UMSL Current features Bistro 10th anniversary

The Current, the student newspaper at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has a feature story in this week's issue about the 10th anniversary of Jazz at the Bistro. The article seems intended to introduce students to JATB, so there's not a lot of new information there, but it may be a useful primer for newbies.

One shortcoming, though, is that the piece omits any mention of the "Just Jazz" series, which ran for several years at the Hotel Majestic downtown before a change in the hotel's ownership forced producer and JATB founder Barbara Rose to end operations there and move to Grand Center to start anew. There's no question that "Just Jazz" helped lay crucial groundwork and create an audience that basically moved en masse over to Grand Center along with Ms. Rose. Another promoter, starting from scratch in the same space, would have had a very different, and much more difficult, row to hoe.

All this is duly recounted in the "History" portion of the JATB Web site, by the way, so it's not like the current management and board are trying to hide or revise past events. The extended version of the story does complicate the notion of a 10th anniversary a bit, so perhaps it should be no surprise that it was deemed superfluous for this particular story. Still, it's a shame that Ms. Rose's role seems to have been given short shrift.