Jazz fans pay £3,500 to be buried near Miles Davis
How much would you pay to be buried near jazz heroes such as Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins or Lionel Hampton? Well, some Americans have been willing to pay more than £3,500 ($6,000) starting prices just to spend the afterlife in a mausoleum in the vicinity of their favourite musicians.
Many of the dedicated jazz fans devoted are apparently attracted to the idea of spending eternity near Duke Ellington, the composer, appropriately of the jazz standard Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.
Such is the demand at the Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City that 2,275 new burial plots are being built between the grave of Latin music star Celia Cruz and ‘Jazz Corner,’ the area where Davis, Ellington, Hampton and Illinois Jacquet are buried.
“With the history of the Bronx and everybody that is planning ahead, we have a lot of requests to be close to Miles Davis and Celia Cruz,” cemetery executive director David Ison told AP’s Rachelle Blinder. More than 60 special plots near Davis’s grave have already been sold
Jazz fan Pauline Smith, 74, who has bought a plot near Jazz Corner, said: “I love the idea that I could be continuing my love on the other side.”
The cemetery, in the Bronx area of New York, is also the final resting place of journalist Joseph Pulitzer, author Herman Melville and composer Irving Berlin.
Among the other celebrated jazz musicians buried there are WC Handy, Milt Jackson, Jackie McLean and Joseph ‘King’ Oliver.
Source: The Telegraph
