pirated), curious lis-teners can only hear the Savory collection—aside from the brief samples mentionedabove—at 104 E. 126th Street. Following the press release, Loren Schoenberg orga-nized a series of public listening sessions at the NJMH Visitor’s Center. These fea-tured special guests such as Gene Savory, producer George Avakian, and ColemanHawkins’s daughter, Colette (the collection includes Coleman Hawkins performing“Body and Soul”). On 28 September 2010, for example, the museum hosted aSavory event titled, “Jam Sessions: Benny Goodman/Bobby Hackett/LionelHampton/Slim and Slam.” “Gaps in jazz lore are filled to overflowing in theSavory Collection,” the publicity announcement read. “Come listen and be one ofthe first to hear these fascinating records.”56

Schoenberg’s excitement about the acquisition was palpable (the Savory events alsogave him the opportunity to appeal for donations to aid in properly restoring andarchiving the collection). My field notes document how, at one point during this 28September 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 baritonesax, Joe Bushkin on piano, Artie Shapiro on bass, and George Wettling on drums. Thetrack had special resonance for audience member Bill Crow, a bassist who performedwith George Wettling many years ago (figure 6). Crow was hearing something new andold at the same time, and remembering personal experiences from the past, which heshared with the public at the museum. Those present could thus appreciate this record-ing in its immediate historical connection to someone’s life there, while also feeling akind of thrill in hearing something apparently unearthed for the first time. When LorenSchoenberg needed a few minutes to find his next audio example on his iPod, olderaudience members reminisced about their younger days. I overhead someone leantoward Morris Hodara in the front row—then 86 years old—and say to him, “ErnieCaceres was a fantastic musician.” Elder members of the jazz museum public canclaim to having witnessed jazz’s past, whether as a participant in the music making,like Bill Crow or the legendary producer George Avakian, or as a listener and fan.57

History is thus experienced as part of the present.Loren Schoenberg often arranges to mix live performance into museum sessions that

simultaneously commemorate the past. In this manner, another layer of musical

55“Jazz Lost and Found,” reader comment # 76, “dan” in New York, 31 August 2010, accessed 26 October 2012. See

also “Free That Tenor Sax,” New York Times, 17 August 2011.56http://www.jazzmuseuminharlem.org/archive.php?id=699 (accessed 21 October 2012).57George 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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meaning that weaved past and present, live and remembered now occurred as theyoung Sullivan Fortner jumped in with a version of the song “Mack the Knife” onthe piano of the Visitor’s Center. An older man noted that Fortner’s version of the stan-dard was in a distinct style, and he asked the pianist what it was. Fortner answered thathe 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 stridegreats such as James P. Johnson). An iconic era from jazz’s past—stride was mostpopular in the 1920s and 1930s—was performatively brought into the present aspart of a listening, teaching, talking and remembering session.

In another example from the Jazz for Curious Listeners classes, on 5 October 2010Dominick 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 audi-ence to listen closely to Bill Evans’s piano on the track “So What.” An older man com-mented, “You know, I’ve heard this album hundreds of times but now I’m hearing thepiano different.” Amiddle-aged woman added, “It sounds like the piano was answeringthe trumpet.” There was a pause as we listened. Eighty-year-old Jackie “Taja”Murdock,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 withthe 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 intothe mix. I was 17 when I saw Miles for the first time … I saw Miles about 50 timesover the years, and each time I could hear the evolution … One time oppositeDizzy, who was still playing that busy bebop harmony and Miles got on stage anddid his cool thing. I came all the way down from The Bronx because I just had tohear this. I remember the day in 1959 when my father brought this album home,and I knew that it was very special.”

Figure 6 Bassist Bill Crow (L) chatting with producer George Avakian, 28 March, 2009.

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While jazz lore sometimes veers into the anecdotal like this, the kinds of talk I justdescribed 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, sherelated. Now when she goes to see live jazz she is more cognizant that she is witnessingcertain people coming together to create a given musical sound at a particular time andplace, engaging with specific influences. She situates musical events in a more historicalcontext, she explained:

You have people at [the Jazz Museum] say, “I remember when I saw so-and-so in thisclub, and they played with so-and-so.” So when I go to [see live music] … I feel likeI’m part of a moment [in] history as well, like I’m going to be telling similar stories 20or 30 years from now.… So that’s why I really appreciate just having that available tome. … Who was working with whom? Who signed whom? How [did] certain musi-cians become known to music execs? Those kinds of relationships.

This is a kind of socialization into jazz community that is not about “shedding” (practi-cing long hours in solitary) or “paying one’s dues” in clubs or on the road, or aboutbeing in-the-know, but about feeling free to talk about one’s personal experience ortastes. The excitement at witnessing live performance, moreover, can become heigh-tened when connected to the impulse to historicize that tends to prevail in jazz narra-tives. The mix of generations at NJMH events—of witnesses, doers, and curiouslisteners—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 thathappen after classes are important to her. “I always wind up sticking around untilthey kick us out,” she said. “Everybody there seems really happy to see younger

Figure 7 Museum patrons Jackie “Taja” Murdock (L) and Fredericka Woodford, 14September, 2010. (Photo F. Moehn).

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people out listening to the music,” Liddell observed. One time she went with one of theolder “students” of the NJMH classes to watch a Chicago Bulls basketball game at thelocal Applebee’s restaurant after class (Liddell is originally from Chicago). They talkedfor 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.”

Burt Westridge is 75 years old; he has lived on the Upper West Side of New York Citysince the 1970s, currently on Duke Ellington Boulevard (figure 8).58 I have seen him atnearly every Jazz Museum event I have been to since 2004. He’s a longtime member ofNew York City’s Duke Ellington Society. “Burt was one of the first people I talked to [atthe NJMH],” Liddell remembered. “And he came to me right away with the wholeEllington Society thing.” Burt and Morris Hodara (introduced above, see figure 9)often hand out flyers about The Duke Ellington Society as they seek to recruit newmembers. “A lot of our members are old,” Burt told Liddell as she was leaving themuseum one day, which she interpreted to mean that the society was in danger offolding if it could not recruit younger members.59

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

Figure 8 Museum patron and volunteer Burt Westridge chatting with another patron,16 April, 2009. (Photo F. Moehn).

58In 1977 The Duke Ellington Society, of which Burt Westridge is a member, successfully lobbied the city torename W. 106th St. Duke Ellington Boulevard. Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington and his son had homes onthis 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 night-club and see Louis Armstrong in 1953.59As far as I can tell, Westridge’s and Hodara’s efforts to recruit newmembers for The Duke Ellington Society at theNJMH have not been terribly successful. As we have seen, for some Harlem residents, the NJMH’s location uptownincreased its attractiveness. (Additionally, a society devoted to one composer’s music may have too narrow anappeal for some.)

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Savory?” panel featured guests Gene Savory, George Avakian, and Larry Rohter (theNew York Times reporter), as well as the Library of Congress jazz specialist Larry Apple-baum and the history professor Susan Schmidt-Horning. The listening for this sessionincluded a Savory recording of Coleman Hawkins performing “Body and Soul.” Haw-kins’s October 1939 recording of this song contains one of the best known and mostadmired solos in jazz history. Many have memorized his extemporization and canperform 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 [andthus] bring them back to life,” as he put it at one of these listening sessions, he

Figure 10 Saxophonist Scott Robinson, 25 September, 2010. (Photo F. Moehn).

Figure 9 Museum patron Morris Hodara (L), volunteer Paul Backman (C), and jazzscholar and archivist Dan Morgenstern (R), 28 March 2009. (Photo F. Moehn).

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invited the young guitarist Marty Napoleon and the saxophonist Scott Robinson toperform musical interludes for the Saturday Panel. Seemingly spontaneously, Schoen-berg asked Robinson to accompany the Savory “Body and Soul” recording on his tenorfor 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 hismouth 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 andallowed the recording to play without live accompaniment. After a break, Robinsonperformed an improvisation and Schoenberg explained to the audience how hewants to keep live music a part of the NJMH jazz experience. “As a musician,” Robin-son reflected on the previous moment, “sometimes you gotta know when not to touchsomething” (figure 10).

Conclusions

As I too listened to Hawkins’s later solo that evening at the National Jazz Museum inHarlem, I was comparing it with my memories of the canonical one. This was now thethird time I had heard the Savory version at the Visitor’s Center. The first time I quicklyconcluded that it could not compare to the better-known version, which today hardlyseems like an “improvisation” and rather more like a perfect “composition.” Thesecond time I listened with a more open mind. By the third time, the firmly inscribedmemory of the October 1939 solo was beginning to loosen up, allowing me to appreci-ate this different improvisation more.60 I wondered if other listeners had similar experi-ences, 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 noexperience of the earlier, famous one. Whatever the case, our individual listeningexperiences on this occasion and many others were also social ones. For a fewpeople, the better-known recording of Hawkins performing “Body and Soul” wasplaced 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), akind of dialogic jazz community is given voice at the Visitor’s Center. Prouty hasobserved that “every person, every jazz community, understands canon differently,”and “these differences are critical to understanding how different communities cometo know jazz.” “To know jazz, to relate oneself to canon, and to identify with thejazz community,” Prouty writes, “are conscious acts that require a degree of self-identi-fication.” We live in an era of social networking, as it is called, in which we can parseour friends into virtual communities. The NJMH, too, has a useful Facebook site forannouncing upcoming events, and for friends of the museum to post commentary.

60A brief excerpt of the Savory “Body and Soul” can be heard at the New York Times interactive feature on thecollection. The excerpt demonstrates how different the improvisation is, although the listener may notice somesimilarities 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 anyof the Savory examples in their entirety there.

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But it is at the Visitor’s Center in the New Harlem where the real work of the museumtakes place: the curating of—if not “the jazz community”—a community of curiouslisteners and talkers.

It should be clear that I do not mean to propose a romantic ideal of harmonioussocial of relations here. Ingrid Monson described the ability of jazz-oriented inter-actions to establish “a moment of community, whether temporary or enduring.”Certainly, the question of whether the sociability that takes place at the JazzMuseum amounts to fleeting moments or something more lasting is pertinent.The folklorist Burt Feintuch has lamented the casual use of the term communityto describe occasional musical get-togethers (such as revivalist music sessions).Community, he holds, is “more than what happens in one, occasional sphere ofinteraction.” Rather, it “is to participate in a web of connectedness to others thatcontinues beyond special events.”61 The social web that congregates at JazzMuseum events probably does not attain this standard of sustainability and exten-sion. Indeed, it seems quite specific to the space of the Visitor’s Center. But itmay also be the case that, for some of the museum patrons, few webs do meet Fein-tuch’s definition.

Meanwhile, live jazz in Harlem is becoming scarcer. Like Minton’s Playhouse, themuch-loved St. Nick’s Pub closed recently, in what one reporter described as “yetanother 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 125thStreet and Lenox Avenue, doors away from the Lounge.)63 Will the jazz museum beable to move into its hopeful permanent building on 125th Street, near the ApolloTheater, and offer expanded exhibitions and programming? If so, will its publicchange? Will it be able to serve both the Harlem community and visitors from theworld 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 hostsjams at Creole restaurant near the museum (and the restaurant itself has recentlyclosed). However, the musicians who have been a part of Revive are performing steadilyelsewhere and attracting critical acclaim.64 At the same time, the NJMH has added per-sonnel and maintains a full program of events. Both Azure Thompson and CourtneyLidell informed me that, after time away from museum events, they have recentlyresumed their attendance. The Visitor’s Center has been serving the public fornearly a decade; whatever happens going forward, the NJMH, which records onvideo and in photographs the Harlem Speaks sessions and other public events, hasamassed a rich archive of materials documenting how jazz can bring some peopletogether some of the time.

61Burt Feintuch, “Longing for Community,”Western Folklore 60 2/3 (2001): 149. See also Prouty,Knowing Jazz, 14.62Kia Gregory, “Frustration Builds Over Closed Harlem Nightspot,” New York Times, 29 July 2012.63See Michael J. Feeney, “Mixed reaction to Harlem Whole Foods,” Daily News, 18 October 2012, NYDailyNews.com, accessed 28 October 2012. See also, Michael J. Feeney, “Lenox Lounge, Harlem’s famed jazz club, could be onlast set,” Daily News, 8 March 2012, NYDailyNews.com, accessed 28 October 2012.64For example, trumpeter Igmar Thomas currently hosts The Evolution Jam Session at Zinc Bar, downtown.

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Acknowledgments

This research would not have been possible were NJMH artistic director Loren Schoen-berg not such a gracious and welcoming individual. I thank Loren and ChristianMcBride for allowing me to take notes and occasional photographs at museumevents. I am grateful also to Greg Thomas and all the individuals I had the pleasureof listening to at the NJMH, and to those I was able to interview for this article.Thoughtful feedback from the anonymous reviewers, from attendees of the 2011 Inter-national Council for Traditional Music Conference, where I presented a version of thisarticle, from Azure Thompson, and from Matthew Somoroff was helpful in revisingthis for publication. I conducted some of the research at the museum with supportfrom the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia in Portugal, administered throughthe Instituto de Etnomusicologia—Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança(INET-MD).

Abstract

This article draws from the author’s experiences as a participant-observer of publicevents at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem over the course of several years.Taking a critical view of the popular phrase, “the jazz community,” the article examineshow this institution seeks to integrate into Harlem and to nurture a community ofcurious listeners and talkers through jazz appreciation. Among the questionsexamine are: What kinds of discussions and relationships emerge between older andyounger individuals at museum events, between experts and enthusiasts or aficionados?How might memory influence the production of history there? How can new experi-ences of jazz shape memories of previous ones, or revise perceptions of canon? Howdoes the social aspect of museum events color the experience of jazz at this space?The author argues that a kind of dialogic jazz community is given voice at themuseum Visitor’s Center in the interactions between doers, listeners, and learners,between older and younger individuals.

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