STONY BROOK, N.Y., March 10, 2008 —As the final event of its 20th anniversary year, the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook will be presenting a major jazz conference and festival on April 3rd, 4th, and 5th. Brilliant Corners: Jazz and Its Cultures will explore the music’s connections to the other arts and will feature many of the world’s most prominent jazz scholars. Twenty-five speakers will be addressing the many ways in which the music of jazz intersects with currents in art, literature, film, theater, and politics. Rounding out the event will be performances by pianist Vijay Iyer, trombonist Ray Anderson, and tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano on the three conference evenings as well as an exhibition of jazz paintings and photographs that will run from April 1st to May 9th. All events will take place in Humanities Institute 1006 unless otherwise noted.
Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie
photo by: W.Gottlieb
"The conference will advance the new, emerging discipline of jazz studies,” said Conference Director Krin Gabbard, Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University and the author of a forthcoming book on the cultural history of the trumpet. “The scholars who will speak have all done ground-breaking work placing jazz in larger contexts involving novels, painting, film, and theater as well as the meetings of world cultures,” he added.
The event will open at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 3rd with welcoming remarks by Shirley Strum Kenny, President of Stony Brook University as well as E. Ann Kaplan, Director of the Humanities Institute and Krin Gabbard, Conference Director. A panel discussion will follow with George E. Lewis (Columbia University), John Szwed (Yale University), Vijay Iyer (pianist) and Eric Lewis (McGill University) on the broad subject of “What is Jazz?”
A free concert will follow that evening at 8:00 p.m. at the Charles Wang Center by The Vijay Iyer Trio. The son of Indian immigrants, Iyer draws from African, Asian, and European musical lineages to create music beyond category. He tours internationally with his various ensembles and has been a featured performer with such artists as Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Coleman and Amiri Baraka.
Talks on Friday, April 4th and Saturday, April 5th will cover a wide range of topics, under the general headings of “Jazz and Literature,” “Jazz and Representation,” “Jazz and Performance,” “Curating Jazz” and “Jazz and Diaspora.” Michael Cogswell, Director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, will give a multi-media presentation called “Saving Satchmo’s Stuff” in which he will showcase treasures from Louis Armstrong's vast personal collection of home-recorded tapes, scrapbooks, photographs and manuscripts. Helen Harrison, Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, will discuss how Jackson Pollock used jazz as an inspiration for his “action painting” technique.
There will be two Keynote Addresses. On Friday, April 4th, Robert G. O’Meally, Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, will show how an African-American painter has jazzed the classics in his talk, “Circe’s Empty Bed Blues: Romare Bearden Collages The Odyssey.” The following day, Sherrie Tucker of the University of Kansas, will give the keynote, titled “A Queer Question for Jazz Studies: When Did Jazz Go Straight?” Her talk will cover such topics as sex-spectacle in 1930’s floor shows, the construction of the jazz tradition in canon formation and institution building, and musical genres in the L-Word soundtrack.
Other speakers will include Robert Crease, Brent Edwards Bernard Gendron, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hairston, Michael Jarrett, Frederick Moehn, Ingrid Monson, Loren Schoenberg, Jans Wager, Tracey Walters, Chris Washburne and David Yaffe.
Friday evening at 8:00 p.m. there will be a free concert by Ray Anderson and Friends at the Staller Center. Described by critic Gary Giddins as “one of the most compellingly original trombonists,” Ray Anderson is by turns a supremely lyrical player and bold texturalist, a warmly natural-sounding soloist and footloose innovator who played a major role in reawakening interest in the instrument in the '80s. He is on the music faculty at Stony Brook University.
Saturday evening at 8:00 p.m., tenor saxophone great Joe Lovano comes to the Staller Center with his quartet. Tickets are $32 each and this concert is already nearly sold out. Contact the Staller Center box office for details: www.stallercenter.com
An exhibition, Pops to Lady Day: Portraits in Jazz, will open on April 1st and will run until May 9th in the Humanities Institute Gallery, Humanities Building 1013. This exhibit, curated by Olivia Mattis, features portraits of Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Hinton, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Fats Waller and others by the photographers Ray Avery, William P. Gottlieb, Paul Hoeffler, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Chuck Stewart and the Stony Brook-based painter Al Jones.
The conference is free to Stony Brook faculty, staff, and students, but registration is required. For the general public April 3rd is free, and April 4th and 5th are $25 a day or $40 for both days. To register please go to www.stonybrook.edu/humanities For more information please call Olivia Mattis, Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, at (631) 632-9957.
This event is being sponsored in part by the Office of the President, Stony Brook University.
For the graphics please go to: www.stonybrook.edu/humanities/jazzposterfinal2.pdf
