Robert Vare can look back on a highly accomplished career in journalism, having written and edited for top-tier publications like Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. In a long, multiple-chapter professional life, he won a Nieman Journalism Fellowship to Harvard, taught writing at Yale and The Columbia Journalism School, and edited a critically acclaimed collection of work by Michael Kelly, a colleague and close friend who died tragically while covering the Iraq War. But even with these impressive credentials, Robert still wonders if he may have missed his true calling. “I totally blew it,” he says of the boringly conventional piano lessons he was sentenced to take as a kid. “If my parents had set me up to study with a jazz pianist, my life might well have taken a different path.” 

Although Robert never pursued jazz professionally, he nurtured a love of the art form throughout his adult life. In college at the University of Chicago, he spent hours at a record store near his dorm and brought back to his room dozens of albums by jazz icons like Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk. For live performances, he headed to McKee’s on the city’s South Side. After he graduated and moved back to New York City, where he’d grown up, he frequented legendary clubs like the Village Vanguard and The Five Spot. 

About 20 years ago, Robert — who, with his longtime partner, Maureen Pratt, had settled fulltime in an 1850 stone house in Litchfield County — discovered The Mahaiwe. “Maureen and I went on a Saturday afternoon to see a 3D movie,” Robert recalls of his first visit to the theater shortly after its historic renovation. “We wore the silly-looking glasses, sat in the mezzanine, and saw a truly cheesy sci-fi movie from the 50s. I was hooked.” Becoming a frequent patron over the years, Robert was thrilled to be able to attend performances at The Mahaiwe by the likes of Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, and Joey Alexander. 

During the pandemic, Robert found himself with down time to do some much- delayed estate planning, compiling a list of institutions he wanted to support. “The Mahaiwe was high on my list, and I had an idea that excited me. I made a cold call.” Thus began the conversation that led to the establishment of The Robert M. Vare Jazz Fund, which will sponsor annual jazz concerts at The Mahaiwe and bring diverse, nationally prominent jazz musicians to perform here. “It is a pleasure and an honor to support The Mahaiwe, a bona fide national treasure,” says Robert. “I love the theater’s history, its architectural details, and how it manages to feel intimate yet at the same time evoke the grandeur of the old-fashioned movie palaces. To my mind, it is a perfect theatrical venue and a great place to see and hear live jazz music.”