Boyd, a prolific Harlem-based author and frequent Downbeat contributor, will get the new series off to a swingin' start, as we approach the close of a most productive year for the museum. Monday, December 3, 2007
JAZZ for CURIOUS READERS
6:00 pm | At the NY Public Library
203 West 115th Street
FREE!
Guest: Author Herb Boyd
Herb Boyd is an award-winning author and journalist who has published sixteen books and countless articles for national magazines and newspapers. Brotherman--The Odyssey of Black Men in America --An Anthology (One World/Ballantine, 1995), co-edited with Robert Allen of the Black Scholar journal, won the American Book Award for nonfiction. In 1999, Boyd won three first place awards from the New York Association of Black Journalists for his articles published in the Amsterdam News. Among his most popular books are Black Panthers for Beginners (Writers & Readers, 1995); Autobiography of a People--Three Centuries of African American History Told By Those Who Lived It (Doubleday, 2000); and Pound for Pound--The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson (Amistad, 2005). Most recently he worked with world music composer and musician Yusef Lateef on his autobiography for Morton Books, The Gentle Giant, released in 2006.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
JAZZ for CURIOUS LISTENERS
7:00 pm | At the Harlem School of the Arts
645 St. Nicholas Ave. (off 141st Street)
Call for reservations: 212 348-8300
FREE
December topic: Harlem Jazz!
Tonight's feature: The Twenties
The 1920s heralded the crystallization of the musical genre jazz, with “American Gabriel" Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens, and his trips with Joe “King" Oliver to Chicago, where Armstrong's artistic revolution took root. In this decade Armstrong also spent over a year with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra in New York, influencing the classy band's large ensemble sound and style, which, through arranger Don Redman, began incorporating New Orleans polyphony.
This was also the decade in which a young pianist and band leader, Duke Ellington, moved from Washington, DC to New York upon the suggestion of another great pianist and composer, Fats Waller. Ellington's band was a staple in Harlem, performing a numerous uptown clubs, most notably the Cotton Club, which broadcast on radio, spreading jazz and Ellington's musical genius across the nation's airwaves.
Waller was one of the best artists in Harlem performing the piano style called stride, the name of which, as museum executive director Loren Schoenberg writes in The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jazz, “came from the expert left-hand figures that alternated between lower single or octave notes and higher, more fully fingered chords." The main creators of this style were James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion" Smith.
The above is just the tip of the iceberg, so come to the Harlem School of the Arts to discover more about the roots of jazz in Harlem, and why Harlem was essential to the music's national dominance during the “Jazz Age."
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
JAZZ for CURIOUS LISTENERS
7:00 pm | At the Harlem School of the Arts
645 St. Nicholas Ave. (off 141st Street)
Call for reservations: 212 348-8300
FREE
December's focus is Harlem Jazz!
Tonight's feature: The Thirties
The “Jazz Age" is the term representing the roaring twenties after World War I, and before the Depression. For Harlemites, and, via radio, the entire nation, an essential way that people confronted the Depression blues in the 1930s was through the dances and joie de vivre of jazz, particularly as played by big bands, whose lilting swing helped lift the nation's spirits.
This decade has been called the Swing Era as a result. The 1930s saw “American popular culture hit a high-water mark in which stylistic elegance and sophistication were rewarded with mass acceptance," writes museum director Loren Schoenberg in The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jazz.
Schoenberg will detail much more about jazz in Harlem during the '30s, an era that solidified jazz permanently in the cultural memory of the United States and the entire world. As always for Jazz for Curious Listeners, recordings will leaven the evening, and audience contributions will complete the feedback loop of discussion.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
HARLEM SPEAKS
Trumpeter Eddie Henderson
6:30 pm | at the Harlem School of the Arts
645 St. Nicholas Ave. (off 141st Street)
Call for reservations: 212 348-8300
FREE
Eddie Henderson is one of the few trumpeters strongly influenced by Miles Davis' work of his early fusion period. He grew up in San Francisco, studied trumpet at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, but was trained to be a doctor when he permanently chose music as complementary avocation. Henderson has worked with John Handy, Tyrone Washington, and Joe Henderson, in addition to his own group. He gained recognition for his work with the Herbie Hancock Sextet (1970-1973), although his own records (which utilized electronics) tended to be commercial. After Hancock broke up his group, Henderson worked with Art Blakey and Mike Nock, recorded with Charles Earland, and later, in the 1970s, led a rock-oriented group. In the '90s, he returned to playing acoustic hard bop (touring with Billy Harper in 1991) while also working as a psychiatrist.
Come to find out the intersection of the mind, psychiatry and jazz with Eddie Henderson, who is most qualified to reveal the role and function of such conjunctions.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
JAZZ for CURIOUS LISTENERS
7:00 pm | At the Harlem School of the Arts
645 St. Nicholas Ave. (off 141st Street)
Call for reservations: 212 348-8300
FREE
December's focus is Harlem Jazz!
Tonight's feature: The Forties
“By the end of the '30s, a new generation of players had appeared who felt stifled by the ubiquity of big bands and their limited opportunities for full-blown improvisation. Some of the best of them gathered in a handful of after-hours clubs in Harlem," writes museum director Loren Schoenberg in The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Jazz.
The 1940s found musicians going to new musical territories, taking the innovations of Armstrong, Ellington, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Don Byas and Papa Jo Jones to fresh melodic, harmonic and rhythmic heights. The largely small group revolution that become known as bebop hit the musical scene like the “bombs" dropped by drummers Max Roach and Kenny Clarke as the twirling, brisk improvisations of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell spun curlicue musical architecture from thin air.
Come discover the musical magic of Harlem Jazz in the 1940s!
Friday, December 21, 2007
HARLEM IN THE HIMALAYAS
Ohad Talmor Newsreel
7:00 pm
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street
New York, NY 10011
Box Office: 212.620.5000 ext. 344
$20
Ohad Talmor, tenor saxophone; Shane Endsley, trumpet, Jacob Sacks, piano, Matt Pavolka, bass, Dan Weiss, drums
This group is a innovative project, performing Talmor's brand new repertoire - with a social conscience - crossing paths with North Indian Music, Funk and whatever other music his musical mind digested over the course of his continuous growth!
Ohad Talmor was born in 1970, in Lyon, France of Israeli parents. He grew up in Geneva Switzerland, in a house with classical music on at all times. At age five, he started studying piano at the Geneva conservatory.
Upon moving to Florida in 1987 as an exchange student, Talmor took up the saxophone after falling in love with the little jazz he had heard before leaving Switzerland. Following his return to Europe, he moved along a musical path which led him first to study musicology at the University in parallel to gigging around town.
Eventually, performing took over studying as Talmor immersed himself into the European jazz scene. Parallel to his activities as a performer on the saxophones/clarinet, Talmor took on a growing passion for composing and arranging which eventually led him in 1995 to the Manhattan School of Music on a full scholarship. He received his Diploma in Composition in 1997 and since then is continuing to live in Brooklyn, NY, performing, composing, arranging - and sometimes acting - in a wealth of different projects.
Since moving to New York in 1995, Ohad Talmor has put together five different groups for which he has written distinctive repertoire as well as co-leading two distinct projects: musical director of the Lee Konitz Nonet and the Steve Swallow Sextet. As an arranger/composer, his writing includes pieces for the Brecker Brothers, Lee Konitz, Steve Swallow and various Big Bands such as the Matosinhos Jazz Orchestra, the European Broadcasting Ensemble as well as music written for leading classical musicians such as Martha Argerich, the Spring String Quartet in Austria and the Axis String Quartet in New York.
Talmor is actively involved in writing for new media. This includes music for NPR and the SciFi channel, part of their radio-drama series, and for Random House and Penguin- Putnam audio books series as well as writing music for movies.
Thursday, December 28, 2007
HARLEM SPEAKS - note different location!
Legendary vocalist Andy Bey
6:30 pm | at the Hansborough Recreation Center
35 West 134th Street
call 212-348-8300 to RSVP
FREE
Born in 1939, the Newark (NJ) native was a genuine child prodigy as a pianist and singer, garnering appearances at the famed Apollo Theater and on television's Spotlight On Harlem and The Star Time Kids, sharing stages with the likes of Louis Jordan, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, before he turned 18. He then formed a vocal trio alongside his sisters Salome and Geraldine and embarked for Europe; Andy & The Bey Sisters were celebrated regulars at The Blue Note in Paris and other venues in Europe from the late 1950s into the early 1960s, when they returned to the U.S. and continued to perform and record (for RCA and Prestige) until the trio disbanded in 1966.
For the two decades thereafter, Bey recorded and performed with such notables as McCoy Tyner, Lonnie Liston Smith, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis, Eddie Harris and others. He was featured vocalist on Gary Bartz' acclaimed Harlem Bush Music projects and for an extended period with Horace Silver, including Silver's The United States of Mind album sequence. In 1991, Bey returned to Europe to teach vocal instruction in Austria; he remained there until 1993, when he returned to the States to record his comeback album, accompanied only by his own piano, called Ballads, Blues & Bey.
One of the great unsung heroes of jazz singing, Andy Bey is a commanding interpreter of lyrics who has a wide vocal range and a big, rich, full voice. Bey enjoys a following that swears by him; nonetheless, he isn't nearly as well known as he should be.
The release of Ballads, Blues & Bey in 1996, and his subsequent Shades of Bey, recorded with Bartz, Victor Lewis, Peter Washington and other jazz notables and released in 1998, heralded Bey's renaissance in the business he's been in for nearly five decades. This leaves Bey somewhat bemused: “I never went away, actually. I don't know about this “renaissance." It's...well, it's new in a sense, but it's not like I left the business."
The velvet-voiced Bey has a unique perspective on the music that you won't want to miss! This is the very last event of the year for the jazz museum, so let's take it out with a bang! We hope to see you at the Hansborough Recreation Center, at 35 West 134th Street.
This press release was composed and edited by Greg Thomas. The National Jazz Museum in Harlem has been ensconced in its Harlem offices for over five years now; its public programs now attract several thousand people a year as they continue their efforts to obtain a permanent home. Update: The Victoria Theatre on 125th Street will be redeveloped and includes space (10,150 sq. feet) for the museum!. If you would like to receive updates on our progress or further information, please contact us online or by phone at 212-348- 8300. To find video clips, event summaries, program updates and photographs galore from our previous programs, venture here:
For more information contact Jim Eigo, Jazz Promo Services.
