Envisioned is a modern three-level building to blend with the nearby Lionel Hampton School of Music and retain some of its Gothic features. It is to be located on a generous acre on Sweet Avenue just east of the music school. It will contain a small library for scholars, staff offices, a coffee shop and a store. Already in hand are artifacts from music critic Leonard Feather and jazz artists Ella Fitzgerald, Lionel Hampton, Stan Kenton, Al Grey and Dizzy Gillespie. Also archived are 34 years of jazz festival holdings and articles from Iron Curtain countries where, for many years, jazz went underground.
Items come from as far away as Japan and Russia.
Endowment of the annual Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival , ensuring a lasting legacy for decades to come. The endowment also will hire staff to perform duties now done entirely by volunteers. He has partnered with UI since 1984, when he first headlined at its annual jazz festival. Since then, he not only has lent his name to the festival and to UI's school of music and primed the pump for scholarships, but he has been a magnet for hundreds of jazz artists and thousands of school kids to make musical magic together. PST on Telstar 6, transponder 4.