Queens Jazz Orchestra

Friday, June 18, 2010, 8:00 PM
$40/$32 Members/ Package (SOLD OUT): $120/$100 Members (Table for 2, Wine & snacks, Meet the Artists, signed CD)

Purchase tickets >>

“Certain to delight” (Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg)

Since 1923, Queens has been the home to an astonishing list of jazz artists who migrated there to be close to the jazz scene in New York City. The list of artists who lived in Queens include John Coltrane, Clark Terry, Jimmy Rushing, Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, Mildred Bailey and Billie Holiday. The Queens Jazz Orchestra, a program of Flushing Council, will perform a potpourri of tunes from these legends and play excerpts from Conductor Jimmy Heath’s original composition “New Visions”.

Spend your evening in Flushing, NY! Have a wonderful pre-show dinner at DELUGE (www.delugerestaurant.com) specializing in refined, globally-inspired cuisine, located at Sheraton LaGuardia East Hotel in Flushing and come to Flushing Town Hall's Spring 2010 season finale concert, the Queens Jazz Orchestra led by NEA Jazz Master Jimmy Heath on Friday, June 18th at 8PM.

We are giving away a pair of free tickets to the Queens Jazz Orchestra concert and dinner for 2 at DELUGE (Total value of $155) to one of our Twitter followers or Facebook fans.

Here is how you enter the drawing:

1. You must be a registered user of Twitter or Facebook.
2. You must opt to 'follow' us on Twitter (twitter.com/FlushingTwnHall) or join as a fan on our Facebook page (facebook.com/flushingtownhall).
3. Before Monday, June 14, send us a tweet or write on our Facebook page wall. (Optional)
4. If you are already a follower and/or fan, you can simply tweet and/or write on the wall.
5. You will be automatically entered into the drawing.
6. The winner will be chosen randomly and announced on Monday, June 14th at 5PM on Twitter and Facebook.

The lucky winner of the contest "Win 2 Tickets to Queens Jazz Orchestra & Dinner for 2 at DELUGE" is John Gilliand. We also drew another winner for a pair of Queens Jazz Orchestra tickets and that winner is Mariana DiazWionczek.



The Queens Jazz Orchestra is a program of FCCA and this year's concert is part of the 2010 CareFusion Jazz Festival series.

Though Little-Known, Queens Was Once Haven For Jazz Musicians
by NY1 News

Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong were jazz legends, but did you know that they were also neighbors? NY1's Ruschell Boone tells us that when several musical greats moved into Queens, a jazzy borough was born.

New Orleans, Kansas City, Harlem, Queens. Queens? That's right, Queens, where jazz has lived since at least 1923. The borough has been home to artists like Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Woody Herman, Count Basie, and hundreds more.

"It became the place to live if you were happening in the music business and you were successful," says Flushing Town Hall producer and historian Clyde Bullard.

That success led jazz musicians to Jamaica, Addesleigh Park, Jackson Heights, and Corona which is where the Saxophonist and Composer Jimmy Heath still lives.

"I moved here in 1964 to Corona at the urging of Clark Terry and Cannonball Adderly who were already here, because I had two young children and I liked the schools and the atmosphere," says Heather. "We had trees out here and I didn't have trees where I was living in Philadelphia."

Heath soon realized Dizzy Gillespie, who owned a building on 106th Street, was his neighbor. So was Louis Armstrong who lived on 107th Street. Armstrong's wife bought the house in 1943 while he was on the road and they lived there until 1971.

So, you might be wondering why Queens? Well, it was close to the action in Harlem where many of the musicians played. It was also a safe haven for black musicians.

"It was very rural and it gave them a lot of space to raise their children," says Bullard. "Also, with many segregated laws in New York City, it became an enclave that was a nice place for Inegroes," as they were called then, to move to. It didn't have many segregated laws or enactments there.

Within the borough, Addesleigh Park became one of the most famous places to live. Take a trip to the neighborhood and you can still see the homes of Ella Fitzgerald, Fats Waller, Lena Horne, Milt Hinton, and many more.

- Ruschell Boone -


The Queens Jazz Trail
by Marc H. Miller

The history of jazz is associated with many cities, districts and streets. There is New Orleans, Storyville, Basin Street, Memphis, Beale Street, the Southside of Chicago, Kansas City, Harlem, 52nd Street, Greenwich Village and many others. One place though conspicuously absent in most accounts of jazz history, despite its many links to the music, is New York City’s Borough of Queens. It will come as a surprise to most that since the 1920s, Queens has been the “home of jazz,” the residence of choice for hundreds, of jazz musicians, including such all-time notables as Louis Armstrong, Fat Waller, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie. The Queens Jazz Trail©, a project of Flushing Town Hall, aims to shed light on this neglected history.

Consisting of a map that includes the addresses of the jazz musicians who lived in Queens, and escorted tours that visit the Borough’s major jazz sites, the Queens Jazz Trail documents, for all to see, the undeniable importance of Queens in the history of jazz.

The role of Queens as a jazz center began in 1923 when the music publisher and entrepreneur, Clarence Williams, and his wife, singer Eva Taylor, purchased a home and eight adjoining lots along 108 Ave. in rural Jamaica. Born and raised in the Louisiana delta, Williams preferred living in the country to the city. Similar views were held by other African American musicians, many of whom were also from the South. Soon the open spaces of Jamaica, St. Albans, Hollis, and neighboring towns were home for other musicians like piano player James P. Johnson, composer Perry Bradford and bandleader fess Williams. As jazz continued to grow in popularity, more and more musicians could afford to purchase the home in Queens. In the 1940s and 1950s, the small counnity of Addisleigh Park in St. Albans must have seemed like a living music hall of fame. Its long list of famous residents included Count Basie, Lena Horne, Mercer Ellington. Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, and the soul singer James Brown.

Jazz would play a role in almost every community of Queens. In 1931 Sunnyside was the site of the death of Bix Beiderbecke, the talented, white cornet player whose short and tragic life inspired the book and movie, “Young Man With a Horn.”

The music of the 1930s and early 1940s was dominated by the big swing bands. Many key players, including Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Woody Herman, lived in the new apartment of Jackson Heights. Red Nichols and Red Norvo had houses in Forest Hills. Encouraged by his new wife Lucille, who had spent her teenage years in Queens, Louis Armstrong purchased a home in Corona in 1943. Billie Holiday moved to Queens at the end of the 1940s, living first in a house in Addisleigh Park, and later, in a modest second floor apartment in the new housing project of Parson Gardens in Flushing. Dizzy Gillespie also lived in Parsons Gardens, before saving enough money to buy a large brick building in Corona less than three blocks from Armstrong. Although the press often made much of the rivalry between Satchmo and Diz, the two trumpet players were in fact neighbors and friends. Even in death, the two jazz greats would remain connected in Queens. Both are buried in Flushing cemetery.

Now as a new generation of musicians move into Queens, they join a living legacy personified by the Borough’s senior jazzmen: 76-year-old Illinois Jacquet, 88-year-old Milt Hinton, and 96-year-old Benny Waters.

In the year 2000, the Louis Armstrong House, administered by Queens College, will open as a museum. The Armstrong Archives, the richest collection of Armstrong material anywhere, can already be visited at the college’s nearby Flushing Campus. Many Queens institutions now strive to keep the Borough’s jazz tradition alive. York College houses The Black American Heritage Foundation Music History Archive with material given by Buck Clayton and other local jazz greats. Flushing Town Hall sponsors exhibitions about jazz and jazz concerts. Jazz can be heard at other venues as well.

While there has never been a tune called Take The F Train, the Queens Jazz Trail shows that many musicians did ride that subway line. For them and for the musicians who took the J train, the Long Island Railroad, or drove across the Queenborough Bridge, Queens really was the home of jazz.

Marc H. Miller, Ph.d., is an author and curator who is the project director of the Queens Jazz Trail Map. The Map is one part of a multi-faceted program of exhibits, concerts and tours under the direction of Jo-Ann Jones, the former Creative and Executive director of the Flushing Council on Culture and the Arts and historic Flushing Town Hall.