Newark Jazz Heritage is a public art project celebrating the importance of Newark NJ as a center for the performance and promotion of jazz music. Through most of the twentieth century Newark was a leading venue for live performance, at one point boasting over 100 clubs operating simultaneously. Duke Ellington famously said that anyone wanting to hear black music had to go through Newark.
Although live jazz performance declined in Newark starting in the 1980s, as it did throughout the country, Newark has remained a significant outpost for jazz through two world-class institutions: WBGO is the most important jazz radio station in the New York metro area and a recognized leader in the world of public radio for the presentation of live jazz programming; the Institute of Jazz Studies at the Newark campus of Rutgers is the largest and most comprehensive library and archive of jazz and jazz-related materials in the world. Drawing on this resource, Rutgers offers an MA in Jazz History and Research, the only degree program at any level devoted to this subject.
In addition to jazz programming at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, other institutions offer jazz on a regular basis, notably the monthly jazz vespers at Bethany Baptist Church, the summer Jazz in the Garden program at the Newark Museum, and the annual Lincoln Park Music Festival. A Museum of African American Music, now in the early planning stages, has been designated as an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, America’s national educational facility. Several bars and restaurants also offer jazz on a regular basis, among them 27 Mix and Mompou...
Among the many jazz artists who were born and/or raised in Newark are the pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith, singers Viola Wells (“Miss Rhapsody”), Sarah Vaughan (“The Divine One”)and Carrie Washington, trumpeter Woody Shaw, and saxophonists James Moody, Ike Quebec, and Wayne Shorter. Savoy Records, an important recording label for bebop, was based in Newark. The great stride pianist James P. Johnson, composer of “Charleston”, “Carolina Shout” and other classics, cut player piano rolls in Newark.
Newark Jazz Heritage Components
Banners will be placed at the sites of all known sites of jazz clubs and performance halls in Newark dating to the 1920s.
On the Newark Jazz Heritage Blog (http://newark-jazz-heritage.blogspot.com/) these sites have been located on a Newark Jazz Map. By clicking on a music symbol, the reader can access profiles of the jazz clubs that formerly operated at that site. A comprehensive alphabetical index identifies over 150 former clubs. The website also offers video clips of several of the performers associated with the Newark jazz scene over the years.
Over the new few years several works of public art will be commissioned as site specific installations at historic Newark jazz sites, starting with the former Grand Hotel on West Market Street (now a county park) where visiting baseball players from the Negro Leagues, in town to play the hometown Newark Eagles, mixed with patrons of the hotel’s jazz club.
