By VERENA DOBNIK

NEW YORK (AP) - Jazz at Lincoln Center will move next fall into its new home, the world's first arts complex devoted to jazz.

Wynton Marsalis, who will head the complex, said that for the first time "acoustics in a hall were designed for the sound of our music."

"In classical music halls, we have to play very softly for jazz to resonate," the Grammy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning trumpeter told The Associated Press Thursday. "And it still comes out muddy."

On Oct. 18, 2004, Marsalis will help inaugurate the $128 million arts complex - the Frederick P. Rose Hall - which is under construction at Manhattan's Columbus Circle.


A half-dozen blocks below Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, it's part of the $1.7 billion twin-tower complex that will house the Time Warner headquarters, office space, a hotel, condominiums, a garage and shopping mall.

The sound spaces will include the Rose Theater, with about 1,150 seats; The Allen Room, whose 300 to 600 seats (depending on its flexible configuration) look out at Central Park through a mammoth glass window; and Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, a 140-seat space.

The first nights after the opening "will be a celebration of jazz featuring the greatest musicians, playing a wide range of music," Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, said in a telephone interview from Topeka, Kan., where he was performing.

The complex also will serve as a venue where jazz encounters other art forms, creating new dances with artists such as choreographer Twyla Tharp or recording soundtracks for movies or even fusing jazz with classical forms.

"We also want to work with other cultures, like a show with a tango band or a big band from Moscow, or flamenco and African music," he said.

I was at their performance last night and, hall acoustics notwithstanding, they were just superb.

They played a very wide variety of music, from a lush 15 man orchestral of Rhapsody in Blue (with the opening solo on Joe Templeton's baritone sax) to a six-man bare-bones laconic New Orleans (funeral?) march that brought chuckles from the audience as the bass trombone "ran out of range" near the end of his break.
Whichever style they were in at the time they executed it well, and the piano player, during a Coltrain number, just about made the audience sweat.

Marsalis often puts on afternoon clinics for the local high-school jazz bands during the afternoon and there were quite a few of those excited kids in the audience as well.

The ONLY complaint I had was that the names of the band members were not printed and I could actually understand only 2 or 3 of the names as they were announced after the numbers. I checked the Lincoln center website last night and came up empty as well. Templeton I knew from a few years back at the Topeka Jazz Festival, and I think the piano players name was Professor Eric Lewis. The bass trombone player was probably 170 pounds at about 6'6" and he had to sit on a two chair stack to keep his knees out of the way.

This is an excellent group and I'm glad I saw them.

Bob