"Watch a jazz group gather on a bandstand. The pianist plays some introductory chords, then repeats them. The other musicians talk, joke, trade suggestions about tunes and tempo, and play seemingly random riffs. Finally, to the relief of the audience, they begin. "Vamp till ready" is music business jargon for this Zen-like ritual of marking time until performance overtakes preparation. The phrase applies just as well to the founding of a museum like the one in whose birth I am involved, the Jazz Museum in Harlem.

"In 1996, Art D'Lugoff, then proprietor of the Village Gate, the historic Greenwich Village jazz club, suggested the idea of a jazz museum to his friend David Levy, who is director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, a sometime saxophonist and a lifelong jazz enthusiast. The two of them enlisted me. Before entering the practice of law, I had spent some time as a jazz musician; my performing career was brief, but my love of jazz proved permanent. Daryl Libow, a Washington lawyer and amateur jazz historian, joined us. We had lots of enthusiasm and no funding. We soon discovered the limitations of the former and the importance of the latter.

"Some of our early decisions were easy. The most appropriate place for the museum was clearly Harlem, reflecting as it does the dominant African-American contribution to the jazz art form. The music in Harlem's clubs and theaters, during and after the Harlem Renaissance, indelibly shaped the way jazz entered and informed virtually all of American culture. A jazz museum in Harlem would be a companion to the jazz performance space being developed at Lincoln Center.

"In those early days we also received some indispensable funding. Through friends of mine who are involved in antipoverty efforts in Harlem, I met Deborah Wright, then head of the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, Harlem's principal development organization. The Empowerment Zone provided the jazz museum with its first funds, a grant of $125,000. Those funds were matched by the Scheuer Foundation and by Abraham Sofaer, a State Department legal adviser, federal judge, and jazz fan.

"We had enough money to hire an executive director, who struggled for a year to assemble an organization. We gathered a distinguished board. Jazz historians, archivists, educators, and musicians advised on museum structure, themes, and exhibits. We were assured of access to the vast jazz collections of the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress. We acquired the help of Wendy Evans Joseph, architect of the new Women's Museum in Dallas. Design work began for a small experimental facility, modeled on the Los Angeles Temporary Contemporary Museum, where we could test relationships among historic text, live music, and technology.

"But our inadequacies soon overtook with us. To begin with, we were all part-timers; our meetings were sporadic and our communications mainly by remote means. We groped to answer basic questions: Where would the museum be sited? Who would do preliminary organizing? How would we raise more money? More important, what was the museum's mission? How could it display and illuminate music, an invisible art form? We properly identified these issues but did not have the expertise to resolve them.

"We flailed around for three years; and while we did, the money ran out. We had been awarded a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, to be used for planning conferences; but several hundred thousand dollars was what we needed to refine and develop our primitive planning. We did not have it. Our executive director departed, sensibly enough, for employment in California. Work came to a halt.

"At this point, Congress produced what it occasionally does: an act of creative generosity. I had worked to interest Senators and Congressmen in the museum, and some responded-notably, Senators Daniel P. Moynihan and John Warner and Congressmen Charles Rangel and John Conyers. Most unexpected was the crucial concurrence of Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Ted Stevens. Congress provided a $1 million line item in the fiscal year 2000 federal budget for development of the Jazz Museum in Harlem. It turned out that Senator Stevens was a jazz fan who, during his undergraduate years at Yale, had spent many weekends in the jazz clubs of Manhattan. You never know.

"To be sure, this kind of largesse is not exactly drive-by funding. The money is earmarked within the budget of a host federal agency-in our case, the Small Business Administration-whose standards the grantee must meet in exacting detail before the disbursement of actual money is authorized. The process took us the better part of a year to complete. If Daryl Libow had not kept at it with his litigator's tenacity, we would have lost our chance.

"That is how the museum stayed alive. But the idea gained major impetus from another event: the accelerating momentum of change in Harlem. For years, a new Harlem Renaissance had struggled to be born; it was finally happening. On February 10, 2002, the Sunday New York Times reported on "The Changing Look of Harlem." Parcel by parcel, it said, Harlem was finally being remade. The principal actors in this development drama were the Empowerment Zone and the state Metropolitan Economic Revitalization Fund. Though the organizations' names are less than poetic, the transformation they have wrought is dramatic. Indeed, Harlem now faces a new problem: the displacement of small businesses through gentrification.

"In this changed urban setting, the jazz museum came back to life like a rim shot. The head of the Empowerment Zone, Terry Lane, is supporting the jazz museum as a natural addition to Harlem's landmark Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the expanding Studio Museum, the rebuilt Apollo Theater, the new Museum for African Art, and other major cultural establishments. Discussions have begun for access by the jazz museum to major jazz archives such as the Rutgers University archive administered by Dan Morgenstern. The museum is the natural institutional home for a collection of which I am executor, Willis Conover's spectacular Voice of America collection of jazz music and history. The National Endowment for the Arts has officially confirmed its planning grant to us; now we have the capacity to use it.

"Most important, we have a new executive director for the National Jazz Museum, Loren Schoenberg. Mr. Schoenberg's quarter-century playing and conducting career in jazz has included close associations with eminent musicians ranging from Benny Goodman to Wynton Marsalis; the latter has become a friend and supporter of the jazz museum. Mr. Schoenberg's extraordinary range is what we hope for in the museum: an illumination of jazz as art form, jazz as a teaching instrument, jazz as a model of combined discipline and improvisation, and jazz as a supreme narrative, literary and musical, that has flowed through virtually every capillary of the nation's culture and set the mood for what we Americans think and feel about ourselves.

"It has been a long haul, because we started with a big idea but no money and because, until recently, the Harlem community was not ready for a jazz museum. Now these conditions have changed. So why, after six years of vamping, is all of this suddenly happening? Because, in the words of the Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie breakthrough modern jazz recording, "Now's The Time!" (Savoy, 1945.)