Fifty people is almost a sellout here. The experience was intimate, and not only for the listeners. Afterward, the Haskinses put up the five musicians in their home: “Taylor made breakfast for us,” Klein said. “Full service, man.”
Taylor Haskins grew up in rural New Hampshire, was mentored through college by the trumpet great Clark Terry and moved to New York in 1996. He first played with Klein at Smalls Jazz Club in Greenwich Village, subbing with the pianist’s big band, and began making a name for himself on the broader scene.
In 2005, while performing with the bassist Dave Holland’s big band in Montreal, he ran into Catherine, who was attending a friend’s wedding. They married in 2008. Their son, Felix, now a budding cellist, was born in 2010. Tired of the city grind, they bought a lakefront house in Westport that summer. Taylor opened a production studio there and later began hosting a weekly music show, “The Thread,” on NCPR (North Country Public Radio). From 2014 to 2017, the couple curated a summer music series in a local park.
Westport has around 1,300 residents and typical small-town problems; reliable jobs aren’t easy to find. But over the past couple of decades, idealistic young people have migrated to the region to establish bakeries, carpentry businesses and a multitude of farms with C.S.A. programs. Here and there, an old church or grange has been turned into a gallery or performance space, setting the stage for the Mill.
When the Haskinses bought the old flour mill, it was “dark and creepy,” Catherine recalled — nearly windowless and crammed with silos, grain elevators, hoppers and other machinery, including a 23-foot-tall, steel-beamed sifting tower in what is now the music space. Everything was coated with old flour dust. “Lots of happy squirrels in there,” Taylor noted. A crew of Amish farmers spent weeks sweeping, bagging and carting away the flour.
During the building’s demolition phase, Taylor prowled the premises, measuring, analyzing and imagining what it might look like as an arts center. He came up with a detailed design (“I saw it in my mind’s eye”), which was realized by a Vermont architectural firm and set in motion by local contractors and dozens of workers. Windows appeared. Catherine stepped in to design the five galleries.
Read More: A New Venue Beckons Jazz Musicians and Beyond to Upstate New York
