Max Roach

Jazz legends Max Roach and Cecil Taylor will headline a free, outdoor concert at Columbia University on Sunday, June 4, in a celebration of their first duet performance together 21 years ago on the Columbia campus. The concert is the first of two free, outdoor performances of the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival during its New York City run. Columbia is hosting the concert on Low Plaza, its main campus plaza, through its Center for Jazz Studies, launched last fall.

The reunion of these two jazz legends is a major component of the festival, which includes concerts by Dr. John and Galactic (June 6) and Al Green and Odetta (June 7) at Ramsey Playfield in Central Park. In The New York Times (5-26-00) jazz writer Ben Ratliff described the last performance by Roach and Taylor in 1989 as "one of the best shows I have ever seen."

The festival, which opens in New York City following engagements in Washington, Philadelphia and Boston, features performances in clubs, parks and halls around the city, most of them downtown and in midtown. Many jam sessions are free, but the Columbia concert will be one of only two free outdoor events and the only uptown component of the series.

Although Columbia is noted for its many and varied cultural offerings on campus during the academic year, it has rarely opened its main plaza for a major public cultural event. Organizers plan to accommodate 15,000 to 20,000 people at the concert, which begins at 6 P.M.

The concert also will feature the Davis S. Ware Quartet, with Ware on saxophone, Guillermo Brown on drums, William Parker on bass and Matthew Shipp on piano; the Joey Baron and Ron Carter Duo; and the LaGuardia High School Jazz Band, winner of a nationwide high school jazz competition.

Cecil Taylor

Roach and Taylor first performed together on Saturday night, Dec. 15, 1979 at the former McMillin Theater, now Miller Theater on the Columbia campus at Broadway at 116th Street. Since then, the two have performed together again, but their first duet engagement was, according to the jazz critic and essayist Stanley Crouch, 'one of the major musical events of the age."

"One anticipated the evening with special interest," wrote Robert Palmer in the following Monday's issue of The New York Times, 'because Mr. Roach, the most creative and adventurous drummer to emerge from the first generation of modern jazz in the 1940's, would be working with the premier jazz pianist of the 60's." Captured on an LP produced by Soulnote in 1984, the McMillin Theater concert demonstrated, Crouch wrote, that Roach "alone of his generation, was able ... to embrace the conception that Cecil Taylorís style demands."

Columbia's role as host of the concert is a measure of the success of the inaugural year of the Center for Jazz Studies, founded and directed by Professor Robert O'Meally, the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. The center is the first in the nation to explore jazz, not simply as a musical idiom, but as a way to understand the soul of American culture through interdisciplinary studies in music, literature, the arts and the social sciences.

A trailblazer in the nascent field of jazz studies, O'Meally is the editor of the first textbook on jazz studies, The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1998). A key adviser to the Jazz at Lincoln Center Educational Program, O'Meally has lent his expertise to its nationwide, K-12 programming.

The center has received start up funding from the Ford Foundation and recently was awarded nearly $500,000 by the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation to establish the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professorship in Jazz Studies at Columbia.

O'Meally's stature in the jazz world is such that this summer, at the Newport, R.I. Jazz Festival, the nation's oldest, he will revive an academic component of the event, leading a two-day symposium on jazz with other distinguished scholars and writers in the field.