Celebrities Gather At a Party For Jazz At Lincoln Center

One night in May the painter Jennifer Bartlett opened her West Village home to supporters of Wynton Marsalis' Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. The bulk of the guests arrived at half past seven and quickly gravitated to the first-floor bar. They had come to hear Marsalis and members of his ensemble play in Ms. Bartlett's basement, or just to linger on her garden terraces, by her rooftop pool, or in front of one of her grid-pattern, polka-dotted abstractions. "It's more of a complex than an apartment," Matthew Modine helpfully pointed out. "Between you and me, bad art," said another actor of the paintings that presumably paid for the complex. "I think she sleeps up here," said one gawker, attempting to explain the presence of a bed next to the thirty-foot lap pool, festooned for the occasion with floating candles. "I just know I saw this in Architectural Digest," her friend whispered.

Marsalis drew an unlikely crowd of celebrity guests. In the foyer, Modine and the trumpeter could be seen "talking trash," as Modine later told me, about their regular basketball game at the Nike Gym. Modine met Marsalis through Harry Connick Jr. Glenn Close and Al Roker were "asked to go" by Ashley Schiff, the Gore relative and public relations hack who hosted the party with Bartlett. Actress Kellie Martin seemed to enjoy the music, but was in attendance to support Schiff, whom she met through a Yale connection?although she is "very supportive of jazz."

Downstairs the guests mingled expertly. "The painter! You're the painter from Murphy Brown!" an overexcited socialite informed Robert Pastorelli from across the room. He was also Glenn Close's escort. "Ask them about their sex life," she instructed as I approached Close.

I asked the actress if she was a Marsalis admirer. "I think at one point I bought one of his CDs. Harry Connick Jr. once suggested I listen to Wynton. I'm kind of a jazz ignoramus. Oh, do you know Burt Young?"

The actor had entered from the second-floor patio. In the instant I turned, the couple made their escape. I caught up with them on the staircase. So did the socialite in the zebra-striped dress.

"What are you doing now?" she asked Pastorelli.

"Pornography. I'm not kidding."

Later in the evening, the perspiring public intellectual and Daily News contributor Stanley Crouch entertained four waitresses idling by the bar. From behind plus-size Buddy Holly spectacles, he appraised them one by one: "Fine, fine, fine and still fine." Working on anything, Mr. Crouch? "Just these women right here."

"Who is this guy?" one of the waitresses asked me. "Is he famous? Did he compose this jazz or something?"

Crouch beamed. It was a more approachable Crouch than the one who had earlier rushed past me to apprehend Peter Jennings and several senatorially white-haired gentlemen. Crouch has long been a mentor to Marsalis and advisor to Jazz at Lincoln Center, and has been criticized for his conservative influence. "I still have a role, but I don't know how active it is," said Crouch of his continued involvement with the Orchestra. He and Marsalis have plans to write an opera together.

Re-enter Burt Young. Crouch slapped him on the back. "Here he is! One of our greatest actors." (Young played Paulie in the Rocky movies and is also known for his work in Kicked in the Head, Red Blooded American Girl II, Blood Beach and Carnival of Blood.) Since no equivalent praise was forthcoming from Young, Crouch retreated to the basement and was next seen vigorously rubbing his thighs, apparently to the music.

I spoke with Marsalis before he was hurried away by PR people. Asked about detractors who complain that certain jazz composers are under-represented at Lincoln Center, Marsalis laughed and told me, "You can never let your authority be diminished by someone who's not in your position. Whoever it is, could be your mother."

At the end of the night a hobbled but cheerful Al Roker, aided by a cane, made his way to the door. "Blew out my knee, have to go put it up." Crouch appeared suddenly and enlisted him in a good-night man-hug.