Jazz is shaped by its improvisation, and when musicians fall into the style and let the performance move them, the music becomes ever more dynamic—a living experience that moves the listener too. Through the hands of musical geniuses such as John Coltrane, Nina Simone, and blues musician Muddy Waters—whose work helped to influence what was to come—music became transformative.

Through support from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, three historic sites show the breadth of that legacy and continue to inspire today.

Muddy Waters House, Chicago, Illinois

We cannot talk about jazz without mentioning its roots in the blues, a sound born out of the Deep South that made its way North with the Great Migration into the Chicago music scene.

McKinley Morganfield, better known as blues icon Muddy Waters, purchased his 1889 two-flat in the South Side of Chicago in 1954. Waters and his family called it home, living in the first-floor apartment until his move to the Chicago suburbs in 1974. The second floor was used as temporary quarters for visiting musicians and performers in need. He turned the basement into a recording and rehearsal studio with rear living quarters for band members after late-night sessions and overflow space to accommodate visitors.

“There is valuable history in the walls of that house that has to be told and a rare gem honoring this music space,” says Chandra Cooper, president of the Muddy Waters Mojo Museum and Waters’ great-granddaughter. “It tells of the Black migration and how they found their success, their legacy and piece of American history.”

The John and Alice Coltrane Home, Dix Hills, New York

The John and Alice Coltrane Home in Dix Hills (Long Island), New York, is an unassuming brick ranch-style house in a residential neighborhood. The Coltranes lived there with their four children from 1964-1973, including the last three years of John Coltrane’s life before his death in 1967. It was there that he created his masterwork A Love Supreme. His wife Alice, a talented musician within her own right, recorded her first album A Monastic Trio and other works in the home’s basement studio.

Named a National Trust National Treasure in 2018, HOPE Crew conducted restoration work on the house in 2019. Today the house is owned by the Friends of the John and Alice Coltrane Home with the land maintained by the Town of Huntington, who also works with the National Trust and the Coltrane Family.

The vision for the house is as a cultural center open to the public where the basement would act as an interactive and experimental space for creatives. It will also have other areas for workshops and educational gatherings. An architectural assessment is underway and its business plan, funded by the Action Fund and the The William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust, is complete. Landscape architecture firm Nelson Byrd Woltz is currently working on plans to design its grounds, a 3-acre park inspired by A Love Supreme’s music composition and notation.

Nina Simone Childhood Home, Tryon, North Carolina

Eunice Waymon was born in this modest, clapboard three-bedroom house in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933. It was also in this house that her parents John and Mary Waymon nurtured the talent and awareness—from the age of three— that defined the woman who would become jazz legend and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

In 2017, when the house was in danger of demolition, four Black American artists—Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher, and Julie Mehretu—stepped in to buy it (under the auspices of an LLC). In the five years since, the National Trust (using funding from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), World Monuments Fund, the Nina Simone Project, and the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission worked with the artists to develop a preservation plan.