 |
At Long Last, Lincoln Center Jazz Gets a Home of Its Own By LOREN SCHOENBERG
A little bit more than a century after Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, jazz has found a permanent home in New York. With the opening of Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall, the music can flower in three separate venues, all of which retain the intimacy necessary to properly appreciate this style of music in which improvisation plays a primary function.
 |
| Wynton Marsalis, artistic director, joins Bill Charlap (at the piano) in Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola at the October 18 grand opening concert of Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall. (Photo by Jennifer Samuel) |
|
The hall occupies 100,000 square feet and two floors in the new Time-Warner Center, and is comprised of three performance spaces, a jazz hall of fame, and an education center. The largest room is the Rose Theater, which can seat around 1,200 people. Those familiar with Italian opera houses will recognize many similarities in the design, while the acoustics (as they are in all three spaces) have been specially created to maximize the acoustic essence specific to jazz. Amazingly, the entire structure is floated in rubber isolation pads to ensure that no outside noise intrudes. And in keeping with the plastic nature of jazz itself, the room can change configuration, since many of its design elements are moveable. Opera and dance events can also be staged, and it is in the merging of fine art forms that the true potential of the theater to New York's cultural life can be glimpsed.The glass wall of the Allen Room offers a view of Central Park and points east that must be seen to be believed. Indeed, it presents a great challenge to the artists who perform there to come up with something to keep the audience's attention on them and not the background. The room itself holds anywhere from 300 to 600, and is shaped after the fashion of a Greek amphitheater. And like the Rose Theater, its components are moveable, and the room can also be used for a variety of functions. Juilliard has already found a new venue in Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, where a variety of Juilliard jazz ensembles have already performed to great acclaim, including a weeklong gig with guests, trumpeter Tom Harrell and vocalist Carla Cook. The main thing about the club is that the seating room is spacious (something you won't find in any other jazz room in the city) and, like the other two rooms, the acoustics are superb.
 |
| The Allen Room at Rose Hall offers a stunning view of the skyline. (Photo by Jim D'Addio, Rafael Vinoly Architects) |
|
Education plays a large role in Jazz at Lincoln Center's mandate. The Ertegun Hall of Fame celebrates the figures that have had the greatest impact on jazz's evolution. The room cannily manipulates (in the non-pejorative sense) media and design to tell their stories and makes a perfect stop for tourists and event attendees who have some time to spare. Then there is the 3,500-square-foot Irene Diamond Education Center, where things really fly. There are rehearsal facilities, a mammoth recording studio, and classrooms where various courses are taught. Jazz at Lincoln Center has, with a lot of hard work over many years of planning, integrated all of these elements into a coherent program. Events will be built around upcoming concerts, and the totality of this effort is something new and greatly needed in today's music world. Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center's artistic director, told a reporter a few months back: "In the early days, everybody liked jazz but because it was played by black musicians, it was looked down upon due to racism and ignorance, and then you can add the fact that Americans also have a natural disdain for their own arts. Now we have Jazz at Lincoln Center, which is a sign of the maturation of our culture that we can respect an American art and a sign of the abatement of racism and ignorance—although we have a long way to go."It is also worth remembering that the Juilliard Institute for Jazz Studies plays a vital role on the educational front in celebrating this relatively new art form. The proximity of the two institutions bodes well for their collaborations, which are already underway—many of which will go beyond the limits of any one musical idiom. And credit must be given to the master architect (and classical pianist) Rafael Vinoly, whose physical composition would well be worth a study by any and all people who want to observe a masterpiece of narrative flow mounted in space.Loren Schoenberg, who teaches jazz history, has been on the faculty since 2001.
|
