Tag Archives: Jazz at Lincoln Center

400 Years of African American History, Advocacy, Blog, Cultural Heritage Preservation

Jazz Is Black Music

Jazz Congress 2019, organized by Jazz at Lincoln Center and JazzTimes, was held last week. I was not able to attend in person so I watched the webcast of the panel discussion “Jazz, Swing, Race and Culture” with Myra Melford, Christian McBride, Wynton Marsalis, Terri Lyne Carrington and Nicholas Payton. Andre Guess was the moderator.

#jazzcongress

I listened with disbelief as Wynton Marsalis challenged Nicholas Payton’s comment about the racial origins of jazz:

The music doesn’t have a racial identity because race is a fake construct that was used in our country to enforce a class consciousness and to make people accept an inferiority.

The panel discussion was not the first time the racial roots of jazz were questioned. A 1959 documentary, The Cry of Jazz, sparked controversy when one of the characters asserted that “jazz is merely the Negro’s cry of joy and suffering.” The character, Alex, explained that “the Negro was the only one with the necessary musical and human history to create jazz.”

In 2010, the documentary was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The films selected are considered “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant, to be preserved for all time. These films are not selected as the ‘best’ American films of all time, but rather as works of enduring significance to American culture.”

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, jazz pianist, arranger and composer Mary Lou Williams’ “History of Jazz” says it all.

mary lou williams - tree of jazz

Jazz is black music, point, blank, period.

Advocacy, Blog, Cultural Heritage, Cultural Heritage Preservation

Jazz Congress 2018

The inaugural Jazz Congress will be in session January 11-12 in New York City. Co-produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center and Jazz Times, the conference will “bring together artists, media and industry leaders in the global jazz community to exchange ideas in order to nurture and grow the jazz community and the underlying business and organizations that promote, produce, present, market and support the music.”

Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Managing and Artistic Director at JALC, said:

Jazz at Lincoln Center is excited to host this much needed community initiative. We will stimulate an inclusive environment, explore new ways to expand audiences for our music, and learn from one another. With so much discordant non-communication around the world and in our country, now is the perfect time for us to come together for serious discourse around and about our cultural, business and aesthetic objectives.

Marsalis added:

Jazz has what our modern world needs. Let us all take pride in our collective advocacy of this great music by identifying, declaring and demonstrating our common ground.

The program includes panels focusing on race and gender, and audience development. Hall of Fame basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabber, a jazz enthusiast whose father was a trombonist, will deliver the keynote address. Abdul-Jabbar will talk about the role jazz can play in today’s society.

I am particularly interested in the panel discussion on jazz, politics and activism. One of my objectives with All That Philly Jazz is to contextualize jazz within the framework of movements for social change. Indeed, the jazz culture was about intersectionality before the term was coined.

Checker Cafe

Some of the sessions will be livestreamed. You can join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #JazzCongress. For more information, visit JazzCongress.org.

Blog, Cultural Heritage, Main Channel

McCoy Tyner Inducted into Ertegun Jazz Hall Of Fame

On May 7, 2017, Jazz at Lincoln Center announced that Philly native and NEA Jazz Master McCoy Tyner was inducted into the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame:

Perhaps the most influential jazz pianist of the late 20th century, McCoy Tyner pioneered a forceful, swinging, and unmistakable piano voice that provided crucial harmonic texture to the legendary John Coltrane Quartet. Forging a unique sound that was driven by his powerful left hand, Tyner offered a harmonically open structure for Coltrane’s often modal improvisations and helped direct jazz’s evolution during the early 1960s. As his solo career developed, Tyner began to lead his own highly influential groups while also composing new standards for jazz and nurturing new generations of rising masters. Still actively performing today, McCoy Tyner has shown that he never sits still and is always finding and seeking new possibilities for this music.

Tyner first met Coltrane in the mid-1950s at the Red Rooster in West Philly. He’ll be reunited with Trane in the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame.

Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame 1.1

Blog, Main Channel

Benny, Brownie and Dizzy

1 Comment

On June 26, 1956, legendary trumpet player Clifford “Brownie” Brown had just left performing at Music City in Center City when he was killed in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. He was only 25.

In tribute to his friend, Philly native and NEA Jazz Master Benny Golson composed “I Remember Clifford.” In an episode of Jazz Stories by Jazz at Lincoln Center, Golson recounted how Dizzy Gillespie became the first person to hear his tribute to Brownie:

I decided I would try to write a song that would be reminiscent of Clifford. And during those days, I could write a song in one day. You know, just a half-hour or so—might not have been that great though. But this tune, because of what he meant to me as a friend and fellow musician and what I wanted the song to be, consequentially, it took me almost a whole two weeks to do it. And once I did it, I wasn’t sure what I had.

So Dizzy came in early one night and I had come with my uniform that afternoon knowing that I wouldn’t be going back to the hotel. So since he was there, I decided to ask him what he thought about it. Chairs were still up on the tables, they hadn’t really prepared, but somehow he came early. So I asked him did he have a moment to listen because I wanted him to hear something. And he said, “Okay.”

He came over and sat down at the table and I started to play this tune and he said, “Hmm…” And then he started to take his trumpet out of the case and I thought to myself, “The man doesn’t even know the tune and he’s going to try to play it!” But he fooled me.

READ MORE