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Armstong festival helps Queens celebrate its long history in music
Brooklyn may represent the cutting edge of music in this city. But Queens holds a crucial part of its history. New York’s geographically largest borough can claim an outsized role in the story of jazz. A Who’s Who of genre luminaries lived there, like Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Bix Beiderbecke, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Tony Bennett, “Fats” Waller and more. Perhaps the most influential of them all — Louis Armstrong — spent much of his life in Corona. His house there has become a popular museum.
Armstrong’s connection to the borough has also inspired a growing new music festival, titled Louis Armstrong’s Wonderful World, which takes place Saturday in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.
Lauryn Hill will headline the free event, from noon to 8 p.m. The lineup also features the pan-cultural hipster band Ozomatli, Afro-funk act Antibalas, New Orleans jazz act Rebirth Brass Band and the Shannon Powell Traditional All-Star Band, plus a wide variety of DJs.
Though Hill’s star power will draw many of the expected 25,000 fans to the site, no one could mistake her for a jazz artist.
“Louis Armstrong always said, ‘You’ve got to listen to all kinds of music,’ ” says Jeff Rosenstock, who curated the event. “Queens has all kinds of music, from all the cultural communities here. Louis would have said, ‘This show is what I mean. Let’s bring everybody together.’ ”
At the same time, Rosenstock admits, “If the show was just jazz, we would probably never build something on the scale we wanted. We wanted a major cultural event for Queens, like Central Park Summerstage or Celebrate Brooklyn.”
To embrace the borough’s cultural range, the DJs on Saturday will spin sounds from Mexico and South Asia as well as jazz from New Orleans.
The Queens-jazz connection had much to do with the local infrastructure. “A big part of it was when they built the Triboro Bridge for the 1939 World’s Fair,” says Rosenstock. “People who were working in Harlem were able to move out to Queens, which was the country back then. They said, ‘I can have my family grow up in an idyllic little community, then get over the bridge to work in Harlem.’ ”
The festival will stress that connection with an exhibit at the Queens Museum (which sits in the park), open to those who attend the show. The museum features “The Panorama,” a model map featuring replicas of every building in New York. For Saturday’s event, the homes and grave sites of many jazz luminaries will be marked.
When Rosenstock and others brainstormed the festival in 2012, it was part of their intention to educate fans about the importance of Queens in jazz history. The first fest, which featured jazz trumpeter Jon Faddis and Cuban star Albita, drew 2,500 people — one-tenth of this year’s expected crowd.
“I didn’t expect to grow that much this year,” says Rosenstock. “I was hoping to go from kindergarden to second grade. But with Lauryn Hill, we ramped it up.”
Though the initial run of free tickets (distributed online) has been snapped up, Rosenstock expects that as many as 15% won’t show, allowing for walkups. Also, anyone can hear the music throughout the park.
Both the event and the local salutes to Louis Armstrong are projected to grow. Queen College, which administers the Louis Armstrong House Museum, is building a $20 million educational center across the street to contain the college’s Armstrong archives, the largest devoted to any jazz musician.
Rosenstock envisions a future when the fest will last two days, drawing as many as 100,000 people. He sees it as part of the expanding resonance of the borough. “Queens is what America will look like in terms of its evolving demographics,” he says. “It’s the frontier land.”