This month's museum pick...

American Jazz Museum

By Patrick Totty

A museum honoring Kansas City jazz, restores an old neighborhood’s glory

In the wake of Ken Burns’ recent epic PBS documentary on the history of jazz, this might be a good time to head on over to Kansas City, MO, chow down on some great ribs and browse the American Museum of Jazz at 18^th and Vine.

The museum is upfront about its role, calling Kansas City “the mother of swing and the nurturer of Bebop,” and dedicating itself to the preservation of the memories of both great and unsung black jazz, swing and Bebop musicians.

Its location is at the heart of a neighborhood that in Jim Crow days was the crossroads of a thriving African-American community. With the end of legal segregation, that community later dispersed, leaving behind an area that soon turned desolate.

That abandonment ended, thanks to the late Howard M. Peterson III. Mr. Peterson pushed, pulled, prodded and prayed until his vision of a restored 18^th and Vine came true with the construction of a museum complex that today includes the jazz museum, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, the Horace M. Peterson III Visitors Center, the Gem Theater for Cultural and Performing Arts, and the Charlie Parker Memorial Plaza.

Among the museum’s highlights are four permanent exhibits containing rare photographs and artifacts belonging to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Parker.

“Studio 18^th and Vine” is an interactive music studio exhibit, while the Jazz Discovery Room (a.k.a. “the Wee-Bop Room”) introduces children eight and under to jazz.

The Blue Room, designed to look like a jazz club from the 1930s, exhibits Kansas City jazz memorabilia by day.  After dark, though, four nights a week, it becomes a working night spot that hosts local and national jazz luminaries.

Two thousand years from now, we may have a different answer to that question, thanks to UNESCO and the Egyptian government. In 1999, four years after its construction began, and 1,300 years after the final destruction of its predecessor, the new Library of Alexandria opened.

Called the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the soaring 11-story structure stands on a 21.5-acre site near where the legendary pharos (lighthouse) of Alexandria once stood. The $170-million complex includes reading rooms, conference facilities, classrooms, laboratories, theaters, a museum and planetarium.

With 600,000 square feet of space, the successor library contains as much working space as a medium-sized skyscraper.

As modern scholars begin duplicating the habits of their ancient counterparts by gathering in Alexandria at a superb research facility, a tradition broken by centuries of darkness is revived, phoenix-like.