All That Jazz and Nowhere to Put It
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Mayo is still shopping for property, but since ’99 he’s been concentrating on cultivating political contacts and hunting for new board members who can help raise money. As for the bricks and mortar, “We’ve stepped back,” he says. “When I got involved with the group they were still focused on trying to find a site. I thought what we really needed to be doing was thinking, what were we gonna be? What was the concept? Recently we’ve been working on three programs to help establish our identity, completely separate from trying to build a museum.” Mayo ticks off a Web site under development, a pilot education program in two high schools, and an oral history to be pulled together by a soon-to-be-hired program coordinator. At one time the group envisioned a 100,000-square-foot freestanding museum; Mayo now says a few floors in a new downtown building–20,000 to 40,000 square feet–would do, as long as it has good visibility. The facility would include interactive historical exhibits, an accessible tape and film archive, and spaces for live performance.
The Ellington concert was an annual Grant Park event for five years. “It was a big success and we wanted to do more than one night, but Bilandic was mayor by then and he couldn’t see it,” de Haas says. “When Mayor Byrne got in and saw the possibilities, she went to an organized group–the Jazz Institute of Chicago–and gave them the job of doing the five-day festival.” After that de Haas formed her own nonprofit corporation, Jazz Unites. Operating out of her home and then from a small office, it has brought jazz performances and educational programs to the South Shore Cultural Center and other locations around the city ever since. Johnson Products donated a tax-encumbered building to Jazz Unites in the mid-90s; Jazz Unites couldn’t bail it out, but de Haas got to thinking about a museum. When another donor offered land at the northeast corner of Michigan and Roosevelt, she was thrilled: “That’s where Louis Armstrong got off the train when he came to Chicago.” But the site was too close to Grant Park. The city, wanting to keep that parcel open, suggested the site of the Avenue Motel across the street. Either of those locations would have been “excellent,” de Haas says. When the Avenue Motel site went to the condo and gallery complex–in a city full of galleries–she felt they had been strung along. “There are no institutions coming out of black culture in the Loop,” she says. “I think it’s high time there was one. And what better one than America’s music–jazz?”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
