Mount Vernon Avenue and Long Street were the heart of the city’s Black entertainment district and a busy jazz corridor, where musicians would perform with big bands and eventually tour the country. Today, the genre is still very visible in the city’s current cultural calendar, with shows like The Jazz Room Columbus celebrating the classics. This season, the show will draw on the pulse of New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, giving both music lovers and jazz aficionados a taste of 1920s jazz.
What’s On at The Jazz Room in Columbus, OH
A Journey to New Orleans
New Orleans sits at the root of this setlist as a living musical language. The program takes on early jazz, where collective interplay, blue notes, and call-and-response define the songs played. Echoes of Louis Armstrong and the city’s brass-band inheritance run through the arrangements, alongside the spirit of standards associated with that tradition, from street-parade energy to late-night swing. What emerges is a performance shaped by ensemble feel and individual expression, where improvisation keeps the material open, vivid, and in motion.
What Is The Jazz Room?
The Jazz Room is a live music experience built around one curated set performed over the course of an evening, with each performance focusing on a distinct jazz world rather than sampling everything at once. That format gives the musicians room to settle into style, tone, and repertoire, whether the theme is New Orleans, a major artist’s songbook, or a specific tradition within jazz history. The result is a performance led by live players, shaped by improvisation, and grounded in the details that make jazz endure—swing, phrasing, restraint, and release.
If you’re looking for a unique evening plan guided by the early melodies of jazz, The Jazz Room packs a whole lotta swing. Held at Columbus Museum of Art on select dates, every music lover aged 21 and over is invited to take a seat with a drink in hand and enjoy tunes like “When The Saints Go Marching In”. There are two sessions scheduled each date, at 4:00pm and 6:00pm so you can choose the one that best suits you. What’s more, the drinks are not included in the ticket but are available for purchase at the venue.