Illustration Credit: Tereks
Musicians from Africa and North America, Sonic Harvest and the YaYa Kalbaye Trio, vibrate together, illuminated by spot-lit artwork. Tom Smith, an artist seated beside the stage, begins a new oil painting. Dipping his brush in and out of his palette, his strokes dance to the music’s bubbling rhythms.
The total effect feels transporting—two Senegalese kora players plucking strings rising from their spherical sounding gourds. The music’s spangling weave circles a pianist pounding out a propulsive vamp.
The hypnotic aura reflects the fearless creative mission of the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts (JGCA). A somewhat-hidden city jewel, the center’s challenge has been long, arduous and complex—signified by the checkered stage the musicians stand on, like so many chess players advanced by creative, dedicated thinkers during two distinctive incarnations of the venue.
From 1978 to 1984, as the historic Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, that stage held countless famous jazz players, including Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon and Art Blakey with Wynton and Branford Marsalis. Founder-owner Chuck LaPaglia doggedly pursued a venue that actively served local artists and the community situated on Center and Weil Streets, a location both urban and easy to access for East-Side dwellers.
Fast-forward to 1995. The Riverwest Artists Association (RWAA) seized it as a promising art gallery venue. “The place had been a hard rock/party disco club and it was a total shamble, smashed mirrors everywhere,” recalls JGCA president and venue manager Mark Lawson. In 2011, the young musicians organized as Milwaukee Jazz Vision suggested they do live jazz there, knowing the club’s historic legacy. “Jazz in Milwaukee was struggling at that point,” Lawson recalls. “The original Jazz Estate was on its last legs. But the musicians didn’t not know how to run a club, so we took over as a music and visual arts space.”
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That’s when the venue began to assert its current vision, as imaginative and diverse as any non-profit arts space in the city. RWAA board member John Richards, a master carpenter, built a small kitchen in one corner. Now, the center regularly offers refreshments and potlucks to complement art shows and performances. Without bar distractions, performers can count on attentive audiences. And despite dwindling state funding under Gov. Walker’s administration, social media connections have helped attract touring musicians and visiting artists from around the U.S. and Europe. Lawson, a longtime gallery curator at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, mounts consistently varied and sometimes provocative exhibits.
Lawyer/musician Steve Tilton donated a Yamaha grand piano a few years ago and helps stage community and higher-profile events, like last year’s Pianofest, headlined by renowned Milwaukee-born pianist David Hazeltine. So, there's really nothing quite like this place in Milwaukee. They still stage jazz, but it’s become a bastion of experimental arts, exemplified by the monthly series called Seed Sounds, curated by longtime Milwaukee multi-instrumentalist Rick Ollman, where the musical sky’s the limit. Drummer-composer Adam Nussbaum, who's played with Stan Getz, John Scofield and the Gil Evans Orchestra, will bring his Lead Belly Project to the Seed Sounds series on Sunday, March 17. Also, intrepid board member and performance artist Peter Woods’ Samuel Beckett-influenced one-man shows employ noise sonics “and critical theory to investigate learning practices that emerge from experimental arts.”
“What we do makes a big difference in the community,” Lawson says. Many women musicians and noteworthy young performers got their start here, including guitarist Cody Steinmann, singer-songwriter Caley Conway, the fusion group Digbii, performance-poet Kavon Cortez-Jones and the luminous jazz saxophonist Lenard Simpson. “He took the bus here when he was 18 years old,” to Tuesday jam sessions long featuring iconic Milwaukee guitarist-educator Manty Ellis.
Among the center’s regular offerings is as a hip-hop venue and workshop under the guise of a loose-knit organization called Free Space, partly spearheaded by local rapper WebsterX, “which counters the stereotypes about hip-hop clubs," Lawson says." In five years of Free Space, we've never had an incident." At the other end of the generational spectrum, a twice-weekly seniors activity called “Older, Wiser and Local”(or OWL) offers interactive presentations. “Who knows?” cries the owl. Ol’ Dizzy Gillespie might still haunt the place, as king of the chessboard.
