Englewood, NJ

Englewood sits at the top of the Palisades, the basalt cliffs of the Hudson. Its most beloved resident was Dizzy Gillespie: the trumpeter whose bent horn and ballooning cheeks helped invent bebop made Englewood his home for decades until his death in 1993, and the city honours him as its own. The leafy East Hill neighbourhoods have housed generations of performers, musicians and broadcasters drawn by the same arithmetic of proximity and peace. The archive's stage is the John Harms Center, now bergenPAC — the Bergen Performing Arts Center — a 1926 movie palace on Palisade Avenue restored into North Jersey's principal concert hall, seating 1,300 for a calendar that runs from symphony orchestras and opera tours to jazz and headline entertainers, with a performing-arts school attached that teaches thousands of children. Englewood's downtown, dense with restaurants and shops, serves a famously diverse city of some 30,000. A cliff-top suburb with a bebop patron saint and a proper concert hall: Englewood is the New York region in miniature, minus the noise.