Coming in April--
Burnt Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber:
A Workshop in Conducted Improvisation
In this unprecedented performance workshop, open to student performers from any and all traditions and practices--musicians, poets, actors, dancers, musicians, writers--Greg Tate, Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies for Fall 2009 and leader of the innovative musical ensemble Burnt Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber, will demonstrate how new musical material may be generated and existing musical material may be restructured and renewed in real-time performance, using Conduction, the versatile lexicon of hand and baton gestures developed over the past twenty years by improvisor and conductor Lawrence "Butch" Morris.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009, 7-9:30 pm
301 Philosophy Hall
Columbia University Morningside Campus
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Sweet Willie Rollbar's Orientation:
A Film Screening and Discussion
With Baikida Carroll, Oliver Lake, and K. Curtis LyleModerated by Brent Hayes Edwards
As part of the 2009 LeBoff Seminar in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, this special event will feature the world premiere screening of the short experimental film "Sweet Willie Rollbar's Orientation" (1970) made by poet K. Curtis Lyle in collaboration with theater artist Malinke Robert Elliott, composer Julius Hemphill, and other members of the Black Artists' Group (BAG) of St. Louis, the historically important collective of musicians, visual artists, actors, poets, and dancers that emerged as a vibrant cauldron for creative collaboration in the midst of the urban unrest of the late 1960s. The screening will be followed by a conversation about the film and about BAG more generally, featuring three of the artists who perform in the film: Lyle himself, and musicians and BAG co-founders Baikida Carroll and Oliver Lake, moderated by Brent Hayes Edwards, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and faculty of the Center for Jazz Studies.
Friday, April 17, 2009, 1:00-4:00 pm
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Film Center, Theater 101
36 East 8th Street (between University Place and Greene Street)
New York University
Free and open to the publicMore about this event
Professor Brent Hayes Edwards wins
Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award
This year’s recipients of the Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award include Dr. Brent Hayes Edwards, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and faculty of the Center for Jazz Studies. The award was created in 2005 by Columbia Trustee Gerry Lenfest (’58LAW) to honor exceptional teaching in the Arts and Sciences. The awards are given annually to faculty of unusual merit across a range of activities, including scholarship, University citizenship, and professional involvement, with an emphasis on teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students.
Please join us in congratulating Professor Edwards on this achievement.
New Courses for Spring 2009
John Szwed: "The New Thing": Jazz 1955-1980
Music W4508Tuesday, 4:10pm-6:00pm
701A Dodge Hall
An examination of the new jazz that emerged shortly after the middle of the 20th century. Includes the work of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Anthony Braxton, Carla Bley, Albert Ayler, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago; the economics and politics of the period; parallel developments in other arts; the rise of new performance spaces, recording companies, and collectives; and the accomplishments of the music and the problems it raised for jazz performance and criticism.
REGISTER FOR THIS COURSE
Brent Hayes Edwards: Jazz and The Literary Imagination
Jazz Studies W4900
Tuesday/Thursday, 10:35am-11:50am
516 Hamilton Hall
Focuses on jazz as inspiration for twentieth-century literature, from the blues poetry of the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary fiction, and on how writers have discovered or intuited formal models and political implications in black music. Discusses literary efforts (including autobiography, poetry, historiography, and criticism) by musicians themselves. Explores links between musical form and literary innovation; between musical analysis (improvisation, rhythm, syncopation, harmony)and the medium of writing; how music suggests modes of social interaction or political potential to be articulated in language; how the performance of a poem is related to its text. Materials may include writings and recordings by Jacques Attali, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Louis Armstrong, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling Brown, Kurt Schwitters, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Ella Fitzgerald, William Melvin Kelley, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Gayl Jones, Michael Ondaatje, Joseph Jarman, Nathaniel Mackey, and Harryette Mullen, among others.
REGISTER FOR THIS COURSE
New Books by
Center for Jazz Studies Faculty
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever
Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington
Thomas Dunne Books, 2008
Clawing at the Limits of Cool is the first book to focus on Davis and Coltrane's musical interaction and its historical context, on the ways they influenced each other and the tremendous impact they've had on culture since then. It chronicles the drama of their collaboration, from their initial historic partnership to the interlude of their breakup, during which each man made tremendous progress toward his personal artistic goals. And it continues with the last leg of their journey together, a time when the Miles Davis group, featuring John Coltrane, forever changed the landscape of jazz... more
The AACM and American Experimental Music
George E. Lewis
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. From its working-class roots on the South Side of Chicago, the AACM went on to forge an extensive legacy of cultural and social experimentation, crossing both musical and racial boundaries. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images... more
Performing Latin Music in New York City
Christopher Washburne
Temple University Press, 2008
This ethnographic journey into the New York salsa scene of the 1990s is the first of its kind. Written by a musical insider, and from the perspective of salsa musicians, Sounding Salsa is a pioneering study that offers detailed accounts of these musicians grappling with intercultural tensions and commercial pressures. Christopher Washburne, himself an accomplished salsa musician, examines the organizational structures, recording processes, rehearsing, and gigging of salsa bands, paying particular attention to how they created a sense of community, privileged "the people" over artistic and commercial concerns, and incited cultural pride during performances...more
© 2008, Columbia University Center for
Jazz Studies.
Last Updated September 2, 2008.
