Breaking down barriers is what jazz is all about – music that lives and breathes collaboration and assimilation, both instrumentally and culturally. Aptly, the great melting-pot of New York City is jazz’s spiritual home – the center for swing in the 1920s, bebop in the 1940s, avant-garde in the 1960s and the loft scene of the 1970s that created world-famous venues such as The Cotton Club, Birdland and The Village Vanguard. Musical movements may come and go, but jazz continues to thrive in NYC as new generations discover, absorb and renew the genre.

And central to this participation is Wynton Marsalis’s ground-breaking Jazz at Lincoln Center, part of the famous arts venue and a hub for jazz education and performance since 1987. In the spirit of the great jazz ambassadors of days gone by – Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and the recently departed Dave Brubeck – Jazz at the Lincoln Center has extended its reach to the Middle East and teamed up with The St. Regis Doha to open its first club outside New York – a partnership that flows naturally from The St. Regis New York’s longstanding connection with the genre, having hosted celebrated performances by the greats, including Count Basie, Buddy Rich and Tommy Dorsey, from the first Jazz Age up to the present day.
 Its spirit will be heard in upcoming performances from virtuoso trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who is the program’s director, and from pianist extraordinaire Ahmad Jamal, bass wunderkind Christian McBride, drummer Willie Jones III and new vocal talent Cécile McLorin Salvant. An astonishingly bright and nimble trumpet player, 51-year-old Marsalis has been thrilling jazz audiences since his appearances with legendary drummer Art Blakey at the age of just 19.

A proud New Orleans native, Marsalis has been the jazz figurehead for his generation and the next. “Throughout its history, jazz has connected with different cultures, races, religions and generations,” he says. “This is an especially important time to communicate the sanctity of our collective human heritage. Jazz is a perfect tool to do this.” Marsalis, one of the key contributors to Ken Burns’s famous Jazz documentary series of 2001, is also a gifted and respected teacher, and in his role as artistic director of New York’s Lincoln Center he is passing on all he’s learned to the next generation of jazz greats. His recording career, now spanning 30 years, includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields and his legendary eponymous 1982 debut album featuring Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams. The St. Regis Doha may not seem the obvious setting for a jazz club, but walk through the wooden doors on the fourth floor and you could be in The Village Vanguard or Blue Note. The sightlines and acoustics are perfect. Marsalis approves: “I grew up in clubs – I know what clubs should be like, and this is beautiful. Our goal is to uplift everyone who hears us.”

Your address: The St. Regis Doha; The St. Regis New York
 

Images by Corbis, Max Reed, Ayano Hisa & Hanayo Takai, Anne Webber

Artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, Wynton Marsalis brings his talent, influence and associates to the new jazz club at The St. Regis Doha

Hailed as one of the most gifted jazz vocalists to emerge on the scene in recent years, 23-year-old Cécile McLorin Salvant was born and raised in Miami, Florida, by her Haitian father and French mother. She regularly wows audiences with her huge range, incredible control, advanced melodic sense and intriguing repertoire that draws on everything from Erik Satie to John Lennon. Critics have been comparing McLorin Salvant to Sarah Vaughan, Abbey Lincoln and Carmen McRae. In 2010, she won jazz’s most presigious award, the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, which recognizes the next generation of masters. She spent August 2012 recording her eponymous debut album for the thriving Mack Avenue label, and has been performing as Wynton Marsalis’s special guest with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Don’t miss one of jazz’s brightest young stars.

Jamal is a hugely innovative and influential pianist, one of the giants of post-war jazz. His sense of space and conception of rhythm was a significant influence on Miles Davis, and his trio is one of jazz’s most enduring small groups. You can hear the whole history of the piano in his masterful, effortless playing, from Earl Hines and Erroll Garner through Keith Jarrett, right up to Brad Mehldau. A child prodigy, he was tipped for greatness at the age of 14 by the legendary Art Tatum. Jamal has been at the forefront of jazz piano for five decades, and recently released his studio album Blue Moon. Now, at the age of 82, Ahmad Jamal continues to thrill jazz audiences worldwide with his Zen-like solos, and is rightly considered one of the all-time greats.

McBride’s vitality, virtuosity and pure love of jazz have given the acoustic bass a new lease of life, and in doing so he has also joined the pantheon of greats alongside the likes of Milt Hinton, Ron Carter and his idol Ray Brown. Musicians joke that there’s nothing Christian McBride can’t play – he’s equally at home cranking up the jazz/rock with Chick Corea, burning with Sonny Rollins at Carnegie Hall or arranging and composing music for his own big band. Still only 40 years old, McBride has released ten acclaimed albums, including the Grammy winner The Good Feeling and Conversations with Christian, a joyous collection of duets with the likes of Sting, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Hank Jones, Dr. Billy Taylor and George Duke. Don’t miss this chance to check out one of the young giants, and arguably the most important jazz bassist since Jaco Pastorius.

We’ve all heard the old saying: a band is only as good as its drummer. Taking his cue from past masters Philly Joe Jones, Billy Higgins and Art Blakey, Willie Jones III, born in LA in 1968, knows exactly how to drive a band with his inventive sense of swing, slick grooves, subtle dynamics and natural power. Utilizing a very small kit, Jones has always been in huge demand, performing with the likes of Herbie Hancock, Horace Silver and Milt Jackson. He co-founded the innovative Black Note band in 1991, which regularly served as Wynton Marsalis’s opening act, and won the coveted John Coltrane Young Artist Competition in 1991. Initially inspired by his pianist father, and later studying under the legendary sticksman Albert “Tootie” Heath, Jones understands jazz music inside and out. Soloists adore his playing – he’s a drummer to silence drummer jokes forever.

Once seen, a Beatriz Milhazes canvas is never forgotten. The 54-year-old Brazilian’s palette races through tangy citrus, raspberry, blueberry, coral, mint, scarlet and sky-blue. Sharpened here and there by linear shapes, the leitmotif is the sphere, often figured as a tropical flower. But she explodes the curves into fragmented arabesques that swirl and spiral across the canvas.
 
Rather than working directly on canvas, Milhazes paints on sheets of plastic which she then lays on to her surface and peels away. From a distance, her paintings possess flawless, graphic sheen; close up, subtle shifts of tone and texture inject a vigorous, carnal vitality.
 
Today, her oeuvre has garnered worldwide recognition, with works residing in New York’s Guggenheim Museum and MoMA. In 2012, her painting My Lemon sold at Sotheby’s for $2.1 million, making her Brazil’s most expensive living artist at the time.
 
Last year the Paço Imperial cultural center hosted her first retrospective for ten years in Rio de Janeiro, her native city. For Milhazes, the experience was thrilling. “The pulse of this city is incredible right now,” she tells me at her studio in Rio. But it was nerve-racking, too. “People say, ‘I love your work’, but many have only ever seen it in books.
 
”This year, her sights are set on her first major U.S. retrospective, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Milhazes is keen to make her mark on a city she views as “a bridge between North and South America.” She is also enthused by the museum’s spectacular new building, whose glass walls are framed by a pergola of hanging gardens.
 
“I love the way that nature is integrated with the space,” she says, adding that the rapport with flora mirrors the tension in her own work, which thrives on the clash of landscapes. “I love to be surrounded by the city and yet also by nature. That’s why I love Rio and Miami.”
 
Your address: The St. Regis Bal Harbour Resort

“The maps of ancient Jerusalem are all fabrication, while celestial maps are an attempt to impose the Greek myths on to the night sky,” says Jay Walker of the Walker Library of the History of the Human Imagination in Connecticut.
 
Today, printed maps of the ancient world have never been as prized, or as celebrated for their rarity and their beauty. The oldest date back to the early days of printing in the 15th century, when European explorers started documenting their travels, and hit an aesthetic high in the elaborately decorated works of the Dutch mapmakers of the 17th century, the so-called Dutch Golden Age.
 
Although prices for antique maps start at about $100, most purchases are in the low five figures. The most expensive single printed map sold to date is Abel Buell’s A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America from 1784, which fetched $2,098,500 at Christie’s, New York in 2010. Seven-figure sales such as this are becoming more and more common, with dealers pinning great hopes on increasing interest from the Far East and Southeast Asia. “I’m off to Hong Kong for the second time in two months,” says Daniel Crouch, of the eponymous map-dealing firm in London. “Five years ago I would buy in China and sell in the U.S. Now it’s the reverse.”
 
What are these new buyers going after? So-called “curiosity maps”, in which land takes the form of figures – monarchy or politicians, for example – are well-liked. Among the most sought-after are Ptolemaic maps, based on the shape of the world set out by Claudius Ptolemy around AD 150; the last one sold to an individual by Sotheby’s in 2006 was printed in 1477 and fetched £2.1 million (about $3.4 million). The most undervalued, Crouch believes, are whole atlases. “You can get a globally significant world atlas collection for the same price as a mediocre Impressionist painting,” he says.
 
Christie’s, meanwhile, has seen prices soaring for masterpieces which are rare, in fine condition and have an excellent provenance. Just two years ago at the Kenneth Nebenzahl sale in New York, the auction house sold a 1542 portolan atlas by Battista Agnese for $2,770,500 – well above the original estimate of $800,000 to $1,200,000.

Abel Buell’s 1784 A New and Correct Map of the United States of America

The internet has also had a huge part to play in rising prices, creating “a transparent marketplace where map and globe values can be easily traced,” according to Julian Wilson, specialist in books and manuscripts at Christie’s. “It’s also facilitated the globalization of the market, which was dominated by Western buyers ten years ago,” he adds.
 
Massimo De Martini of the Altea Gallery in London points out, however, that many people still like to make their purchase in person. “The internet is like our shop window,” he says. “Part of the fun of collecting is the hunt. But people still try to feel the quality for themselves.”
Experts advise new buyers to start small, looking for anything with original hand-painted colour on it, and to collect what they love. For Daniel Crouch, this is maps that are unusual. “My favourite item is an original 1930 copy of a 16th-century book called Astronomicum Caesareum by Petrus Apianus,” he says. “It’s made with moving parts and is full of dragons.” Wilson advises looking to the skies. “Celestial maps such as Star Spread by E. Hattie Rogers (1863) will pick up soon,” he says.
 
Perhaps surprisingly, new territories are still being charted. “NASA has produced a complete set of geological maps of the moon,” says Wilson. “One day, they, too, will be seen as a part of history.”
 
Where to buy antique maps
Altea Gallery, London, alteagallery.com; Antipodean Books, Maps and Prints, New York, antipodean.com; Christie’s, New York, christies.com; Geographicus Rare Antique Maps, New York, geographicus.com; Sotheby’s, New York, sothebys.com; Daniel Crouch Rare Books, London, crouchrarebooks.com
 
Where to see antique maps and globes
The Map & Atlas Museum of La Jolla, San Diego, mamlj.org; The National Maritime Museum, London, nmm.ac.uk; The British Library, London, bl.uk; The Newberry Library,
Chicago, newberry.org
 
Your address: The St. Regis New York

Images courtesy of Christie's and Sotheby's

A hand-stitched Star Spread,
approximately 5 feet x 8 feet, made by E. Hattie Rogers
in upstate New York in 1863