Photo by Kevin Lynch
Kai Simone - Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts
Kai Simone
A new critical biography of the brilliant director Alfred Hitchcock examined how he became a Hollywood embodiment of an auteur. The term, first used by French film critics, refers to the artist who controls his work’s vision and process.
In a significant change, the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts may have found its auteur in Kai Simone. As home base for the Riverwest Artists Association (RAA), the Center has been a dedicated collective endeavor. Yet one RAA board member characterized board meetings as sometimes “painful” and, despite the Center’s considerable accomplishments, president Mark Lawson commented, perhaps only half-jokingly, “We really didn’t know what we were doing.”
The RAA is visual arts-oriented, but the Jazz Gallery Center is about diversity in the arts and audience. That’s where Simone, the first-ever executive director, steps in. “I have a very special relationship to jazz,” says the former Chicagoan with an abundance of connections to that city’s rich jazz community, as did the founder of the original Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, Chuck LaPaglia. Simone’s allies include Heather Ireland Robinson, executive director of The Jazz Institute of Chicago; and Emmy Award-winning trumpeter Orbert Davis, artistic director of the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. A source of inspiration is Ralph Bass, an influential R&B and jazz producer at Chicago’s legendary Chess Records. Such factors should help sustain the creative jazz and musical tradition the Jazz Gallery has provided.
Building on the Legacy
“I also want to build on the legacy of the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, develop more educational and historical programs, and scholarships,” Simone says with eyes firmly fixed on the future—and the venue’s distinctive checkerboard stage. She feels the Center needs much more outreach to youth culture, a specialty of hers. She’s an experienced theater director and herein the auteur analogy strengthens. She seems to be a woman of embracing vision, but also fully capable of handling practical operations of a multi-arts center.
“I love mentoring, leading, and teaching.” she says. Simone is also a performer, a writer, and a singer-songwriter. She founded the arts-education Skai Academy, a Milwaukee Public Schools affiliate until the pandemic led to funding cuts.
As an educator, Simone values allowing students liberty to think “outside the box.” She relates how she once hid herself inside a cardboard box onstage before an unsuspecting young audience and, when she finally burst out, she had them “hooked.” Such engaging ingenuity should help strengthen the Jazz Gallery Center. Simone also envisions doing more with Riverwest Radio, WXRW-FM, whose programming already benefits the Center, as well as “virtual reality presentations, even animated films.”
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She also thinks she can combine the Jazz Gallery Center’s non-profit status with indirect profiting strategies through partnerships with MPS and Arts @ Large, among other organizations. “We own the building, so rent helps. So, it’s a business approach. I like problem-solving and talking to people about visions and passions. I want to take it to another level,” she says.
Regarding diverse community outreach and audience-building, Milwaukee has, besides African Americans and Latinx, “a huge Hmong community, as well as Japanese, Burmese and Ghanaian,” says Simone, whose daughter is half-Ghanaian. “I want to think globally and act locally.”
