photo by Elsa Hahne story by Jennifer Odell – offBEAT magazine
Past a two-story wall of windows, up a wide set of wooden stairs, and set back from the concert stage at Irvin Mayfield’s newly christened New Orleans Jazz Market sits a room the trumpet player identifies as his office. There’s no desk in this office. No computer, no phone and no trumpet—just two places to sit and a chessboard. This is fitting enough, given the amount of strategizing that went into transforming an old Gator’s discount store into what Mayfield hopes will become a shining new beacon for jazz…
[Read the full post at offBEAT.com]
“Symbols matter,” says Mayfield on a Saturday afternoon in late January. Seated in the new office, he’s dressed in a navy blue T-shirt emblazoned with a fire department insignia—only instead of “NOFD,” the shirt bears the acronym for Mayfield’s New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, “NOJO.” He’s making a familiar argument to a reporter: New Orleans was “built on the DNA” of innovators like Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Danny Barker, he contends, but “we haven’t really embraced that.”
“I mean, there’s a problem here,” he says. “Have we really not built a monument for the one thing we built as a city?”
The Jazz Market, Mayfield hopes, is a step toward filling that void. He asserts that it’s the first concert space in New Orleans ever designed exclusively for jazz… [Read the full post at offBEAT.com]
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