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Pat Taylor

Artistic director/choreographer for JazzAntiqua Dance & Music Ensemble -- an award-winning performance group premised on the interplay between live jazz music and the movement that derives from the stories within the music.

About Me

Jazz Choreographer Pat Taylor is the founding artistic director of JazzAntiqua Dance & Music Ensemble. She blends a love of jazz and blues music, visual art and spoken word with a distinctive historical perspective to create her own sense of jazz theatre. Although raised in a household where jazz served as a musical backdrop to daily life, it was while living and working in Europe as a choreographer/teacher/performer for seven years, that she truly kindled a passion and appreciation for our musical heritage.

She works in collaboration with several noted jazz artists including: Kenny Garrett, Eric Lewis (ELEW), Dwight Trible, Marcus Shelby, Brian Swartz, Munyungo Jackson, Ark Sano, Trevor Ware and others.

Pat is the recipient of several awards including a Brody Arts Fund Choreography Fellowship and grants from Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Center for Cultural Innovation, Frances E. Williams Artists Grant and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Taylor was a finalist in the Leo’s Choreography Competition for the Jazz Dance World Congress. JAZZANTIQUA has received awards from the Doolittle Foundation, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, California Arts Council, California Humanities and Toyota Motor Sales, USA.

Founded in 1993, JAZZANTIQUA celebrates the jazz tradition as a vital thread in the cultural fabric of African American history and heritage, and a defining element of the American experience. Premised on the interplay between live jazz music and the movement that derives from the stories within the music, JazzAntiqua explores original compositions along with the works of jazz greats. The Company's mission is to increase awareness of and appreciation for jazz as an American legacy through dynamic, multi-disciplinary projects (also incorporating spoken word and visual art) that educate and inspire, as well as entertain. From jazz clubs to concert halls, performing arts centers to schools, museums to festivals in the park --- JazzAntiqua shares the art of jazz with audiences of all ages and backgrounds.

JAZZANTIQUA has been presented in performance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (Music Center of Los Angeles County), Playboy Jazz Festival (Hollywood Bowl) Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California African American Museum, The Jazz Bakery, CIAIE Theater (Brazil), Southern Theatre (Minneapolis), Irvine Barclay Theatre (University of California, Irvine), Moorpark, Pasadena, East Los Angeles and Claremont Colleges, Ford Amphitheatre, Japan America Theatre, Dance Mission Theatre (San Francisco), Nate Holden Performing Arts Center, Watts Towers Jazz Festival, UCLA Hammer Museum, McCallum Theatre (Palm Desert), Highways Performance Space and many other distinguished venues.

www.jazzantiqua.org

Contact Me

My Jazz Story

I love jazz because as a choreographer I am captivated and inspired by the stories I hear within the music and inspired to create dances that grow directly out of the music. My greatest joy is when I work in collaboration with a jazz composer and my dance ensemble performs to the music played live, all of us fully engaged in an inspired conversational give and take through movement and music. I was first exposed to jazz at home with my parents record collection. As a kid I would listen to Nancy Wilson and George Shearing, Cannonball Adderley, Modern Jazz Quartet, Miles Davis, Wes Montgomery... I met Regina Carter, The best show I ever attended was (recently) Esperanza Spalding and Keith Jarrett. The first jazz record I bought was "Kind of Blue" My advice to new listeners... listen to it all!

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