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RES 2005-0041 - Declare 24th and Lake/Grant Sts historic jazz area / Y U,4°`1�'P1sf 'RECEIVED Law Department 5*':`+.►,. Omaha/Douglas Civic Center itez I� t y � 1819 Famam Street,Suite 804 �p�n'. ��� 04 DEC 2 1 2' Omaha,Nebraska 68183 0804 ���ro _ (402)444-5115 O�'rfo FeeR°ray CITY CLERK Telefax(402)444-5125 City of Omaha O M A H►'A, N B R A S K A Paul D.Kratz Mike Fahey,Mayor City Attorney • Honorable President and Members of the City Council, The attached Resolution requested by Councilmember Frank Brown publicly declares the 24th and Lake/Grant Street as "the 24th and Lake/Grant Streets Historic Jazz Area." This commemorative designation is in recognition of the memories of many Omaha citizens who remember this area as playing a significant role in the history and culture of the vibrant jazz music experience in Omaha. The area now includes a park, bronze sculptures and upgraded public improvements. Your favorable consideration is requested. Respectfully submitted, ....-7---7 .,.......j2 ° Q. C� l 2`1 0 y L Bernard J. in den Bosch Date Assistant City Attorney P:\LAW 1\2792sap.doc S/ZU REQUEST TO LAW DEPARTMENT RE C E R/E D For Law Department Use Only TO: Paul D. Kratz, City Attorney Oil DEC 20 PM 12: 3° Log Book #: —o DATE: December 20, 2004 Date Assigned:g Ar.t_r Assigned EBRAS ;, to: Answered/Sent Out: Withdrawn: REQUEST BEING MADE BY: On behalf of Councilmember Frank Brown Lou Andersen, City Council 5518 (Name` (Department) (Phone) TIME LINE (Due Date): January 4, 2005, Council Agenda (12 Working Days from Date Received by Law Department) REQUEST FOR: Resolution —24th and Lake/Grant Street Recognition (State Specifically What You Are Requesting) DETAILS: Councilmember Frank Brown requests the preparation of a City Council Resolution that would publicly declare the 24th and Lake/Grant Street area as "the 24th and Lake/Grant Streets Historic Jazz Area." This former Dreamland Ballroom building at 24th and Grant Street has been formally designated by the National Register of Historic Places, and in the memory of thousands of Omaha citizens the surrounding business area extending to Lake Street is recalled as a significant part of the history and culture of the vibrant jazz music experience in Omaha. This area now includes a park, bronze structures, and upgraded improvements. The attached articles provide additional background information. A City Council designation of this area is an important means of recognition for the North Omaha community. INFORMATION ATTACHED: YES X NO NONE AVAILABLE wl c: Councilmember Frank Brown Ideas for North 24th jazz play off histOty BY ERIN GRACE A recurring image on signs WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER or markers might be jazz leg- end Billie Holliday appearing Fancy street signs. with the words: "North 24th Monuments to local leaders. Street Heritage District." Distinctive street paving,' The theme could be repeated tree-lined sidewalks and an in intersection entryways, open green space with game ta- _ street signs,fabric banners and bles, a water fountain and a other features. Monuments of '. stage were some of the design Malcolm X,Nebraska Sen.Er- concepts unveiled Thursday by nie Chambers, Omaha Star city officials and a landscape founder Mildred Brown or • architecture consultant' for other local leaders could stand North 24th Street's upcoming at major intersections. $2 million facelift • The idea, 'explained Doug The still-preliminary design Lamson,project manager from concepts grew out of a public the landscape architecture meeting in December and cen- firm EDA\'V Inc.,would be to tie ' ter on the business district's in the area's rich heritage and jazz history. See North 24th:Page 2 v • Cow ❑� �wc,z.. ' CC ,i4 0-8 5. „ ca � 30 - ' otr0_, Uco •a to o . • C/') 0 ~ � >•c0 � o - mi, L. g 30 �1 , U O^y p i .O L. L = Y S. 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VI a' ',` CLICK y is f(:Yt...,.r SUS�� :14,I`6 o�CLrC;�y�, tL :IL': f k{1�'sr ila gc r ^ ties r< 9 .,,' t�c�1�r , t.�. ., s ' ' , ,'�' cot7-,Swingin, �s wifhp �v o Preston Lov 1• a e v r f' • �� Br►StOW 1 ,? f. �i/.,: `...: .4.2, . : �� P estop Love ,; 'xi 1 big break was just t�V'u�'I 6It 01- �: , , e� • i` , � , In the with the Cou when he 2004beI/llrccjl ears toas/ 9 t pert e Orch or come Insld • '; " , :. r 1.1:: ' a2Za med withreadte musicans c eibis Issti. crL9 `r ndrhth /:hi:21.1.2:8s. w`'ubs_cribe "' _P '�, Ra Char/ m-and- hO swhGive a$ , r �,• es, the e : Bi.Qift . , s'' Robinso Tem e y�hanc�e Ad r :%'' Aretha Frana Rossotai- ns, SrnoA �re$$ Di I., �"" �� �av //S ank/in � eie , t)O{ti Us J/�Y +o 4 ": a N;`tal —-. and wOndE I w rf n,�r,,,,`•,t a•, we me Give .� fc,rr•'' ' y � IN t L Girl , r',,�'iv+..»,;�•,'�x Mar y/n9 with h/ Omaha in'tr:3rtcd r h 14,,,,;i f'„.1;f ::::•-d ket s 6 19g ca ldttdrC2 v t �'' «iir f�rix(iiattiii(4� SQ n/ghtSAot and in a ve At'iptth �Q.4 C;�aij�+r�ful���r,f�i� Unded9oQd At a9�, �8 /�OpU/ e 1/1/Ark tr;;fJ;ilcif',<< music, about and hadp/ert he sti// t=c,nctrai::irrc� '`-1r+.1i V(,�Ir,`<<.. t�1 remar b/e m`�h , anQl Yto Y t'titcr: GOO,' ' ka career a about his' rfrc ~ � Freston Preston tc<;r,T Febru Love died ,.,rcrss f=ttirfr_ Love. 1g�I_2OOg ary�2 Of/un c,°r�'`Ir•'fc� r our 9 cancer st.t,,criYi SeAt/O • �Og9 This story a °n �\n; Arriving at ct 19 !°pea �mahat ea /ssue. Young Preston Love D d no land Ballroom ttthe//lwww.nebl-askalif reason to one night ;,, Preston Love Page 2 of 7 change. He had come to hear Count Basie and his orchestras and tht Cuntoci Us good fortune enough for one night. Love adored Basie and his music; he revered Basie's orchestra like pantheon of gods — especially Earle Warren, the lead alto saxophon Whenever Basie came to town (he played Omaha regularly in those ( Preston Love was there, down front. He listened carefully when the t was playing, and chatted with Earle Warren when it was not. This was not just a case of youthful hero-worship. It may have start( way, but by 1943 Love was 22 years old, and was himself a promisir young alto sax player. For years he had, "studied the band as you wi study medicine," and by playing with a succession of regional bands, young Omahan had started to make a name for himself. But that didn't prepare him to hear Earle Warren say, "Hey, boy, I'vE looking for you." Basie's lead alto man — looking for Preston Love? F what? Warren explained that he was suffering from a stomach ulcer and ne medical treatment. He'd have to leave the band for several weeks. Therefore, Basie needed a replacement, and needed one soon. Warr( that he'd been told that there was a young man in Omaha who soun' like him. "I thought he was joking and kept laughing," Love recalls. His moo( changed when he realized that Warren was serious, and Basie wante audition on the spot. Right now. On stage. In front of a hometown at "I almost panicked with fear," Love says, "But Earle reassured me." Within minutes, Love's sax was sent for, an extra chair was placed b Earle Warren's, and Love climbed up on stage to the murmurs of the Basie called the next tune, and the band began to play. At a certain Basie motioned for the band to play softly, so he could better hear Li saxophone. "I remember it sounding as though I was all alone," Love says, "with sound but mine on the stage." To everyone's surprise — except to Preston Love and those who knee obsession with Warren's style — it was a sound uncannily similar tot • Earle Warren. • After playing for an hour with the band there was no doubt in anyone mind, not among the orchestra or the audience, that Basie had fount replacement. Love received word from Basie's valet to be at Union S the next morning at 8:30. So began Preston Love's first foray into the big time. It would not be last. Though his first stint with Count Basie lasted only six weeks, un Warren's recovery, a second tour with the band lasted two and a hal. And as the years went by, the big-time names on Love's resume beg accumulate: Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, the Temptations, Smokey Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin — and that is only a par Love's musical talent has, in a very literal sense, taken him around t http://www.nebraskalife.com/PrestonLove.asp 12/17/2004 Preston Love Page 3 of 7 world. But it all began in Omaha, Nebraska, and that is the thing of Love wants to remind us. Preston Love gazes out the window of his office where he works as advertising manager of the Omaha Star, a black newspaper located c North 24th Street, just across from what used to be the Dreamland Ballroom. "Where you are sitting now is in the middle of where there hundreds of great players, black players," he says. ,.— During the 1930s and 40s, Omaha was a booming regional center of an era in which every small town had its own dance hall, countless b toured incessantly to bring live music to every corner of the nation. 1 vast territory of the upper plains — from Wyoming to Minnesota — tl bands were likely to come from Omaha. r-- I "We were centrally located," Love says. "This was the hub, the booki 1 center for the biggest dance territory in the world ... we played all th dance pavilions and ballrooms in the Midwest. Minnesota had thousa Nebraska had hundreds ... all the bands were working six or seven n week. So therefore, to service these bands, we brought musicians fri over the country to Omaha because the employment was here. "There were some other cities — like Kansas City, or Oklahoma City where they had some bands, but Omaha was the hub because we w( centrally located. So these hundreds of black musicians came here. F these were some great players. The proof of it is, where did they go, who were good? Ellington, Basie, every band of any note had severa Omahans. They might not have been born in Omaha, but they lived several years while they played." A good example is Jo Jones, a drummer who joined Count Basie's ba 1935. "He came here in '31," Love recalls. "He was working a joint a and Franklin, down the street here, for three dollars a night. And BaE brought him to Kansas City, and he revolutionized the way jazz was played." To this day, Jones is often referred to as the "father of mod' drumming." It's difficult to comprehend the surplus of jazz talent that Omaha po5 in those days, and the ease with which a local band could replace a musician. Love remembers that, "on a couple of occasions we'd be Ic town with Lloyd Hunter's band, to go out on tour. The first trumpet show up. 'Drive on there, man, on Erskine, and get Bruce. Drive on, and get so-and-so. Hey man, not working now? C'mon, get your stuf jump in the bus.' And we'd leave town with great players." "We Don't Serve Any Colored Race." So read a sign that Preston Love saw in a café window in 1956. Not i Alabama or Mississippi — but in Omaha, Nebraska. Perhaps the sign little blatant by Omaha standards, but the tradition it proclaimed wa! enough. For Preston Love it meant knowing that he would not be ser certain places of business. It meant having to sit in the balcony at th Orpheum Theatre — even when Count Basie and his all-black orches http://www.nebraskalife.com/PrestonLove.asp 12/17/2004 Preston Love Page 4 of 7 • occupied the stage. For Count Basie and his musicians, it meant beir unwelcome in the white-owned hotels and having to stay in black-ova boarding houses. From the window of the Omaha Star, just eight blocks from the hour where he was born in 1921, Love points out the former locations of the boarding houses: "Duke [Ellington] stayed around here, with Mrs. Evans. Cab [Callowa to stay over here. The first time I saw Ella Fitzgerald and her band, t were staying about two blocks from here ... I think Duke stayed at tl Fontenelle once, which was the big hotel, but he couldn't eat in the c room. He had to eat in his room." As maddeningly unjust as segregation was, it allowed a seperate, dis African-American culture — which included a unique musical style — flourish. "Whites didn't fool around with that jazz or blues thing then insists. "They didn't talk that stuff. It was considered exclusively blac rightfully so — in that day." Whites didn't play jazz? What about Glenn Miller, Stan Kenton, or Be Goodman, the King of Swing? This is where the word jazz gets tricky. Later in our conversation, Lo suggested that the white orchestras, not black ones, were the ones F "jazz." Confused? Love recalls seeing a Duke Ellington show in Omaha when two white near the stage begin talking with Ellington between songs. One of th made a remark such as, "Mr. Ellington, you're playing some jazz!" Duke corrected his young admirer: "Well, I don't know that our musi jazz," Love recalls Ellington saying. "I wouldn't use that word. It's improvisational musi' "We never used the term jazz," Love explains. "That was taboo. Thai corn." Jazz was what squares played. Black musicians had a derisive vocabulary for the inauthentic white versions of their music: cornball ticky, ta-ta-ta-ta. • "We considered Glenn Miller's version of'In the Mood' (written by a I musician, Joe Garland) and Tommy Dorsey's `Boogie Woogie''as corr laughable," Love says. White audiences didn't share that opinion, but they heard the distinc well. When the Preston Love Orchestra began touring the Midwest in 1950s, Love already knew from experience that, "no matter how goc repertoire was from the standpoint of swinging ... you had to play at 50 percent of the music in the Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo sty please the dancers in that area." Though the term jazz eventually be-came acceptable to black musici these days Love prefers to describe what he does as black music. By he isn't saying that whites can't play it authentically; in fact, Love wi hiring white musicians for his orchestra as early as 1950, when integ http://www.nebraskalife.com/PrestonLove.asp 12/17/2004 • Preston Love Page 5 of 7 bands were still very rare. What he is saying is that the thing at the jazz and the blues — the thing that defines them — is something tha directly from the African-American experience. That something is oft called the blue note. "It's hard to catch when you're playing," Love says of the blue note. might play a whole night and never get close. Great players catch it time, great soloists. Hard to catch, and it's certainly hard to define. Indefinable. But it is what it is. "There's a particular interval in harmony — in any harmony, when yc improvising — that seems to make it have credible dignity. It's the b note. That bluesy (not necessarily the blues music) thing that gives i meaning, that ties it all together and makes sense of what you're do It isn't a matter of technical skill. Consider drummer Buddy Rich, a fi technician who billed himself as "The World's Greatest Drummer." "No, he was not," Love insists. "He wasn't close. I could name you black drummers without taking a breath who had that rhythmic thinc that feeling thing a hundred times more than he did. I don't know if• had better technique than he did ... ." "Some of the great players of history never caught it. Benny Goodn never caught the blue note once. And it was an exclusively black thir most cases, because we thought that way, and because we were tryi express and find that thing. And every now and then I'll catch it — a like having an orgasm. It is a fulfillment within itself ... That blue not essential to jazz. It tears at your heart, even in the fastest, the most complex piece of music. If they get that blue note, it's a son-of-a-b The scores of jazz musicians are gone from Omaha now, gone the w; the big bands and the small-town dance halls. "We atrophied as a m! center with the advent of television, air travel, and faster transportal Love says. "The ballrooms all ceased to exist. So therefore, the mu: of stature, of caliber, stopped living here ... Every musician here, aln has to have a day job to make a decent living." Love is not speaking of the local classical scene (which he praises), t jazz and the blues. "The future is grim, for certain places," he says. ' always be black music of some kind, but it's become so'integrated' t we're losing our identity in it. • And the authenticity and the tradition is dying, because everybody h play a certain way to be popular ... That creative African-American tl just died. The purpose was to express ourselves — we didn't make a money. Not that much. It wasn't much about money, so we express( ourselves while the Glenn Millers, the Benny Goodmans played great music for the white audiences." At age 78, Preston Love is still expressing himself — and through a v of media. There's his weekly jazz column in the Omaha World-Heralc 1997 autobiography, A Thousand Honey Creeks Later, and especially there's his music. Come to the Destiny Cafe (1217 Howard St., in Or Old Market) any Friday or Saturday night, and you'll be drawn upstai the sound of Love's four-piece band. Old jazzmen don't retire. Certai http://www.nebraskalite.com/PrestonLove.asp 12/17/2004 Preston Love Page 6 of 7 when they sound as good as Preston Love does. Alto sax, tenor sax, even vocals — he handles each with such ease and grace and energy age seems irrelevant. On a good night, the Destiny is filled with a responsive, diverse crowd — black and white, young and old, male a female — and the band and the audience draw energy from each oth jazz conversation that crosses barriers of time and race. They come upstairs in tuxedos and prom dresses, about half a dozer teenagers out on the town. It's Saturday night, and the teens have c hear Preston Love and his band. Nothing unusual about that. Except those matters of age, and race, and popular music styles that • change as often as the weather. Think of it this way: these kids — young adults now, dressed to the i and sitting politely around a few small tables — were born about the time as MTV. Preston Love was born about the same time as radio. C might wonder, just what — to put it bluntly — could this living relic c big band era have to offer that these teenagers would want to hear? Love answers the unspoken question with his saxophone. And as the familiar opening notes of"In the Mood" burst from his horn, a remar thing happens. The young people respond just as their grandparents when the song was a hit in the 1940s: they spring up from their chai jitterbug. r i E ; . tip ; , 1 **4' '''... '''ti, ') ' 4 .i::1':, .pt �v�t$j3'LWy� 0 1 7 `y* Wit. .1' , r .t, L - ,i,4 1q.` 111 .,A- 1 ,I Preston Love chats with the audience between sets, Omaha, 19 © 2004 Nebraska Life Magazine • 405 N. Broadway • PO Box 577 • Hartington, N htto://www.nebraskalife.com/PrestonLo\'e.asp 12/17/2004 CITY OF OMAHA LEGISLATIVE CHAMBER Omaha,Nebraska RESOLVED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF OMAHA: WHEREAS, that area of Omaha located at 24th Street from Lake Street to Grant Street is an area that contributed significantly historically and culturally to the City of Omaha; and WHEREAS, the former Dreamland Ballroom building at 24th and Grant Streets has been formally designated by the National Register of Historic Places because of its architectural and historical significance; and WHEREAS, improvements in this area now includes a park, bronze sculptures and upgraded public improvements; and WHEREAS, the area along 24th Street from Grant Street extending to Lake Street and the surrounding business area and its life and vibrancy as a historic and cultural center provides significant memories for thousands of Omaha citizens; and WHEREAS, the 24th and Lake/Grant Streets area was also the epicenter of the vibrant jazz music experience in Omaha which flourished for many years by becoming a regional center for bands traveling around the country and a hotbed for talented local musicians; and WHEREAS, it has been determined that it is in the best interest of the City of Omaha to commemorate the significant historical and cultural impact of the vibrant jazz music scene which developed in the 24th and Lake/Grant Streets area by recognizing that area. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF OMAHA: THAT, the 24th and Lake/Grant Streets area is hereby declared, and shall be commemoratively called "the 24th and Lake/Grant Streets Historic Jazz Area" in recognition of its rich history and cultural impact, as well as, its significance in the development of Omaha. P:\LAW1\2791sap.doc APPROVED AS Ti7t:), ASSISTANT CITY ATTORNEY DA'I b By "X .' ,"�.... / Councilmember Adopted` i, - 4 2005 7 City erk Approved i t I,:r //O — Mayor b ¢ 5. rt h--I 2 �• Fey - .. CD n N /b C O i 6„ A� CD G • �p (D v' ,-r ,-c �' O A� N `d w O " M C• N 6- l� G1 0 ' 'z' CAD '7 Q. 0 n Z coo S ---_ : �' -• p.. I,1-4 \ ,.- a a 0. `< .•L. pp N \ C5.. emsD () i P c 5' ni �• CCD CD Pr-, C3 ¢ CD A, ;�v i