Tax-Exempt 78s
Anybody who knows me, or who has read my blogging, knows that I love jazz. It’s not a casual hobby; it’s not an occasional thing; it’s central to what I love.
And for my 40th birthday (a long time ago, it turns out), my family bought me a record player. While I do most of my listening on Spotify and Apple Music, I have a pretty decent collection of vinyl, including some stuff that isn’t available on streaming.
So last week’s New York Times article on the Hot Club of New York was right down my alley. Essentially, the Hot Club of New York is a record listening room. For $25, patrons listen to 78s of jazz from the 1910s-1950s on what sounds like a pretty awesome setup (I’m not an audiophile, so I’m not intimately acquainted with the record player and tube speakers it describes), and also get a lecture on the music.
But it’s not just the jazz side of things that attracted me to the piece: you discover, about halfway in, that the Hot Club of New York is a member-supported nonprofit organization. A little digging (that is, doing a quick search and finding its home page) also suggests that it is tax-exempt (memberships, its website says, are tax-deductible).
The idea of a tax-exempt jazz listening room really piques my curiosity—I’m actually very interested in the idea that jazz and classical institutions are often tax-exempt while other musical genres often aren’t.
But here, I hit a brick wall. I spent fifteen or twenty minutes over the weekend searching, and I can’t find evidence of its being tax-exempt or of a nonprofit New York corporation.
More searching may have helped, but it was the weekend and I did have other things to do. But also, I suspect its corporate name is something other than “Hot Club of New York,” and I honestly don’t know what that name is.
But with luck, I’ll figure it out at some point.