Presents
Count Basie
Then as Now, Count's the King
A film by Gary Keys
Introduced by Professor 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 delivershis 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, 7:30pm
Lifetime Screening Room, 513 Dodge Hall
Columbia University Morningside Campus
Campus Map: http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/dodge.html
Free and Open to the public
Reception to follow
Co-presented with the Graduate Film Program, School of the Arts, Columbia University
Please join us as well for these upcoming Center for Jazz Studies events
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How Does Music Free Us? Afro-Asian Revolutionary Concepts in New Music
A discussion and reading by author Fred Ho
Chinese-American composer, baritone saxophonist, scholar/writer, producer, matriarchal revolutionary socialist
and aspiring Luddite Fred Ho explores the role of music in imagining a new society and foreshadowing a
transformed humanity.
Thursday, March 4, 2010, 7:30pm
301 Philosophy Hall, 116th Street and Amsterdam Ave
Columbia University Morningside Campus
Campus Map: http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/philosophy.html
Free and Open to the public
Copies of Mr. Ho's newest book WICKED THEORY, NAKED PRACTICE: A FRED HO READER will be available to purchase
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Jazz Studies Beyond the Commercial Album
A panel discussion with Jason Moran, Ben Young, Larry Applebaum and Prof. John Szwed
Moderated by Prof. Brent Hayes Edwards
Jazz scholarship has focused on commercial recordings as Max Roach was fond of saying, "Records are our textbooks"
yet there is a shadow world beyond these official audio texts a world of alternate takes, acetates and cassettes of
live recordings, radio broadcasts, and club appearances. Fascinating and revealing as these documents are, they are
seldom used as the basis for published materials. But with the creation of new and inexpensive technology, mass
downloading, the virtual collapse of the recording business, and the flood of unlicensed music on the Web, this alternate
universe of music is overwhelming 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, 116th Street and Amsterdam Ave
Columbia University Morningside Campus
Campus Map: http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/philosophy.html
Free and Open to the public
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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 20Co-Presented by Uptown Nights at Harlem Stage and the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project, with support from the Office of the President, Columbia University**********************************************
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 (19061908) and The Red Moon (19081910),
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
Campus Map: http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/dodge.html
Free and open to the public
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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.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010, 7:30pm
301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus
Campus Map: http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/philosophy.html
Free and open to the public
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Jazz Festivals and Cosmopolitan Vernaculars
Anne C. Dvinge, University of Copenhagen
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. Thursday, April 15, 2010, 8:00 pm
622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University Morningside Campus
Campus Map: http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/dodge.html
Free and open to the public
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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 voiceas vocal instrument, as the expression of all we behold and all that
emerges from usas 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 20Co-Presented by WaterWorks at Harlem Stage and the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project, with support from the Office of the President, Columbia University
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For more information about the Center for Jazz Studies activities, please visitwww.jazz.columbia.edu or call 212-851-1633
Yulanda C. Denoon
Program Coordinator
Center for Jazz Studies
Columbia University
(212) 851-1633 - office
(212) 851-1634 - fax