News

Over the past two decades, the bond between hip-hop and jazz has tightened again – this time in reverse. After years of DJs sampling jazz records, hip-hop artists began collaborating directly with jazz musicians. On To Pimp a Butterfly(2015), Kendrick…

In the 1930s and ’40s, Harlem became the cultural heart of Black America. It was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, when literature, art, and music spoke openly about dignity, freedom, and belonging. In this context, jazz stopped being merely…

Jazz was born as an act of freedom. In early-20th-century New Orleans, African American communities, marked by poverty and segregation, turned the blues and work songs into improvisations that told a story of resistance. Trumpets, clarinets, and drums became instruments…

Like jazz, hip-hop was born from the need for expression in African American communities. In the 1970s, in the neighborhoods of the Bronx, young people lived in a divided America marked by poverty and segregation. They didn’t have instruments or…

One of the defining moments in jazz history is the release of Strange Fruit, performed by Billie Holiday. Considered one of the first songs to use music as a form of protest, it denounced racial violence in the American South.…

After the Second World War, jazz crossed America’s borders and became one of the most influential cultural voices of the 20th century. American soldiers carried records and instruments with them, radio stations began broadcasting jazz, and Hollywood films wove it…

Jazz was born at the beginning of the 20th century in New Orleans, a port city where cultures, languages, and rhythms from all over the world met. Around the same time, our building, Edison, was being constructed (circa 1902), in…

The building that now hosts the Music Gallery is Edison House of Music, a place with a long and colorful history. It was originally built as a cinema and carried the name Edison, inspired by the man who brought light…