Whether the music is red, raw, jagged, and sharp, or cool, blue, smooth and mellow, it’s jazz played New York style, with humor and skill and a hard competitive edge. The first big New York jazz clubs were located in Harlem, and a few old venues, like the Cotton Club on 125th Street, are still popular. As jazz gained a wider audience, noteworthy clubs sprang up around 52nd Street. Today, however, the place for jazz is the West Village, at clubs like the Village Vanguard, Smalls, and the Blue Note. New York has a long and vigorous history with jazz; as drummer Art Blakely once said, “I’d hate for a human being to pass through this life and miss out on this music.”