Spring 2012 Events

Thursday,  February 16, 2012

The Future of Jazz Studies

 

A Conversation with the Center for Jazz Studies Faculty: Brent Edwards, Kevin Fellezs, Farah Griffin, George Lewis, Robert O’Meally, John Szwed & Chris Washburne

The faculty of the Center for Jazz Studies looks back over the first decade of the Center, its research and performance events, and discusses their current projects, the future of jazz studies, and the future of jazz itself.

 

Thursday, February 16, 2012, 7:30pm

Faculty House, 64 Morningside Drive

Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free of charge/RSVP is required.

RSVP by calling 212-851-9270 or email ym189@columbia.edu

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Vital Transformations: Fusion's Young Discontents

A Talk by Professor Kevin Fellezs

Though fusion is now seen as one of the more commercially driven of jazz’s substyles, most of the early fusion groups remained unknown and largely unheard outside of private jam sessions and infrequent live performances. Commercial success was hardly a phrase one would use to describe early fusion bands from the mid-1960s until 1970 with the release of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. The talk will be focused on the early formative years of fusion, outlining the rationales and aesthetics of young "fusioneers," who were criticized by jazz writers and fans for merging jazz with rock and funk. Yet this is a concern only if one is insisting on aligning fusion with jazz. Thinking of fusion as a "new idiom," as Herbie Hancock insisted, may lead to a more productive way to think about the music these young musicians began creating at a time when jazz observers often felt besieged by, rather than aligned with, the broader popular music world.

 

Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 8 pm

622 Dodge Hall

Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography & Jazz

Talk and book signing with Ben Cawthra

 

Jazz photographs are testaments to the symbolic depth and impact of African American culture in the last century. Tracing jazz photography from its rise in the 1930s to its role in the upheavals of the ’60s, Blue Notes in Black and White explores the partnership between two of the twentieth century’s most innovative art forms.  Professor Cawthra’s book discussed Gjon Mili, William Gottlieb, Herman Leonard, Francis Wolff, Roy DeCarava, and William Claxton. Cawthra shows us the connections between the photographers, art directors, editors, and record producers who crafted a look for jazz that would sell magazines and albums. He also explores how the musicians shaped their public images to further their own financial and political goals.
 

There will be copies of Prof. Cawthra's book available for purchase.

 

Thursday, April 5, 2012, 8pm
622 Dodge Hall
Columbia University Morningside Campus
Free and open to the public

Fall 2011 Event Archive

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Kind of Blue to Bitches Brew                                       With Quincy Troupe

Kind of Blue to Bitches Brew is a lecture on the seminal music Miles Davis played and composed during a 14-year span from 1958 to 1972 and provides a musical, cultural and political framework for the Cultural Revolution that occurred in the United States in the 20th Century during that same period. The lecture covers musicians and composers who impacted and influenced this seminal American musician and looks at several very important albums released by Miles Davis during this period; music that mirrors the complex social, political, cultural and racial events that changed the United States as a country forever.
 

Thursday, September 22, 2011, 8:00 pm

622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

I Walked with Giants: The Autobiography of Jimmy Heath 

Talk and Book signing with Jimmy Heath
Moderated by Salim Washington


Composer of more than 100 jazz pieces, three-time Grammy nominee, and performer on more than 125 albums, saxophonist Jimmy Heath has earned a place of honor in the history of jazz.  In his extraordinary new autobiography, Heath creates a “dialogue” with musicians and family members.  I Walked with Giants juxtaposes Heath’s account of his life and career with recollections from jazz giants who he knew well about life on the road and making music on the world’s stages. His memories of playing with his equally noteworthy brothers, Percy and Albert (aka “Tootie”), dovetail with their recollections. Heath reminisces about a South Philadelphia home filled with music and a close-knit family that hosted musicians performing in the city’s then thriving jazz scene.

Heath plays tenor and soprano saxes and flute. His composer credits include "C.T.A." and "Gingerbread Boy." Originally an altoist, Heath was called "Little Bird" because of the similarity in his playing to Charlie Parker, and he switched to tenor in the early '50s. Heath wrote for Chet Baker and Art Blakey during 1956-1957. Back in action in 1959, he worked with Miles Davis briefly that year, in addition to Kenny Dorham and Gil Evans, and started a string of impressive recordings for Riverside. In the 1960s, Heath also recorded with Milt Jackson and Art Farmer, and worked as an educator and a freelance arranger. During 1975-1982, Jimmy Heath teamed up with brothers in the Heath Brothers, and since then has remained active as a saxophonist and writer.

 

Tuesday, October 4, 2011, 8:00 p.m. 622 Dodge Hall, 116th and Broadway, Columbia University Campus.

Free and open to the public.




Friday and Saturday, October 28 & 29, 2011

Double Take: The Christian Scott Quintet

Heralded by Jazz Times Magazine, as “the Architect of a new commercially viable fusion,” Grammy-nominated trumpeter Christian Scott comes to the Gatehouse for two nights of incredible music with his quintet. The first evening features five new compositions that build upon the “harmolodic” musical philosophy of free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman as well as signature works from Scott’s 2007 and 2008 releases Anthem and Live from Newport. On the second evening, the Christian Scott Quintet will premiere five new compositions showcasing a new harmonic form created by Scott called Forecasting Harmony and Rhythms of the Afro-Native American Tradition of New Orleans in addition to works from his 2010 release Yesterday You Said Tomorrow.

Friday and Saturday, October 28 & 29, 2011, 7:30pm

The Gatehouse, 150 Convent Ave. at West 135th Street

Tickets: $25 For tickets, visit www.harlemstage.org, or call the Harlem Stage box office at 212-281-9240, ext. 19 or 20.

 

Co-Presented by Uptown Nights at Harlem Stage and the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project, with support from the Office of the President, Columbia University

Thursday, November 3, 2011

The Struggle and the Triumph of Latin Jazz

A Conversation with Bobby Sanabria
Moderated by Chris Washburne


Bobby Sanabria, world-renowned Latin jazz artist, percussionist, educator and four-time Grammy nominee will be featured in conversation with Professor Chris Washburne discussing the current state of Latin jazz.  Today we are experiencing one of the most critical junctures in the history of Latin jazz, with the music receiving an unprecedented amount of recognition, most notably with two Latin jazz musicians being awarded MacArthur “Genius” Grants – Miguel Zenon in 2010 and Dafnis Prieto in 2011, while at the same time, the music and the musicians who dedicate their careers to the genre face continued marginalization and struggles for equal performance and career advancement opportunities. The recent elimination of the Latin jazz Category in the Grammy Awards is just one example.  Mr. Sanabria serves as a prominent advocate and spokesperson for Latin jazz and has led the protest against the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), owners and producers of the Grammy Awards. He, along with several other musicians, has filed a class action suit to have the category reinstated.  Mr. Sanabria and Prof. Washburne will explore the current triumphs and struggles of Latin jazz and discuss their implications for the future of this vibrant and interculturally expressive music.

Thursday, November 3, 2011, 8:00 pm

622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Spring 2011 Event Archives

Thursday, February 10, 2011

African Rhythms: An Evening with                      Randy Weston and Willard Jenkins

A discussion of Randy Weston's new book, African Rhythms:  The Autobiography of Randy Weston.

African Rhythms (Duke University Press, 2010) is Randy Weston’s life story, as told by him to music journalist Willard Jenkins. The book encompasses Weston’s childhood in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, his early years as a musician in the artistic ferment of mid-twentieth-century New York, and his globe-trotting musical adventures. 

Africa is at the core of Weston’s music and spirituality. He has traversed the continent on a continuous quest to learn about its musical traditions, produced its first major jazz festival, and lived for years in Morocco, where he opened a popular jazz club, the African Rhythms Club, in Tangier. Weston’s narrative is replete with tales of the people he has met. befriended, and worked with--Langston Hughes, Melba Liston, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn, Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Paul Bowles, Candido, the Gnawa musicians of Morocco, and many others.

Randy Weston is an internationally renowned pianist, composer, and bandleader living in Brooklyn, New York. He has made more than forty albums and performed throughout the world. Weston has been inducted into the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame, designated a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, and named Jazz Composer of the Year three times by DownBeat magazine. He is the recipient of many other honors and awards, including France’s Order of Arts and Letters, the Black Star Award from the Arts Critics and Reviewers Association of Ghana, and a five-night tribute at the Montreal Jazz Festival.

Willard Jenkins is an independent arts consultant, producer, educator, and print and broadcast journalist. His writing has been featured in JazzTimes, DownBeat, Jazz Report, Jazz Forum, All About Jazz, Jazzwise, and many other publications, incuding his blog with partner Suzan Jenkins, Open Sky Jazz.

Wednesday, February 10, 2011, 7:30 pm

622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Conversations with Composers:                      Graham Collier

A discussion of Graham Collier's new book,
The Jazz Composer: Moving Music Off The Paper

“Jazz happens in real time, once” is a mantra that has provided the
inspiration for the music of British composer and author Graham Collier, who will discuss his recent book, The Jazz Composer: Moving Music off . This fascinating book treats at length the work of the three icons of jazz composition--Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Gil Evans—offering not a pastiche of their music or their musical identities, nor a copying of their orchestration techniques, but an engagement with their philosophies--their respect for the individualities of the musicians involved, their openness, and the resultant feeling that each time, the music can and will be different.
 
Graham Collier's career spans four decades of innovation at the forefront of British jazz.  Born in Tynemouth, England in 1937, on leaving school he joined the British Army as a musician. He was the first British graduate of the Berklee School of Jazz, Boston, where he studied with Herb Pomeroy. He was the first jazz composer to receive a commission from the Arts Council of Great Britain, and in 1987 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II.  His ensembles are known as Graham Collier Music and are dedicated to performing his own compositions. He has also recorded with the Australian contemporary music group The Collective, the Danish Radio Jazz Orchestra and the NDR Big Band, and for ensembles ranging from saxophone quartet to symphony orchestra. He has released 19 albums and CDs.
 
Collier has written seven books on jazz, jazz history, compositional techniques and education. In the early 1980s, he developed the six-year jazz degree course at the Sibelius Institute in Helsinki, Finland, and in 1986 he launched the Royal Academy of Music’s jazz course where he remained as artistic director until 1999. He has presented his work throughout Europe, North America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

Monday, February 21, 2011, 8:00 pm

622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public.
The author will sign copies of his book at the event.


Saturday, February 26, 2011

Conducting as Composition:                                       Adam Rudolph and his Organic Orchestra

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Harmonic Earthquakes and “Sonic” Notes from the Underground:  Improvisation and Tremors of Transatlantic Discontent

                  

Sarita McCoy Gregory, Vassar College

This talk examines the music festival documented in 2004 called Banlieues Bleues, which featured African American musicians from the AACM tradition.  In scientific parlance, harmonic earthquakes are seismic pre-tremors that predict major earthquakes.  Because the media tend to focus on the seemingly “spontaneous” events of “riots” or urban “protests,” what is often missed are the tremors and sonic notes of disquiet that precede these events.  These “harmonic earthquakes,” while often neglected, can be valuable in discovering the various strategies of resisting power by members of marginal communities.  This talk will offer reflections on interpretations of the car burnings that took place outside of Paris in 2005 as well as on the current moments of political improvisation in Tunisia and Egypt. 

Sarita McCoy Gregory is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vassar College.  Professor Gregory received her B.S. in Political Science with honors from Tuskegee University and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.  She specializes in the study of race and American political thought, ideology in political theory, African American political thought, education and democratic theory, and her research interests include the study of citizenship and transnational identities, African American political thought, and urban education policy reform. Professor Gregory's research proposes improvisation as a post-deliberative mechanism for democratic engagement and decision-making. 

Tuesday, March 8, 2011, 8:00 pm

622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public.


Thursday, March 24, 2011

Recursive Improvisations:  The Art of Eric Metcalfe

With Jason Moran and Naomi Beckwith                  

Eric Metcalfe, The Rumproller (2008)

An introduction to the art of Canadian avant-garde artist Eric Metcalfe opens out into a discussion of the complex relationship among jazz, art, and contemporary global culture.

Vancouver-based artist Eric Metcalfe (b. 1940) epitomizes the avant-garde in Canadian art. Since the late 1960s, Metcalfe's art practice has crossed and merged disciplines: painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, printmaking, performance, video and film. His work has close ties with conceptual art and the Fluxus movement, which focused on the many intersections and blendings of different artistic media and disciplines, as well as contemporary cultural activities, especially jazz, an early interest which became an important lifelong influence. His first public show was in 1966, and in 1973, he co-founded Western Front, a pioneering, artist-run centre in Vancouver.  Metcalfe holds a BFA (Visual Arts) with Distinction from the University of Victoria (1970).  He has taught at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and at the University of British Columbia. His works are held in collections in 18 Canadian museums, including the National Gallery of Canada, and 11 major public collections in Europe and the U.S., including the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). In 1992, he received a Governor General's Citation and Medal (for significant contributions to the arts); in 2006, he was awarded the Audain Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award; and in 2008 he received a Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Pianist and composer Jason Moran, a 2010 MacArthur Fellow, received a B.M. (1997) from the Manhattan School of Music, and joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory in 2010.  Moran creates adventurous, genre-crossing performances. Moran’s signature corpus marries established classical, blues, and jazz techniques with the musical influences of his generation, including funk, hip-hop, and rock, and in original compositions for his ensemble, The Bandwagon, Moran uses the human voice as a starting point for melodic structure, translating speech patterns into a musical language through which the listener can reflect on the underlying connections between speech and music. More recently, Moran has collaborated with visual/performance artists such as Adrian Piper,  incorporating new technology in imaginative intermedia performances.

Naomi Beckwith is Associate Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and also manages its Artists-in-Residence program. Her work focuses on conceptual practices in contemporary art. Her master's thesis on Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems earned Distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and prior to joining the Studio Museum, Beckwith was a project coordinator for BAMart at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and the Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.

Thursday, March 24, 2011, 7:30 pm

301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public


Monday, March 28, 2011

                                                                                  Monument Eternal:  Alice Coltrane's Spiritual Aesthetics                         

Franya Berkman, Lewis and Clark College

Alice Coltrane was a composer, improviser, guru, and widow of John Coltrane. Over the course of her musical life, she synthesized a wide range of musical genres including gospel, rhythm-and-blues, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. Her childhood experiences playing for African-American congregations in Detroit, the ecstatic and avant-garde improvisations she performed on the bandstand with her husband John Coltrane, and her religious pilgrimages to India reveal themselves on more than twenty albums of original music for the Impulse and Warner Brothers labels.  In the late 1970s she became a swami, directing an alternative spiritual community in Southern California.

Exploring her transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church pianist and bebopper, to guru Swami Turiya Sangitananda, Franya Berkman’s new book, Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane (Wesleyan University Press, 2010). illuminates her music and, in turn, reveals the exceptional fluidity of American religious practices in the second half of the twentieth century. Most of all, this book celebrates the hybrid music of an exceptional, boundary-crossing African-American artist.  Dr. Berkman’s talk will focus primarily on two aspects of Berkman’s scholarly approach: ethnomusicological life history as a mode of inquiry in jazz studies, and the necessity of defining “a spiritual aesthetics” in exploring Alice Coltrane’s work.

Franya Berkman is Assistant Professor of Music at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.  She received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University in 2003, and she is currently working on her second book, Obo Addy: Ga Master Drummer, Global Musician. Her interdisciplinary scholarly interests include spiritual, cultural, and musical hybridity in the 20th/21st century, and life history in the study of music culture.

Monday, March 28, 2011, 8:00 pm

622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public.
The author will sign copies of her book at the event.


Saturday, April 16, 2011

The Creative Music Studio:  A Symposium                With Karl Berger, moderator

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Woodstock-based Creative Music Studio was widely considered as the premier center for the study of contemporary creative music. Founded in 1971 by Karl Berger, Ingrid Sertso and Ornette Coleman, CMS brought together leading innovators in the jazz and world music communities. Unprecedented in its range and diversity, CMS was an acknowledged phenomenon in the international music world, providing participants with the rare opportunity to interact personally with the musical giants of improvisation and musical thought on a daily basis.  Hundreds of live concerts were recorded, many heralded as landmark performances. Thousands of workshops, master classes, concerts and colloquia inspired a generation of musicians who took with them the ideas, concepts and practices developed at CMS.

Throughout this day-long symposium, a series of panels, moderated by Berger, Howard Mandel, and Ben Young, will feature CMS musicians such as Oliver Lake, Adam Rudolph, Sylvain Leroux, Don Davis, Ingrid Sertso, Rob Saffer, Ilene Marder, James Emery, Peter Apfelbaum, Marilyn Crispell, Steve Gorn, and Pauline Oliveros. The panels will explore the history of CMS, assessing the impact of the CMS experience on musical developments and individual careers, as well as presenting CMS philosophies and practices, including “Music Universe”--the concept CMS pioneered that adopts an inclusive, non-stylistic focus on the common ground of the world's musical expressions, exploring and expanding multiple languages of contemporary improvised music; and “Music Mind”--finding ways to deepen the experience of playing and listening to music, focusing on attention, expression and communication.

CMF is now working with the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University for the future development and maintenance of the CMS Archive Project, a massive undertaking aimed at the preservation of the large collection of CMS live recordings created between 1972 and 1986, which featured some of the most outstanding and ground-breaking composers/performers in World Jazz, World Music, and New Music.
The Project will also include an Oral History component, and this full-day colloquium will capture many oral histories concerning the Creative Music Studio years and the variegated impact of those experiences on the musical outlook of its participants and the larger world of music and culture.

Saturday, April 16, 2011, 9:30 am to 5:30 pm

301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public

Sunday, April 17, 2011

The Columbia University Jazz Ensembles         Spring Concert                                                              Karl Berger, guest artist/conductor

Founder and director of the Creative Music Foundation, Inc., and the Creative Music Studio, Karl Berger holds a PhD in Music Aesthetics from the University of Heidelberg.  Dr. Berger is a six time winner of the Downbeat Critics Poll as a jazz soloist, recipient of commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Westdeutsche Rundfunk, Norddeutsche Rundfunk, Radio France, RAI Italy, and Südwestfunk; he received the SWF-Prize in 1994). Professor of Composition, Artist-in- Residence at universities, schools and festivals worldwide,

He has recorded and performed with Don Cherry, Lee Konitz, John McLaughlin, Gunther Schuller, the Mingus Epitaph Orchestra, Dave Brubeck, Ingrid Sertso, Dave Holland, Ed Blackwell, Ray Anderson, Carlos Ward, Pharoah Sanders, Blood Ulmer, Hozan Yamamoto and many others at festivals and concerts in the US, Canada, Europe, Africa, India, Phillippines, Japan, Mexico and Brazil, and he has served as arranger for recordings by Natalie Merchant, Buckethead, Bootsy Collins, The Swans, Sly + Robbie, Angelique Kidjo, and many others.

Sunday, April 17, 2011, 8:00 pm

Miller Theatre, 116th and Broadway

Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Improvisation and Phantasmal Media

D. Fox Harrell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in conversation with Alondra Nelson, Columbia University

With Kamau Amu Patton, moderator

According to D. Fox Harrell, who coined the term, the notion of phantasmal media is about "artful uses of computational systems. Phantasmal media works both create mental imagery and challenge and provoke users' idealized cognitive models by enabling active participation imbued with culture and critical awareness...computing to enable new imaginative possibilities and attempting to understand the cognitive origins of these possibilities are the central concerns."

D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Digital Media, joint in the Comparative Media Studies Program, Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, and in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. His research explores the relationship between imaginative cognition, digital media arts, and computation, developing new forms of interactive narrative, gaming, social computing, and other types of culturally engaged AI-based media. Harrell received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He is currently completing a book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, for the MIT Press.

Alondra Nelson is Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and also holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She writes about the intersections of science, technology, medicine and African American experience. Some of these themes are taken up in her book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, the first comprehensive discussion of the radical organizations’ health politics, to be published by the University of Minnesota Press in Fall 2011. She is co-editor with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of Race, DNA, and History, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press. With Thuy Linh Tu, Nelson edited the influential collection Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life and she is also editor of “Afrofuturism,” a special issue of Social Text.  Nelson’s essays, reviews and commentary have also appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Guardian and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is presently at work on a book about genetic genealogy testing and “the social life of DNA.”

Kamau Amu Patton, currently Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, received his MFA from Stanford University, Spring 2007. Patton has exhibited his work in solo shows in Los Angeles at Machine Project, in San Francisco at Queens Nails Annex and at Tilton Gallery in New York, and has worked on numerous community based art projects for organizations such as The San Francisco Art Institute, The School House, the Museum of Children’s Art, Southern Exposure and the Richmond Art Center. He has worked on public art projects commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission, the City of Walnut Creek, the City of San Jose, and Creative Time. Patton has worked collaboratively on artists’ projects at MoMA in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and has recently presented an intermedia performance project at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. He is a recipient of the 2010 SFMOMA SECA award and will present work in the award exhibition at the museum in December of 2011.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011, 7:30 pm

301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public


Friday and Saturday, May 13-14, 2011

The Fats Waller Dance Party                                        With Jason Moran and Meshell Ndegeocello

In this event, Jason Moran and Meshell Ndegeocello transform Harlem Stage into a dance party, as they awaken the spirit of Fats Waller and recreate the dance floor of Harlem’s long-gone jazz shrine, Small’s Paradise. Aside from its regular nightly sets, Smalls was famous for its after hours jams and rent parties.  Among the many artists Smalls hosted, Fats Waller, a seminal figure in the stride piano tradition and an important contributor to the Great American Singbook, was a regular who set the joint jumpin’ with late night jams and rent parties. 

This tribute concert will look back at that legacy, re-envisioning  the importance of moving to this music.  Backed by a seven-piece band, Moran’s musical genius shapes the party through lively compositions and arrangements, while Ndegeocello uses her masterful skills to rework Waller’s applauded tunes.

Pianist and composer Jason Moran, a 2010 MacArthur Fellow, received a B.M. (1997) from the Manhattan School of Music, and joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory in 2010.  Moran creates adventurous, genre-crossing performances. Moran’s signature corpus marries established classical, blues, and jazz techniques with the musical influences of his generation, including funk, hip-hop, and rock. On his solo piano album, Modernistic (2002), he explores the evolution of twentieth-century rhythmic techniques through his virtuosic execution of two-handed “stride” piano—a style used extensively by jazz artists in the 1920s. In original compositions for his ensemble, The Bandwagon, Moran uses the human voice as a starting point for melodic structure, translating speech patterns into a musical language through which the listener can reflect on the underlying connections between speech and music. More recently, Moran has collaborated with visual and performing artists and incorporated new technology in imaginative multimedia performances. His 2008 homage to Thelonious Monk, In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959, weaves together crafted and found audio and visual archival material and a reharmonization of the original big band arrangements, illustrating both Monk’s contribution to the history of jazz as well as the enduring power of the musical form. Through reinterpretation of jazz standards and new compositions of his own, Moran is expanding the boundaries of musical expression and playing a dynamic role in its evolution in the twenty-first century.

Meshell Ndegeocello was born Michelle Johnson in Berlin, Germany and raised in Washington DC. By the early 90's, she had landed in New York armed with a demo recorded in her bedroom, joined the Black Rock Coalition, and was soon signed to Madonna's label. Her records, 8 to date, have offered lyrical ruminations on race, love, sex, betrayal, God, and power, and she has simultaneously embraced and challenged listeners with her refusal to be pigeon-holed musically or personally. Meshell has been both celebrated and berated for her politically charged lyrics, sexual boundary crossing, and for choosing the road less traveled - a winding adventure through her own musical ambitions rather than the industry formulas.  A vast array of influences have informed all of her albums, and there are traces of her native go-go, hip hop, rock, R&B, new wave and punk in each.

A bass player above all else, Meshell brings her signature warm, fat, and melodic groove to everything she does and has appeared alongside the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Alanis Morrisette, James Blood Ulmer, The Blind Boys of Alabama, Tony Allen, John Medeski, Billy Preston, and Chaka Khan. As for her own bass-playing influences, she credits Sting, Jaco Pastorius, "Family Man" Barrett, and Stevie Wonder. Meshell was the first woman to be featured on the cover of Bass Player magazine and remains one of few women who lead the band and write the music.

Friday-Saturday, May 13 and 14, 2011
Performances at 9:00 pm and 11:00 pm
Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue at West 135th Street, New York City

Tickets: $10.  For tickets, visit www.harlemstage.org, or call the Harlem Stage box office at 212-281-9240, ext. 19 or 20.                        

Co-presented by Harlem Stage Harlem Stride, with the Harlem Jazz Shrines, in partnership with the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and  the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project, with support from the Office of the President, Columbia University.


Sunday, May 15, 2011

Habana/Harlem:  The Spanish Harlem Orchestra 

In this special edition of Harlem Stage's semi-annual Habana/Harlem series, produced by Neyda Martinez and Onel Mulet, the Grammy-winning Spanish Harlem Orchestra pays tribute to East Harlem's sultry dance club, the Park Palace, that welcomed Afro-Cuban music as it made its way to New York in the 1920s. The Park Palace, once located on the northwest corner of 110th Street and Fifth Avenue, was one of East Harlem's hottest dance clubs, serving up boleros, guarachas, and charangas from the 1920's through the 1950's. This was just one of the venues where some of the best musicians from Cuba, as well as New York Cubans and Puerto Ricans, came to perform. The Park Palace was  one of the important places where the New York Latino community created a new sound based on the roots of the music, but relevant to their contemporary world. 
 
Now in its tenth year, the Grammy-winning Spanish Harlem Orchestra is one of the most formidable and authentic Latin jazz combos of the present day. The Orchestra's musical director, Oscar Hernández, has long been considered one of the most gifted and prominent pianist/ arrangers on the contemporary Latin, Latin jazz and salsa music scenes.  Since its inception in the early 1980's, Hernández has been responsible for charting the musical course of the Rubén Blades Band, and has produced such artists as Daniel Ponce, Rafael Dejesus, Eddie Torres, Phil Hernandez, and others. Hernández has recorded and performed with Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Julio Iglesias, Ray Barretto, Earl Klugh, Dave Valentin, Johnny Pacheco, Ismael Miranda, Pete "Conde" Rodríquez, and many others.

Sunday, May 15, 2011
Performances at 5:00 pm and 7:00 pm
Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue at West 135th Street, New York City

Tickets: $10.  For tickets, visit www.harlemstage.org, or call the Harlem Stage box office at 212-281-9240, ext. 19 or 20.                        

Co-presented by Harlem Stage Harlem Stride, with the Harlem Jazz Shrines, in partnership with the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and  the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project, with support from the Office of the President, Columbia University. Produced by Neyda Martinez and Onel Mulet.

Sunday/Monday, June 5 and 6, 2011  

The Jazz Composers Institute: Orchestra Readings

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

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

Sitting bare-shouldered at the piano, the Juilliard-trained pianist Hazel Scott delighted the mixed-race clientele of artists, activists, poets, writers, tourists and celebrities at Café Society, New York’s first integrated nightclub, with her effortless blends of Chopin, Bach and Rachmaninoff with the exuberant sounds of swing. As her popularity increased and Hollywood came calling, Scott successfully challenged the studios’ treatment of black actors, demanding pay commensurate with her white counterparts, and refusing to play the subservient roles in which black actors were commonly cast, insisting that her name credit appear the same in all films: “Hazel Scott as Herself.” In 1950, Scott became the first Black performer to host her own nationally-syndicated television show, and her outspoken advocacy on behalf of African-Americans, women, and artists made her the target of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy Era.

In this talk, author Karen Chilton will present the fruits of her extensive research on Hazel Scott’s legacy as one of the pioneering women in entertainment, which culminated in her 2008 book, Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey Of A Jazz Pianist From Café Society To Hollywood To HUAC (University Of Michigan Press)

Wednesday, February 3, 2010, 7:30 pm

301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public
  
Copies of Ms. Chilton's book will be available for purchase.


Wednesday, February 10, 2010

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

Acclaimed pianist/composer Vijay Iyer and celebrated poet/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.  Continuing on the heels of their groundbreaking collaborations In What Language? (2003) and Still Life with Commentator (2006), Iyer and Ladd interviewed young American war veterans of color from the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, building an evening of music, poetry, and song that confronts what it means for soldiers of color to move from an already complex American landscape to the international context of war and imperialism--and then to return home to widespread indifference, numbing bureaucracy, and an economic crisis that hits their communities especially hard.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Performance: 7:30 pm
Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue at West 135th Street, New York City
Tickets:  $15
For tickets, visit www.harlemstage.org, or call the Harlem Stage box office at 212-281-9240, ext. 19 or 20

Co-Presented by WaterWorks at Harlem Stage and the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project, with support from the Office of the President, Columbia University


Thursday, February 18, 2010

Count Basie: Then as Now, Count’s the King
A film by Gary Keys

Introduced by Jamal Joseph, School of the Arts, Columbia University

This rich documentary film traces the history of the pianist, composer, and bandleader William “Count” Basie over several decades.  The Emmy-nominated filmmaker Gary Keys juxtaposes a roundtable discussion among former members of the Count Basie Orchestra with the driving tempo and virtuoso improvisation of Basie’s music in recorded performances. Archival clips (including a cameo appearance in Mel Brooks’ classic comedy, Blazing Saddles) and a gallery of portraits and snapshots reveal the ever-smiling face of a man as vivacious as the grooves he delivers—his good humor suffusing the music and the players all around him, from Lester Young to Ella Fitzgerald.

At the conclusion of the film, the filmmaker Gary Keys will engage in conversation with Jamal Joseph, director of the Graduate Film Program at the School of the Arts, Columbia University.

Thursday, February 18, 2010, 7:30 pm

Lifetime Screening Room, 513 Dodge Hall

Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public; reception to follow.
Co-presented with the Graduate Film Program, School of the Arts, Columbia University


Thursday, March 4, 2010

How Does Music Free Us?                                           Afro-Asian Revolutionary Concepts in New Music

With Fred Ho, author/composer/activist       

In this talk, Chinese American composer, baritone saxophonist, scholar-writer, producer, matriarchal revolutionary socialist and aspiring Luddite Fred Ho explores the role of music, both in imagining a new society, and in its applied role in foreshadowing or prefiguring a revolutionary society and a transformed humanity. 

Fred Ho has created a dozen operas, multimedia suites and martial arts ballets/manga music/theater epic works, recorded 15 albums of his music, and authored and edited/co-edited five books, including the 1996 American Book Award-winning Sounding Off! Music As Subversion/Resistance/Revolution (with Ron Sakolsky); Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political And Cultural Connections Between African Americans And Asian Americans (Duke University Press); and Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader (University of Minnesota Press)

Thursday, March 4, 2010, 7:30pm

301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public

Copies of Mr. Ho’s newest book, Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader (University of Minnesota Press) will be available for purchase.t


Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Jazz Studies Beyond the Commercial Album

A discussion with Larry Appelbaum, Jason Moran, and Ben Young, with John Szwed, Columbia University

Moderated by Brent Hayes Edwards                        Columbia University  

Throughout their brief history, both jazz and the scholarship around it have focused strongly on commercial recordings.  As Max Roach was fond of saying, "Records are our textbooks."  Yet there was always a shadow world beyond these official audio texts--one of alternate takes, acetates and cassettes of live recordings, radio broadcasts, and club appearances, as well as pirated copies of commercial recordings no longer available.  Fascinating and revealing as these documents were, they were talked about yet seldom used as the basis for published materials.

But with the recent creation of new and inexpensive technology, mass downloading, the virtual collapse of the recording business, and the flood of non-commercial and unlicensed music on the Web, this alternate universe of music has overwhelmed scholars and the public alike.  This panel is the first public discussion of this phenomenon and its implications for the future of jazz scholarship and the music itself.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 7:30pm

301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public


Friday, March 26, 2010

Uptown Nights at Harlem Stage:
The Black Rock Coalition Orchestra salutes       The High Priestess of Soul

Existing as a performance entity since 1987, the Black Rock Coalition Orchestra (BRCO) is a collaboration of skilled progressive artists of color whose talents lend themselves to the musical re-interpretation of historically significant bodies of work, entertaining audiences at Central Park SummerStage, Symphony Space, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Joe’s Pub, BAM Café, and Town Hall, as well as internationally.

Friday, March 26, 2010
Dialogue:  6:00 pm
Pre-Show DJ Mixer:  7:30 pm
Performance: 8:30 pm
Aaron Davis Hall
150 Convent Avenue at West 135th Street, New York City
Tickets:  $15
For tickets, visit www.harlemstage.org, or call the Harlem Stage box office at 212-281-9240, ext. 19 or 20

Co-Presented by Uptown Nights at Harlem Stage and the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project, with support from the Office of the President, Columbia University


Thursday, April 1, 2010

Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing:                             The Culture of Uplift Identity and Politics in            Black Musical Theater                                            

Paula Marie Seniors, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
 


From 1898 to 1911, Bob Cole, James Weldon Johnson, and J. Rosamond Johnson formed one of the most prolific song writing teams of their era. In their all-black musicals Shoo Fly Regiment (1906–1908) and The Red Moon (1908–1910), theater, uplift, and politics collided. Following Booker T. Washington’s lead, W.E.B. DuBois’s ideology, the tenets of Atlanta University, and Cole’s own “Colored Actor’s Declaration of Independence,” and informed by their brushes with United States racism and subjugation, the team actively worked to “become leaders and helpers of their race” through music and theater. Their careers as producers of black musical theater lasted approximately four years, but these years proved pivotal to musical theater and politics.

In this talk, author Paula Marie Seniors argues that, far from being conformists, Cole and the Johnsons deployed the very tools of hegemony to create a distinctly black theater informed by black politics, history, and culture, forging a lasting legacy that informed future African American initiatives in the control of the means of artistic production.

Paula Marie Seniors, assistant professor in Africana Studies and Sociology at Virginia Tech, won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians for her 2009 book, Beyond "Lift Every Voice and Sing:” The Culture of Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater.

Thursday April 1, 2010, 8:00 pm

622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public


Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Flirting with America:                                                   The Zestful Tale of Italian Jazz

 
Enzo Capua, with Sara Villa, State University of Milan 


This conversation focuses on the key figures and events that have characterized the evolution of jazz in Italy, from its origins just before the Fascist era to the present day. Capua and Villa discuss the roles that musicians, critics, festivals, and educational institutions have played in engaging African-American and European musical cultures as a basis for forging a distinguished Italian jazz tradition.
 
Journalist and producer Enzo Capua is the New York correspondent for the Italian jazz magazine Musica Jazz and the Australian Radio SBS, and is the US representative for Umbria Jazz, one of the world’s most prestigious jazz festivals. He has worked as a a radio anchorman for RAI National Italian Radio and as music consultant for the Italian Cultural Institute of New York. Since 2005 Capua has been the president of TA YU Productions Corporation, which has realized documentaries for several major television networks.
 
Sara Villa is 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 on 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 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.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010, 7:30pm

301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Jazz Festivals and Cosmopolitan Vernaculars

Anne C. Dvinge, University of Copenhagen

As jazz continues to migrate across national, ethnic, and cultural borders, jazz festivals function as physical and symbolic spaces where the dynamics between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan are put into play. On the one hand, these events are thoroughly vernacular affairs, where communities define and celebrate themselves. But on the other, the celebrations are often aimed at both the local culture of a city and at local, national, and transnational articulations of jazz communities, providing contact zones not just between audiences, performers, and those at the fringes of the festivals, but also between different soundscapes and “acoustemologies”.

In this talk Anne Dvinge will take a closer look at jazz festivals, and specifically the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, as manifestations of this double sense of the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, where jazz enters into dialogue with local music cultures. Perhaps, in the constant negotiation and renegotiation of these positions, jazz offers a way out of the either/or bind of the global versus the local.

Dr. Anne Dvinge is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Scholar at The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, with a grant from the Danish Research Council for the Humanities. She received her PhD in American studies from the University of Copenhagen with the dissertation Between History and Hearsay: Imagining Jazz at the Turn of the 21st Century. She teaches and has published on American literature and jazz, and this talk is part of a larger transatlantic research project on jazz festivals and jazz as a cosmopolitan vernacular.

Thursday, April 29, 2010, 8:00 pm

614 Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public


Thursday, May 13, 2010

The Voice Within: A Work-in-Progress Showing

Conceived and composed by Diedre Murray
Book and lyrics by Marcus Gardley


The Voice Within is a richly textured exploration of the voice—as vocal instrument, as the expression of all we behold and all that emerges from us—as seen through the lens of a contemporary urban story laced with myth.

Thursday, May 13, 2010
Performance: 7:30 pm
Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue at West 135th Street, New York City
Tickets:  $15
For tickets, visit www.harlemstage.org, or call the Harlem Stage box office at 212-281-9240, ext. 19 or 20

Co-Presented by WaterWorks at Harlem Stage and the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project, with support from the Office of the President, Columbia University






Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Clawing at the Limits of Cool:
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the                  Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever

Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University                          Salim Washington, Brooklyn College

Professors Griffin and Washington will discuss aspects of their recent collaboration on the book Clawing at the Limits of Cool (Thomas Dunne Books, 2008),  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 cultural impact of their collaboration. This conversation will further illuminate the drama of Davis's and Coltrane's collaboration, during which each artist made tremendous progress toward personal artistic goals, forever changing the landscape of music.

Farah Jasmine Griffin is  one of the major African-Americanists in the United States. Professor Griffin’s fields of inquiry include African American literature, music, history and politics. The recipient of numerous honors and awards for her teaching and scholarship, she is the author of Who Set You Flowin’?: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford University Press, 1995) and  If You Can’t Be Free Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (The Free Press, 2001).

Composer and scholar Salim Washington plays tenor saxophone, flute, and oboe, and performs regularly with ensembles in the New York area, including James Jabbo Ware's Me, We, and Them Orchestra, Fred Ho's Afro Asian Music Ensemble, KuUmba Frank Lacy's Vibe Tribe, and the Donald Smith sextet, featuring Tulivu Donna Cumberbatch at Harlem's St. Nick's Pub. Washington is an associate professor at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, and a senior researcher at the Hitchcock Institute of Studies in American Music. He has recently returned to New York after an extended period of on-site research on the jazz cultures of Bahia (Brazil) and South Africa.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 7:30 pm

301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public


Saturday, November 21, 2009

Uptown Nights at Harlem Stage
Cabaret Chocolat:  An Autumn Night's Soiree

Tamar-Kali and her Psychochamber Ensemble

Tamar-Kali and her all-female Psychochamber Ensemble are joined by special guests, including The Main Attraction, Monstah Black, Keibpoli, Master of Ceremony “Marco the Magician,” and a rare solo performance by chanteuse-accordioniste Marni Rice. The evening begins with an open bar mixer, followed by a theatrical night of serenades, burlesque, and illusion.

Saturday, November 21, 2009
Dialogue:  6:00 pm
Performance: 7:30 pm
Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue at West 135th Street, New York City
Tickets:  $15
For tickets, visit www.harlemstage.org, or call the Harlem Stage box office at 212-281-9240, ext. 19 or 20

Co-Presented by Uptown Nights at Harlem Stage and the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project, with support from the Office of the President, Columbia University

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Uptown Nights at Harlem Stage
Dana Leong: Milk and Jade

Multi-instrumentalist Dana Leong has worked, both as performer and composer, with Paquito D’Rivera, Dafnis Prieto, P. Diddy, Kanye West, Wynton Marsalis, Yoko Ono, Ryuichi Sakamoto and many more.  His ensemble, Milk and Jade, is considered as one of the finest and most innovative urban music quartets in the United States. 

Saturday, December 12, 2009
Dialogue:  6:00 pm
Performance: 8:30 pm
Harlem Stage Gatehouse
150 Convent Avenue at West 135th Street, New York City
Tickets:  $15
For tickets, visit www.harlemstage.org, or call the Harlem Stage box office at 212-281-9240, ext. 19 or 20

Co-Presented by Uptown Nights at Harlem Stage and the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project, with support from the Office of the President, Columbia University


Friday, October 23, 2009

The Music of Carla Bley                                               

Amy C. Beal, University of California, Santa Cruz

Carla Bley epitomizes the quintessential American composer: unselfconsciously daring, drawing freely on vernacular idioms and local dialects, and evoking images of familiar places. Her work is eclectic, vigorous, and full of wry humor, and her larger compositions, such as the monumental hour and forty-five-minute “jazz opera” Escalator Over the Hill (1968-71) explore suite-like formal designs, idiosyncratic uses of harmony, a fondness for quotation, and a tendency to juxtapose stylistic parodies with extended moments of chaotic freedom. The results are whimsical, baffling, entertaining, emotional, sophisticated, and—like Ives and Ellington in their time—totally unprecedented.

With Columbia Ph.D candidate Beau Bothwell (Historical Musicology) as respondent, Professor Beal will explore Carla Bley’s influential and prolific work, which positions her as a central, yet fundamentally unexplored character in the historical narratives of twentieth-century American music.

Amy C. Beal is a musicologist specializing in recent American music and the history of experimentalism. She is the author of New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany From the Zero Hour to Reunification(University of California Press, 2006). She has spoken and published on Morton Feldman, Harry Partch, Darmstadt, John Cage, David Tudor, Musica Elletronica Viva, Johanna Beyer, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and is currently completing a book on Carla Bley for the University of Illinois Press "American Composers" series.  Beal is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Friday, October 23, 2009, 4:00 pm

622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

This event, which is free and open to the public, is co-sponsored by the Center for Jazz Studies and the Department of Music at Columbia University.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

The Louis Armstrong Lecture, Fall 2009

James Brown and the Revolution of the Mind

Greg Tate, Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor, Columbia University                                           

Professor Tate will read and discuss  excerpts from his forthcoming book for Riverhead Press on the cultural significance of the life ot James Brown. 

Greg Tate's books include Everything But The Burden, What White People Are Taking From Black Culture (Harlem Moon/Random House, 2003), Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and The Black Experience (Acapella/Lawrence Hill, 2003); and Flyboy In The Buttermilk:  Essays on American Culture (Simon and Schuster, 1993).

His writings on culture and politics have been published in the New York Times, the Village Voice, the Washington Post, Artforum, Rolling Stone, VIBE, Premiere, Essence, Suede, Wire, One World, Downbeat, and JazzTimes.  Tate was recently acknowledged by Source magazine as one of the "Godfathers of Hiphop Journalism" for his groundbreaking work on the genre's social, political, economic and cultural implications.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009, 7:30 pm

301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public


Monday, October 19, 2009

"In The Best Possible Light":                                     The Classic Jazz Photography of                          Herman Leonard

A discussion of  "In The Best Possible Light:  Herman Leonard's Jazz," an exhibition of Leonard's work at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

With Herman Leonard, photographer; Kellie Jones, Professor of Art History, Columbia University; and Leonard exhibition co-curators C. Daniel Dawson, Diedra Harris-Kelley and Garnette Cadogan.

Introduced and Moderated by Robert G. O'Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Founder, The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University

The jazz photographs of Herman Leonard comprise an indispensible historical record—particularly of the late Forties moment when the new music called bebop was crystallizing. How, without Leonard’s photographs, could we know how rehearsals at a 52nd Street club looked? How else to get a view from the stage of mid-career Ella Fitzgerald in full performance flow? To see Thelonious Monk, hatless, revising a score between sets at Minton’s in Harlem? Or Louis Armstrong, not mugging for the crowd, but in a reflective moment behind the scenes?

But Leonard was more than a faithful recorder of deeds:  he was an artist. Whether illuminating a dark club’s smoke to suggest mystery and possibility; setting lights behind musicians to create a sense of sculptural depth; or making a gentle still-life of a musician’s shoes or hat—Leonard was revealing beauty in the moment. Consider his portraits of Miles Davis, whom Leonard calls his best subject: how light traces the angular facial structure and catches in the fiery eyes. “Photography is painting with light,” said Leonard, and in its glow, Davis’s skin looks, as Leonard saw it, “like black satin.”

As New Orleans trumpeter Kermit Ruffins enthused, Leonard’s photographs of these central figures in jazz history “makes me feel I can walk over and shake their hands.” For Leonard himself, “I want to show jazz artists in the best possible light--to tell their truth, but to tell it in terms of beauty.”

More about Herman Leonard

Monday, October 19, 2009, 7:30 pm

301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public


Thursday, September 17, 2009

Creative Life:  Music, Politics, People, and Machines

Bob Ostertag, University of California, Davis

Bob Ostertag will read and discuss issues from his new book, Creative Life:  Music, Politics, People, and Machines (University of Illnois Press, 2009).  In this dazzling set of writings from a musical artist who has worked on the cutting edge of new music for thirty years, Professor Ostertag explores the common ground and points of friction among music, creativity, politics, culture, and technology. In terrain ranging from the guerrilla underground in El Salvador's civil war to the drag queen underground in San Francisco and New York, these essays combine journalism and autobiography to explore fundamental questions of what art is and what role it can occupy in a violent and fragmented world, a world in which daily events compromise the universality toward which art strives. Drawing on his intimate engagement with political conflict in Latin America and the Balkans, Ostertag identifies an art of "insurgent politics" that struggles to expand the parameters of the physical and social world.

Composer, performer, historian, instrument builder, journalist, activist, kayak instructor--Bob Ostertag's work cannot easily be summarized or pigeon-holed. He has published 21 CDs of music, two movies, two DVDs, and two books. His writings on contemporary politics have been published on every continent and in many languages. Electronic instruments of his design are at the cutting edge of both music and video performance technology. He has performed at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe, and his radically diverse collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, John Zorn, Mike Patton, Anthony Braxton, Lynn Breedlove, Justin Bond, and Pierre Hébert. He is currently Professor of Technocultural Studies and Music at the University of California at Davis (more).

Professor Ostertag will sign copies of his new book following the lecture and discussion.

"Ostertag tells stories from his own experience as an artist and political activist. He searches for the connections and differences in the illumination sought by the artist and the insight sought by the activist, and he explores the quest for transcendence and universality that unites art and politics and also helps explain their divergence. There are no answers here, but rather a brilliant contemplation of the discontent and yearning that motivates our better natures." -- Frances Fox Piven, author of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America

Thursday, September 17, 2009, 7:30 pm

620 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Burnt Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber:     

A Workshop in Conducted Improvisation

In this unprecedented performance workshop, open to any student performers from any and all traditions--musicians, poets, actors, dancers, musicians, writers--Greg Tate, Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies for Fall 2009, 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.

As leader of the innovative musical ensemble Burnt Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber, Tate uses Conduction in live performance and in the studio to compose and select material from a wide range of composers and genres--Thelonious Monk, Chaka Khan, Jimi Hendrix, Charles Mingus, Iggy Pop, and others. In this workshop, joined by  members of the Arkestra and the workshop participants, Tate will demonstrate these techniques and create new music.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009, 7-9:30 pm

301 Philosophy Hall

Columbia University Morningside Campus

Sponsored by the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, and presented in collaboration with the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program and the Music Performance Program, Columbia University. Photo of Burnt Sugar by Laura Williams.


BURNT SUGAR, THE ARKESTRA CHAMBER is the creation of writer/guitarist/producer Greg Tate.  Formed in 1999, Burnt Sugar was conceived as a contemporary version of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew band, exploring the connective tissue binding jazz, rock, funk, 20th century composition, and African music in a lyrical, seductive, exploratory, improvisational manner.

Employing Conduction, an interpretative system for improvisors developed by Lawrence“ Butch” Morris, Tate guides the band through improvisations on each of its song forms. As a result, each performance is an original mutation in tune with the collective personality of the audience as well as the individual character and talents of the players.

Burnt Sugar performs regularly at the usual hotbed venues in New York, including; Joe’s Pub, Tonic, Symphony Space, The Blue Note, Makor, The Knitting Factory, Galapagos, CBGBs, BAM Café, Aaron Davis Hall, Lotus and The Cutting Room.

About Greg Tate

Greg Tate will be the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies in Fall 2009.  Tate's writings on culture and politics have been published in the New York Times, the Village Voice, the Washington Post, Artforum, Rolling Stone, VIBE, Premiere, Essence, Suede, The Wire, One World, Downbeat, and JazzTimes.  Tate was recently acknowledged by The Source magazine as one of the "Godfathers of Hiphop Journalism" for his groundbreaking work on the genre's social, political, economic and cultural implications.

His books include Everything But The Burden, What White People Are Taking From Black Culture (Harlem Moon/Random House, 2003), Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and The Black Experience (Acapella/Lawrence Hill, 2003); and Flyboy In The Buttermilk:  Essays on American Culture (Simon and Schuster, 1993). Tate is now working on a book for Riverhead Press on the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. 

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Friday, April 17, 2009

Sweet Willie Rollbar's Orientation: 

A Film Screening and Discussion

With Baikida Carroll, Oliver Lake, and K. Curtis Lyle
Moderated 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.  Fragmented and surreal, "Sweet Willie Rollbar's Orientation" is one of the legendary productions of BAG,

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.  The discussion will be 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 public

Monday, April 6, 2009

Technotopia 1969: Miles Davis at the Crossroads

Professor Michael E. Veal
Department of Music, Yale University

Harald Kisiedu, Department of Music, Columbia University, respondent

This paper will examine Miles Davis's influential 1969 double album Bitches Brew not simply as a foundational piece of jazz-rock fusion, but rather as a piece of "electric jazz" which drew on aspects of popular practices and the jazz-avant-garde in equal measure.

Ethnomusicologist Michael Veal, Associate Professor of Music at Yale University, addresses topics of biography, history, analysis, and interpretation in various musics of Africa and the African diaspora. His most recent book, Dub: Soundscapes & Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Wesleyan University Press, 2007) examines the ways in which the studio-based innovations of Jamaican recording engineers during the 1970s created a sonic space for the emergence of a distinctly post-colonial Jamaican culture locally, while they worked to transform the structure and concept of the post-WWII popular song globally.

Monday, April 6, 2009, 8 pm

622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus

Free and open to the public

Recent Events

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Jack Kerouac's Jazz:  A Conversation

Sara Villa, Università degli Studi di Milano

David Amram, composer

John Szwed, Professor of Music and Jazz Studies, Columbia University

An interdisciplinary look at poet and novelist Jack Kerouac’s little-known writings on jazz, and his improvised voice-over and Amram’s soundtrack to Pull My Daisy, the 1959 landmark in new American cinema directed by Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 7:30 pm
301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus
Free and open to the public

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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Writing From A Cave:  Haruki Murakami and Jazz

Kiyofumi Tsubaki, Tsuda College, Tokyo; Visiting Scholar, Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University

Emily Lordi, respondent

Japan’s acceptance of jazz was unique; most people became jazz fans through listening to jazz records, and in this process the “jazz café” played a very important role.  A Japanese jazz café typically presented a very dark, cave-like (or, perhaps, womb-like) atmosphere, separated from the actual world, where jazz records were played at high volume.  Customers were not permitted to talk to each other, and in any event it was usually impossible to do so.  Consequently, the act of listening to jazz became intensely personal.
  
The writer Haruki Murakami's intense engagement with jazz is well known; with a collection of thousands of records, he even became an owner of a jazz café in Tokyo in the 1970s.  With particular reference to Murakami’s best-selling novel Norwegian Wood, Professor Tsubaki and respondent Emily Lordi will consider the relationship between jazz and Murakami’s literature, connecting Japan’s acceptance of jazz with the peculiarly womb-like characteristics of Murakami’s fiction.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009, 8 pm
622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus
Free and open to the public

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Friday, January 30, 2009                  

Black Music, Ownership, and Value  

Ronald Radano, University of Wisconsin, Madison   Respondent:  Harald Kisiedu

Ronald Radano balances his teaching between the programs in
musicology and ethnomusicology and the Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison. His primary work is that of an Americanist with special interests in cultural theory, race, globalization, popular music and the history of North American black music. He is author and editor of three books: New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique (1993), Music and the Racial Imagination (2000; co-edited with Philip V. Bohlman) and Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (2003), all published by the University of Chicago Press. Currently, he is principally at work on a new book on black music, cultural ownership and aesthetics, while also launching two secondary projects: the first, a study of the global circulation of African-American musical rhythm; the second, a critical meditation on private listening and the crisis of taste.

Friday, January 30, 2009
4PM, 620 Dodge Hall
Columbia University Morningside Campus

Co-sponsored by the Center for Jazz Studies and the Department of Music, Columbia University.  Columbia's Music Colloquia are free and open to the public.  Refreshments will be served after the talk.

Thursday and Saturday, October 9 and 11, 2008

A Power Stronger Than Itself: A Celebration of the AACM

Curated by George E. Lewis and Christopher McIntyre

In conjunction with the recent publication of his book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008), composer, musician, former Kitchen music curator, and long-time AACM member George Lewis hosts performances, a panel discussion, and a book signing. Founded in 1965 on the South Side of Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is a dynamic collective that has reconfigured the trajectory of music-making in America through its devotion to the furthering of artistic experimentation and its forward-thinking approach to composition, performance, improvisation, and collectivity.

Co-sponsored by the Kitchen, the Edwin H. Case Chair in American Music, and the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University.

Performances by Muhal Richard Abrams, Amina Claudine Myers, and Wet Ink
Thursday, October 9, 8pm

Performances by Nicole Mitchell, Matana Roberts, and Wet Ink
Saturday, October 11, 2008, 8 pm

The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, Dance, Performance, Film, and Literature

Tickets: $10

A Power Stronger Than Itself: Book Signing and Panel Discussion

Moderated by Christopher McIntyre, with George E. Lewis, Brent Hayes Edwards, Amina Claudine Myers, Nicole Mitchell, Matana Roberts, and Ted Panken, followed by a book signing by Lewis.
Saturday, October 11, 2008, 5 pm
The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, Dance, Performance, Film, and Literature
Free

Associated Event: The Music of Oliver Lake and Reggie Nicholson

Friday, October 10, 8 pm
Community Church of New York, 40 East 35th Street
Sponsored by the AACM New York Chapter, Inc.

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© 2008, Columbia University Center for Jazz Studies.
Last Updated September 2, 2008.