For the Coolest Vibes: Accentuate Acoustics, Eliminate City Noise

by Jon Pareles / The New York Times (May 12, 2004)

Only an acoustician would have second thoughts about getting a new home with floor-to-ceiling, 50-by-90-foot windows overlooking Central Park. Those windows, at the center of the fifth and sixth stories of the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, will be both the public face and the most serious acoustical challenge for Jazz at Lincoln Center's new home, the Frederick P. Rose Hall.

As the world's first performance center built for jazz, the hall represents a milestone for jazz as an American art form. "Everybody was aware that we were doing something historic," said Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who calls the organization's new home "the House of Swing." Construction is scheduled to be completed in July, and opening night, after a summer of private "tuning" concerts and adjustments, is set for Oct. 18.

The project commits $128 million and prime real estate to recognize the lasting importance of music that was born in the streets. "There is no precedent for it," said Rafael Viñoly, the project's architect. "It's not an easy thing, and it's not a sure thing."

Placed in the middle of the Time Warner Center, just above upscale stores and swank restaurants, the hall could be taken as a symbol that jazz is a luxury. Mr. Marsalis rejects that notion. "Since we began, we have done all we can do to reach out into the community to say that this music is here and it's music for the people," he said. "And this is the people's hall. It's built with the people's money." New York City provided $28 million of the $128 million budgeted for Rose Hall, while New York State contributed $3.5 million and the federal government $2.2 million. Jazz at Lincoln Center has already raised all but the final $14 million from private donors.

When the Time Warner Center was being planned, the city required that it include a significant presence for the arts. Under the opera-loving Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, that initially was to mean an opera house. Through successful politicking, Jazz at Lincoln Center was awarded the 100,000-square-foot space with the support of Mr. Giuliani and his successor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Part of the new jazz institution will still be able to stage full-scale operas. But it has been designed around jazz and jazz education. Unlike most performing arts centers, the complex will also be a state-of-the-art recording and broadcast center for audio and video, wired for anything from radio to high-definition television to distance learning via the Internet.

Since 1991, when it became a constituent of Lincoln Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center has presented most of its Manhattan concerts at Alice Tully and Avery Fisher Halls. Those auditoriums are far from ideal for jazz because they were built to fortify unamplified classical music. The same reverberation that makes a violin section sound full-bodied can blur the crispness of a jazz ensemble and turn all but the quietest drumming into a ping-pong of unwanted echoes.

Jazz needs rooms that are less reverberant than classical halls but not so absorptive that the warmth of the instruments is lost. Rooms with good acoustics for jazz groups have by and large been discovered by accident: basement clubs, ballrooms filled with dancers, small European opera houses. Mr. Marsalis, who has toured the world with large and small groups, has kept an eye and ear on the places that sounded best. And those are the models for the House of Swing.

Rose Hall will include a concert hall, a ballroom-cabaret and a small club where jazz musicians will appear every night. The concert hall, Rose Theater, was inspired by the small Italian opera houses. "People are stacked in close, and there was a great feeling of community in those houses," Mr. Marsalis said. "We knew that feeling worked for us." The theater was designed for flexibility; it is also intended to be used for film, dance and theater as well as opera. Other performing-arts groups are already eyeing the space.

The theater includes 11 movable towers holding tiers of seats - Mr. Marsalis likens them to porches in New Orleans - so that audience size can vary from 1,100 to 1,231 seats. For jazz shows, part of the audience can be behind the musicians, the setup Mr. Marsalis prefers. But for opera and theater productions, the towers can be left backstage while scenery and backdrops are lowered from the 83 feet of fly space overhead. An elaborate system of movable acoustical baffles and curtains is being built in to vary the resonance of the room for different kinds of performances.

But as in an intimate opera house, no one in the audience will be more than 95 feet from the performers. "It's very difficult to go wrong in this size of a room," Mr. Viñoly said.

Unlike Carnegie Hall and its basement annex, Zankel Hall, which contend with subway vibrations, Rose Theater is being acoustically isolated from the rest of the Time Warner Center (and the subway station that rumbles below Columbus Circle). The theater's background noise will be below the threshold of human hearing, or what is technically designated an NC-1 noise criteria level. Recording studios are typically far less insulated, having noise criteria levels NC-20 to NC-25. "What is a simple concept in thought becomes very complicated when you try to build it," said Paul Logan, the architect who is the project director for Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Sound travels easily through solid material, so Rose Theater is a box within a box, floating on complex assemblies of steel and neoprene padding. Every structural connection, every doorway and every conduit into the room has to be properly insulated. "It's unbelievably expensive," Mr. Viñoly said.

Next to Rose Theater is the room with the view: a 310-to-550-seat ballroom-cabaret, the Allen Room, with its big window on Central Park. Loosely modeled on both a Greek amphitheater and the Rainbow Room, it has seven tiers of seats that can work like bleachers; alternate tiers can be raised hydraulically to make four tiers that are wide enough for banquet tables and dancing. (The building structure supporting the room has been reinforced to support dancers.) Parties and corporate events are expected to share the schedule there with jazz performances.

Because sound bounces harshly from a hard, flat surface like a glass window, the glass in the Allen Room is tilted slightly upward to reflect sound toward the ceiling. Then, to prevent the energy of the music from disappearing overhead, there are diffusers above the audience: geometrically shaped pieces of black Styrofoam that will reflect sound downward, scattering it at predictable angles. And on the side walls, covered by acoustically transparent fabric, is a checkerboard pattern of absorbers and reflectors, intended to retain sound without directly echoing it.
The room's sound system has also been designed to be more directional than typical amplification, "so it doesn't spray extra energy on the glass," said Damian Doria of Artec Consultants, which collaborated on the acoustics design with the Walters-Storyk Design Group.

Next to the ballroom is a 140-seat jazz club, Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, which will have jazz every night of the year. (The Village Vanguard, the Stradivarius of jazz clubs, has a capacity of 123.) The club also overlooks the park through a glass window, but it's a narrower room with a lower ceiling than the Allen Room and will have its own diffusers and absorbers.

There are classrooms, dressing rooms and the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, a multimedia exhibition on jazz history; the first members will be named on Sept. 30. Rose Hall also houses a combined rehearsal hall and recording studio that is big enough to hold a full-size orchestra and choir; a sprung floor will accommodate dance rehearsals there.

In an era of music constructed by computers and overdubbing, studios that can hold large ensembles have been disappearing from New York City. Jazz at Lincoln Center's two repertory bands, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, will be able to record on home turf, and there is room for the New York Philharmonic to join them. The studio will also be acoustically isolated to the NC-1 level.

All the performing, rehearsal and classroom spaces will be connected by copper and fiber-optic cable to allow audio and video recording and broadcast from anywhere in the complex. A third of the conduits being installed will not be used immediately but will be in place to accommodate future technological upgrades. To make more room for music, Jazz at Lincoln Center chose not to use any of the 100,000 square feet of the complex for office space; instead, it took a long-term lease in an office building across 60th Street.

Egalitarian ideals are designed into all three rooms, which deliberately have lower stages than classical halls. "Our main concern was proximity - how close people could sit and how inviting it was," Mr. Marsalis said. "I didn't want the stage to be too much above the audience. We want people all around us, so the art just grows out of the middle. I like the feeling of not knowing where one thing starts and the other one begins."