New Jazz Aspen Snowmass home to open by end of year
The Paul JAS Center will provide space for performance, education, recording, and community
Charles Cuniffe Architects/Courtesy Photo
Jazz Aspen Snowmass (JAS) will soon introduce its versatile new home to the heart of Aspen.
The nonprofit plans to open the Paul JAS Center — named after JAS board chairman Andy Paul, who donated $10 million for building construction — in late December 2025, providing a creative and cultural hub for musicians, students, and the community. The center will be the first permanent space JAS has owned since it was founded in 1991.
“It’s going to be a special, turnkey venue that we are convinced is going to just cut across so many different elements of the community: resident, visitor, younger, older,” said JAS President and CEO Jim Horowitz.
The center will be located over the historic Red Onion Tavern property at 420 E. Cooper Ave., containing an inside seated audience capacity of 150 to 175 as well as a cocktail standing room for 300-plus, according to Horowitz.
He said the center will provide four critical functions: a performance space for jazz and related forms of music, an educational resource for music students, a professional recording space for students, live performers, and professionals, and a gathering space for the Aspen community.
From a performance standpoint, the venue will provide the JAS Cafe event series with a permanent home. The JAS Cafe, founded in 2011 in the basement of The Little Nell, previously functioned as a pop-up nightclub music series, with musicians performing in varying locations, according to Horowitz.
“At the end of the day, we’ve been vagabonds more or less with this program for years,” Horowitz said. “And now, we’re on the cusp of permanence, and that’s the difference between renting your home and owning your home — (it’s) a big difference.”
Moving the series to the Paul JAS Center will give them a consistent number of performances, as they won’t have to work with the schedules of other venues. Horowitz said they will have a minimum of 30 JAS Cafe performance nights in the space during the first year, and will hopefully expand to 50 or 60 events in the near future.
With the permanent shift, The JAS Cafe will continue to feature a variety of music genres, including jazz, blues, soul, funk, New Orleans music, as well as world music from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe, according to Horowitz.
Additionally, the center will be a principal venue for the JAS June Experience, an annual June music festival run by the nonprofit, which features 12 other venues in downtown Aspen. This year’s festival will run from June 26 to June 29.
The center will also further musical education, providing lesson space and recording studio time for student use, according to Andrea Beard, JAS chief operating officer.
With its Local Education Initiatives, JAS currently works with students from around the valley and region. The organization hires musicians to help with specific instrument instruction in local public schools, providing over 1,200 hours of classroom support last year, and donates instruments to classrooms from Aspen to Parachute, according to Beard. They also offer student summer camps and funds for students to take up to three hours of private music lessons, Beard said.
As part of the initiative, JAS put together a group called JAS Street Horns, an advanced group of 30 students from around the region who practice once a month and perform for the public, culminating in a music-oriented trip to New Orleans at the end of March, according to Beard.
As a permanent space, the center will make it easier for JAS to coordinate their educational initiatives and will give students studio recording experience, according to Beard.
“This just gives us more opportunities,” Beard said.
Students will also use the center to further their career development, as the center will serve as a resource for the JAS Academy, where 46 total students from prestigious music schools around the country will participate in two, two-week educational summer sessions in Aspen. Twenty-three students participate in each session.
Partnering with staff from Frost School of Music at University of Miami to teach each session, JAS offers full, talent-based scholarships to every student participating in the academy. Students receive training in the “business of music,” where they learn how to deal with contracts, market themselves — and negotiate recordings — so they can make a career out of music.
“So that’s another place where that studio is going to be huge,” Beard said.
Apart from helping music students, the recording studio will allow musicians performing at the Paul JAS Center to record their performances live, and will give A-level musicians seeking studio time in Aspen the opportunity to record, according to Horowitz.
Finally, the center will provide an event space for the community, from nonprofits, to companies, to private parties, to political forums, to other arts groups.
So far JAS has raised $30 million in secure pledges to fund the center, Horowitz said. They hope to reach $35 million in their second phase of their fundraising campaign.
Donations can be made to jazzaspensnowmass.org/jas-center-the-red-onion/.
Skyler Stark-Ragsdale can be reached at 970-429-9152 or email him at sstark-ragsdale@aspentimes.com.
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