Hazel Scott:  A Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist from Cafe Society to Hollywood to HUAC





With Karen Chilton, author, introduced by Farah Jasmine Griffin
Columbia University


Exploring the legacy of one of the pioneering women in music.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010, 7:30 pm, 301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus.. Free and open to the public.

Vijay Iyer/Mike Ladd, with Maurice Decaul:     Holding it Down

 



Acclaimed pianist and composer Vijay Iyer and celebrated poet and performer Mike Ladd, with Iraq veteran and poet Maurice Decaul, launch a new work-in-progress of music and poetry commissioned by Harlem Stage’s WaterWorks program.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 7:30 pm, Harlem Stage Gatehouse, 150 Convent Avenue at West 135th Street, New York City







                                        

The Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute

July 20-24, 2010, Columbia University

 

The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and the American Composers Orchestra, with lead support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's Fund for National Projects, announce a new and exciting collaborative project:  the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute, to be held on the Columbia University campus in New York City from July 20-24, 2010. 

The JCOI will present a five-day series of workshops that will include the study of scores and new compositional techniques, orchestration, instrumentation, notation, score preparation, and performance practice, improvisation, and  professional development.

Up to 35 composers in various phases of their composing careers, drawn from a national call for applications, will be selected to participate. The successful applicants will be composers working in jazz, improvised music, and creative music whose work demonstrates excellent musicianship, originality, and potential for future growth.  There is no age limit, and applicants need not have prior experience with orchestral composition.


JCOI participants will study with leading composers, conductors and performers in a curriculum designed by composers Jane Ira Bloom, Anthony Davis, Fabien Lévy and George Lewis, all of whom will serve as instructors. Other participating composer-mentors will include Alvin Singleton, Derek Bermel, and Tania Léon.

Following the Intensive, four to six promising participants from the Intensive will be selected to create new works for orchestra, to be premiered in June 2011 at Columbia's Miller Theatre.

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New Courses for Spring Semester 2010

John Szwed: Jazz and Film

Music G6200
Wednesday, 4:10pm-6:00pm
Location TBA


More information


Patricia Lespinasse: Topics in the                               Black Experience:  20th Century Jazz Text


African-American Studies C3930
Wednesday, 11:10am-1:00pm
Location TBA


More information



Center for Jazz Studies

Visiting Scholars for 2009-10


                       Anne Dvinge       Sara Villa



The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University is proud to announce the residencies of Dr. Anne Dvinge and Dr. Sara Villa as Visiting Scholars for the 2009-10 academic year. 

Dr. Dvinge received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Copenhagen in 2007 with the dissertation, Between History and Hearsay: Imagining Jazz at the Turn of the 21st Century. Currently a Danish Research Council for the Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen’s Department for Arts and Cultural Studies, Dr. Dvinge will be conducting research for her post-doctoral project, “Jazz, A Cosmopolitan Vernacular: National and Transnational Narratives of Identity and Tradition.” This ethnographically oriented research project, based on case studies of jazz festivals in North America and Europe, projects the jazz festival as a symbolic space where local, national and transnational identities and claims of belonging are negotiated by local and visiting jazz musicians.

More on Anne Dvinge

Dr. Villa s a postdoctoral fellow in a joint program between the Center for Jazz Studies and the State University of Milan, where she received her PhD in 2008. Her research project is dedicated to Jack Kerouac’s manuscripts on jazz, from his juvenile articles dedicated to Glenn Miller and Count Basie to the more mature production of essays on bebop and cool jazz. Dr. Villa is the translator into Italian of Windblown World (Kerouac’s journals), and the editor of a forthcoming collection of Kerouac’s music and writings. She is also the author of articles on Virginia Woolf, and on Anglo-American contemporary cinema. Her monograph on Woolf’s Orlando (I due Orlando: dal romanzo di Virginia Woolf all’adattamento cinematografico di Sally Potter/Two Orlandos: From Virginia Woolf’s Novel to Sally Potter’s Film Adaptation) has recently been published by CUEM, Milan.


George E. Lewis receives                   

2009 American Book Award



George E. Lewis, Case Professor of American Music and Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia, has been honored by the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for 2009 for his book, A Power Stronger Than Itself:  The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008).  Other recipients of the 2009 award include poet Suheir Hammad and scholar Houston A. Baker, Jr.  Established in 1978, the American Book Awards recognize outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America's diverse literary community. The award ceremony, which recently took place at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on New York's Lower East Side, will be broadcast on the US cable channel C-Span in the near future.






                   Recent Books by                                                              Center for Jazz Studies Faculty






Clawing at the Limits of Cool:

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














A Power Stronger Than Itself:

The AACM and American Experimental Music

George E. Lewis
University of Chicago Press, 2008

Winner, American Book Award 2009
"Best Book on Jazz 2009"--Jazz Journalists Association

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

Sounding Salsa:
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

Jazz Studies Online


Jazz Studies Online's rich collection of digital resources–journal articles, books and book chapters, video and audio, teaching materials–is proving tremendously exciting for jazz scholars, musicians, educators, journalists, and the general public. More

Louis Armstrong Visiting Professorship

Generous support from the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation enables the Center for Jazz Studies to sponsor Armstrong Visiting Professors to teach jazz-related academic courses and curate public programs. More

The Conversations Series

With support from the Ford Foundation, this series of public discussions explores the role of improvisation in the widest array of fields and practices, showing how ideas from jazz culture resonate with the intellectual currents of our time. More

Jazz Study Group

The interdisciplinary Jazz Study Group meets regularly to explore new methods of studying the history of jazz its social context, and its ramifications as a global cultural phenomenon that has influenced all of the arts, the humanities, and even the sciences. More

Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project

A New York State Music Fund grant enables the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project, which presents leading artists in programs that explore and interpret jazz music through a variety of perspectives, to a community where the roots of jazz run deep. More

Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice

An international research team, more than thirty scholars from eighteen universities, as well as twelve community groups, explore seven research areas related to improvisation, defining a new interdisciplinary field. More