Harlem Speaks
Jerry Dodgion, Saxophone
6:30 – 8:30pm
Location: The National Jazz Museum in Harlem
(104 E. 126th Street, Suite 2D)
Donation Suggested | For more information: 212-348-8300 Jerry Dodgion is a musician's musician, a multi-woodwind master who in the course of his six-decade career, has been a first-call player for hundreds of classic projects. Among the countless number of musical associations that Dodgion has had throughout the years were with Gerald Wilson, Benny Carter, Red Norvo, Benny Goodman, Oliver Nelson, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Herbie Hancock, Duke Pearson, Count Basie, and Marian McPartland among many others. We're thrilled to have Jerry join us for our oral history series and we hope to see you there as he gives a unique insight into the music world.
Special Event
Make Music New York Day, Sylvain Leroux Trio, Words Beyond Jazz Trio, And The Lucky Chops Brass Band
11:30am – 3:00pm
Location: The National Jazz Museum in Harlem
(104 E. 126th Street, Suite 2C)
Donation Suggested | For more information: 212-348-8300 Come visit the museum this Friday for live music all afternoon as part of Make Music New York Day. MMNY, "the largest music event ever to grace Gotham" (Metro New York), is a unique festival of free concerts in public spaces throughout the five boroughs of New York City, all on June 21st, the first day of summer. MMNY takes place simultaneously with similar festivities in more than 514 cities around the world - a global celebration of music making and this year we have the Words Beyond trio and the Lucky Chops Brass Band bringing their bright sounds to the Visitors Center. We might even spill on to the streets- come by to find out!
11:30 - 12:30 Sylvain Leroux Trio
12:45 - 1:45 Words Beyond Trio
2:00 - 3:00 Lucky Chops Brass Band
Harlem in the Himalayas
Christian Wallumrød Ensemble
7:00pm
Location: Rubin Museum of Art
(150 West 17th Street)
$18 in advance | $20 at door |
For tickets: RMA Box Office or call 212-620-5000 ext. 344 Part of the ECM CD Release Concert Mini-Series
The ensemble of Christian Wallumrød continues to evolve in its own idiosyncratic way on the new album Outstairs. By now, Wallumrød's compositional signature is instantly recognizable. Nobody else writes pieces like this - multi-dimensional chamber music inspired by the sonorities of Norwegian folk and church music, influenced by early music and the post-Cage avant-garde, and liberated by jazz's freedom of thought. This time around, the ensemble members share the arranging credits between them, making the music still more organic and flexible as new sound combinations emerge.
With Christian Wallumrød on piano, harmonium, and toy piano, Eivind Lønning on trumpet, Gjermund Larsen on violin, hardanger fiddle, and viola, Espen Reinertsen on tenor saxophone, Tove Törngren on cello, Per Oddvar Johansen on drums and vibraphone.
Jazz for Curious Listeners
Polymaths: Hank O'Neal on Gordon Parks
7:00 – 8:30pm
Location: The National Jazz Museum in Harlem
(104 E. 126th Street, Suite 2D)
Donation Suggested | For more information: 212-348-8300 This month's Jazz For Curious Listeners are inspired by the "A Harlem Family 1967" Gordon Parks exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem. We are presenting four polymaths whose lives have a significant intersection between jazz and other interests.
As a child in Texas, Hank O'Neal first experienced photography when he watched his father print his World War II photographs and family portraits in a kitchen darkroom. A few years later, in 1952, he won a Brownie Hawkeye in a drawing at a small grocery store and began taking and processing his own pictures. Child in Spacesuit, 1953, is a product of those times.
Twenty years later, in 1973, O'Neal had a better camera, his first book, The Eddie Condon Scrapbook of Jazz, was published, and he had his first modest photography show, Winona, Texas, at The Open Mind Gallery, an appropriately modest establishment in the soon to blossom Soho district of New York City. By then, photography had become a serious avocation, and during that period O'Neal formed lasting friendships and working relationships with such noted photographers as Berenice Abbott, Andre Kertesz, all the living Farm Security Administration photographers and many others. Additionally, he came to know many dealers, critics, and curators interested in the art of photography, particularly Lee Witkin and those associated with his gallery, as well as Harry Lunn. His relationship with The Witkin Gallery continued until it ceased operation in 1999, and with Harry Lunn until his death in 1998. More recently he has been associated with Howard Greenberg.
In 1972, O'Neal met Berenice Abbott and began a working relationship with her that lasted nineteen years. It was Abbott who convinced him of the merits of a large format view camera, suggesting that if he'd buy one, she'd teach him how to work it. He did and she did, in an abbreviated thirty-minute session. About the same time, Bert Stern suggested there was equal merit in medium format cameras and gave O'Neal a spare Rolleiflex to prove the point. No lesson was involved.
Now, equipped with a Leica, Nikon, Rolleiflex, and Deardorff, O'Neal began to take serious photographs. His visual boundary was provided by a conversation with John Vachon, who told him, "I knew I would only photograph what pleased or astonished my eye, and in the way I wanted to see it," and this sounded like a fine philosophy. Abbott provided the intellectual boundary, when she admonished O'Neal, saying, "Don't take photographs willy-nilly, you have to have a project."
Walker Evans added another point, when he told O'Neal, "It doesn't count unless you find it yourself." He paid attention to all three of these fine artists and for the next four decades followed their advice, accumulating a large body of work in the process. O'Neal has constantly discovered subjects he feels to be visually astonishing, and has integrated them into various projects. Except for those photographs taken for a specific assignment or publication, until his major one-man show at The Witkin Gallery, he elected to keep most of his work private. Since the Witkin retrospective, he has shown and published his work with increasing regularity.
Many of O'Neal's photographs are often work-related, portraits for LP jackets and CD booklets, documenting recording sessions, illustrating books or producing booklets for his music festivals. Since 1971, he has produced over 200 LPs or CDs for his companies, Chiaroscuro Records and Hammond Music Enterprises. Since 1983, he and his partner, Shelley Shier have produced over one hundred music festivals, through their New York City-based production company, HOSS, Inc.
Along the way, O'Neal has also published a number of books and monographs, including the now classic work on the Farm Security Administration, A Vision Shared - A Portrait of America and Its People 1935 - 1943 and the landmark study of his friend, Berenice Abbott - American Photographer. His own photographs appeared in a variety of books and publications, the award-winning book, The Ghosts of Harlem in 1997, to be reissued in 2008), Hank O'Neal Portraits 1971 - 2000, and in 2006, Gay Day - The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade. One of his more unusual accomplishments was producing a series of photographs that accompanied a special Limited Editions Club edition of Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men. A special portfolio of these gravure prints was issued along with the book.
O'Neal has produced a wide ranging body of work, portraits of friends and associates, ironic images fromany parts of the world, and continually added to projects that have lasted two or three decades. Examples of his work may be seen in the photo section of hankoneal.com. The many illustrated books can be seen in the book section of hankoneal.com.
In addition to the musical and photographic interests, O'Neal's other activities are as varied as the subject matter of his photographs. He received a BA from Syracuse University in 1962, and was well on his way to an MA, when, in 1963, he was snared by the Central Intelligence Agency, with whom he was associated until 1976. While he was with this organization, he also served on active duty in the US Army, rising to the rank of Captain.
O'Neal came to New York City from Washington, D.C. in 1967 and still resides in Greenwich Village. He joined the faculty of The New School University in 1970 and remains affiliated with that school as a member of the Board of Advisors of the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program. For the decade of the 1970s, he was associated with the modern dance company, Choreographer's Theater, for whom he not only created sound and visual collages, but also, on occasion, danced. In the same decade, he built and operated two recording studios in Greenwich Village. During the years 1983 through 1995, he was an advisor to the Justice Department and is currently on the Board of Directors of various arts organizations, galleries and corporations, most prominently the Jazz Foundation of America/Jazz Musician's Emergency Fund, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and The Jazz Gallery.
Special Event
The National Jazz Museum in Harlem and the Studio Museum in Harlem Present: The NJMH Allstars play Gordon Parks
7:00 – 9:00pm
Location: The Studio Museum in Harlem
(144 West 125th Street (Btwn Lenox and 7th Ave))
General Admission $20, Studio Museum Members $15 | For more information: 212-348-8300 Inspired by Gordon Parks, this public program culminates in an evening of exciting improvisation on the exhibition Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967 at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Join the National Jazz Museum in Harlem All Stars, led by long time Harlemite Jason Marshall, for an interactive concert as they perform to a selection of photographs from the exhibition. Come see if you can identify the sound of a sleeping child, a busy Harlem street corner, a family at their kitchen table and more!
Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967 honors the legacy and the work of late iconic artist and photojournalist Gordon Parks, who would have turned 100 on November 30, 2012. The exhibition, organized by Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden and Assistant Curator Lauren Haynes, will feature approximately thirty black and white photographs of the Fontenelle family, whose lives Parks documented as part of a 1968 Life magazine photo essay. A searing portrait of poverty in the United States, the Fontenelle photographs provide a view of Harlem through the narrative of a specific family at a particular moment in time. This intimate exhibition will include all images from the original essay as well as several unpublished images-some which have never been displayed publicly.
This project was supported by a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities.
Special thanks to the Gordon Parks Foundation, who provided essential support and assistance in organizing Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967.
Please note: this event was rescheduled from its original date and time. We apologize for any inconvenience.
|
|
|
