“The concept of an institution for jazz is a very new thing obviously, Jazz at Lincoln Center made that concept work," said Randall Kline, the groups director. “Its the idea that jazz has earned a right to permanence. And because our view of jazz is wide-angled, its a great thing for the art form."
The building, to be called the SFJazz Center and designed by Mark Cavagnero Associates Architects, is scheduled to break ground in spring 2011 and open in fall 2012. It will entail a $60 million capital campaign, including a $10 million operating endowment.
The campaign was initiated in 2008 by a $20 million donation from an individual from the Bay Area who wished to remain unidentified, Mr. Kline said. Beyond the gift, $10 million has been raised from the SFJazz board; Mr. Kline hopes to raise 80 percent of the $60 million total by next spring.
Founded in 1983, SFJazz offers nearly 100 concerts a year to a growing audience that includes a 3,000-member subscriber base. As the most visible presenter of jazz in San Francisco, it produces the city's annual fall jazz festival, as well as its own year-round schedule of concerts, talks and workshops. Since 2004 it has cultivated its own in-house band, the SFJazz Collective, whose members have included some of the genres marquee names Joshua Redman, Dave Douglas, Joe Lovano, Bobby Hutcherson and Nicholas Payton. The band records and tours with a new program every year.
In many respects, SFJazz has functioned like a West Coast counterpart to New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center. But the creation of a bricks-and-mortar home base where the organization will present 90 percent of its concerts near the city's conservatory of music and symphony hall seals that comparison.
Mr. Kline said the theater inside the building would be a steeply raked, 700-seat space.
“It's acoustically friendly to jazz both in the sound aspect and the proximity aspect," he said. “The idea Im trying to capture is intimacy."
He added, “When we visited other theaters with our architectural people, we went to many smaller places, including Barbs and the Brooklyn Lyceum in New York. We wanted a hybrid of different theater shapes, not necessarily associated with a particular art form, whether music or theater. And we wanted a community room, welcome to everybody."
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San Francisco Jazz Group Plans Its Own Building Dedicated to the Genre
SFJazz, the San Francisco arts organization, will announce plans on Friday to build its own facility dedicated to jazz: a 35,000-square-foot building in that city's Hayes Valley neighborhood, with two adaptable theater spaces inside.
