“Jazz Steel”: The Vibrancy of Rooms and the Acoustics of Genre at Jazz at Lincoln Center

Abstract

This article ethnographically analyzes the unique acoustic properties of Rose Theater, a lavish 1,300-seat concert hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) in New York City, arguing that the room itself is both a vibrant participant in live performance and a humanly shaped artifact through which musical genre is contested and inscribed. As the premier performance space in JALC's $125 million multipurpose facility, considerable investment was dedicated to designing Rose Theater “specifically for the sound of jazz.” Investigating how JALC went about fulfilling this goal through innovative acoustic engineering reveals how the institution's aesthetic and ideological values were encoded in the raw materiality of the room and its surrounding architecture—what JALC's artistic director Wynton Marsalis evocatively describes as “jazz steel.” Building on extensive fieldwork with stage technicians, acousticians, and musicians, I orient my analysis around a key trope evoked by my interlocutors: that Rose Theater “responds well” to some sounds and not to others. I explore this notion through two primary examples: performances by the largely unamplified Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) and a heavily amplified electric ensemble led by bassist Marcus Miller. While the room's particular ways of patterning vibrations make the JLCO sound “at home,” the same acoustic properties present an array of complications for the Miller ensemble. I show how the room actively conditions human action while contributing unpredictably—even creatively—to live musical performance, while opening up novel ways to understand how acoustic architecture mediates the symbolic, political, and affective valences of racial difference. March 30, 2019 “This room doesn't respond well to loud electronic sound.” These words are spoken by David Gibson, head sound engineer at Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC), the influential performing arts institution. The room he's referring to is Rose Theater, JALC's celebrated 1,300-seat concert hall, one of three upscale performance venues housed in the organization's lavish multipurpose complex in New York City. It's about 11 a.m., and Gibson is taking a brief pause from a frenzied day of preparations to tell me some of his concerns about tonight's concert, led by electric bassist Marcus Miller. Buzzing around us, Gibson's crew of audio technicians are hustling to load in and set up all manner of amplifiers, instruments, microphones, cables, and other equipment—and as the piles of gear swell on the stage, a weighty air of uncertainty pervades the space. Gibson is particularly concerned about the sheer magnitude of acoustical energy that all this gear will produce. Miller's ensemble performs almost exclusively on electric instruments, all heavily amplified. What effect will all the anticipated “loud electronic sound” elicit from the raw materiality of the physical environment that surrounds us—the walls, the floors, the seats, the scaffolding, and the constellation of other materials that form what we call a “room”? While Rose Theater was carefully designed to react in an aesthetically pleasing way to certain kinds of musical sounds, Gibson, like other technicians consulted in my research, knows that Miller's style of music—and the way it's amplified—is a poor acoustic match to this physical space. He fears that this room, which he helped design and where he comes to work every day, simply won't “respond well.”