The Jazz Gallery

Winner of the 2010 ASCAP/CMA Award for Adventurous Programming, The Jazz Gallery is a nonprofit organization that nurtures the youngest generation of professional jazz musicians by giving them an audience for their performances and a stage upon which to assemble their bands. The Gallery is open 3 to 5 nights per week, 50 weeks per year and produces more than 150 events per year.

The Gallery is a hub of creativity, a home to jazz musicians/composers, many of them from all over the world but now permanently settled in the United States. The Jazz Gallery presented nine of the last 11 winners of the Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition PRIOR to their winning this competition. In September 2011, drummer Dafnis Prieto, who has frequented the Gallery’s stage since his arrival in NYC and who has been commissioned by the gallery twice, won a MacArthur Award; in 2010, Jason Moran, a formidable pianist who has frequented the stage of The Gallery for more than 10 years, also won a MacArthur Fellowship Award; and inb2008, 2010-11 Jazz Gallery Resident Artist Miguel Zenon, whose emergence began at The JazzbGallery in 2001, was a MacArthur Fellowship recipient.

The Jazz Gallery’s Residency Commissions offer artists a commissioning and residency fee (up to $7,000 in 2011-12) that allows them to take a hiatus from the road as they create their new works. In addition, the Gallery provides them with a creative and convivial space in which to develop, rehearse and workshop the new music before it is made public. During each artist's four to six week residency period, The Jazz Gallery space is made available to the selected artists during "off hours," when they can collaborate with their ensemble members and utilize the month to realize artistic goals. The program is made possible by a major grant from The Jerome Foundation, with additional support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Support for this program has been renewed for 2011-12, and the second Residency Commissioning Series will focus on bassist/compose /bandleaders, with new works scheduled from Alexis Cuadrado, Joe Sanders, Linda Oh and Matt Brewer. In each case, The Jazz Gallery does not dictate the exact nature of each residency, but rather, allows each composer the freedom to create a residency that meets his/her individual needs. Through The Residency Commissions as well as other new projects such at “The Woodshed at The Jazz Gallery”, which will provide free rehearsal space to jazz musicians beginning in January 2012, The Jazz Gallery seeks to provide a powerful creative environment for the musicians it supports and presents, and at the same time, to establish a replicable model for supportive relationships between jazz musicians and presenters in general.