Dreams of a Harlem Jazz Rebirth

As another evening falls, the Lenox Lounge sits dim and lonely. Commuters pour out of the 125th Street subway station and onto Lenox Avenue, past its padlocked door. At Ginny’s Supper Club across the street, a mostly black crowd of men in suits and women in heels sips and sways as a band turns out a haunting rendition of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.”

It is said that Coltrane once blew his sax at the Lenox Lounge, which kept regulars, downtowners and tourists coming back for 70 years, even through the neighborhood’s bleak times. Now, with Harlem resurgent, only its remains are on display: its Art Deco finishes, familiar red paneling and famous sign have all been stripped away.

Happy Birthday To Jazz Legend Benny Carter!

Harlem-born jazz great Bennett Lester Carter (pictured) was a leading figure in the genre, enjoying one of the lengthiest careers in music ever. A multi-instrumentalist, Benny Carter would showcase mastery of the saxophone, clarinet, and trumpet. Spanning decades, Carter’s musical legacy began in the 1930s and didn’t officially end until the late ’90s – an impressive run that may never be matched again. Affectionately known as the “King” among his fellow jazz musicians, Carter would go on to inspire and mentor a host of players along the way.

SEE ALSO: A Mother to Be Reckoned With…Queen Mother Moore

Carter was born in 1907 as the youngest of three children. His first exposure to music happened by way of his mother giving him piano lessons. He would graduate to other instruments, mostly teaching himself. By the age of 15, Carter would become a side man in some of Harlem’s early jazz clubs.

Although he was inspired by Duke Ellington band member and trumpeter Bubby Miley, Carter would ditch the trumpet out of frustration and pick up the saxophone instead. From there, he would play alongside pianists Fats Waller and Earl Hines, as well as the legendary Duke Ellington himself.

Carter would craft his first recording in 1928 with Charlie Johnson’s Orchestra, going on to lead his own band the next year. As a a master arranger and songwriter, Carter would craft many jazz standards, including the swing standard “Blue Lou” and “When Lights Are Low,” and created tunes for Duke Ellington and others.

Carter would become a standout alto sax player, finally releasing his debut album in 1935, “The Chocolate Dandies (pictured).” That same year, Carter moved to Europe to play with the Willie Lewis Orchestra and did musical arrangements for the BBC.

He returned to the States in 1938, working at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom with his latest orchestra. His arrangements also appeared on recordings for Lena Horne, Count Bassie, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and more.

In 1943, he moved to Los Angeles, where he engaged in studio work and opened the door for Black composers in the film world. He would pen arrangements for Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, Lou Rawls, and Mel Torme before moving in to composing music for large film production.

Quincy Jones looked to Carter as an inspiration when he began his career in composing, and Miles Davis started his recording career as a sideman in Carter’s orchestra and considered him a mentor and close ally. But beyond inspiring and arranging for a growing list of future jazz legends, Carter would take his music around the world with tour stops in Australia and various locales in Europe as well, playing well in to his 80s and finally retiring in 1997.

Having lived a long and full life, Carter would pass from complications arising from bronchitis in July 2003 at age 95.

Carter’s long career is fodder enough for many words of praise but the fact that he was able to take his music to the global stage, offering opportunities to younger players and enhancing the sound of fellow greats, solidifies his place in the pantheon of jazz legends near the top. With jazz standards still enjoyed and re-imagined to this day, Carter’s musical legacy remains untarnished and continues to inspire.

Major rezoning plan for Harlem geared to preserve brownstones by imposing height limits on new homes

Buildings would be capped at 4-6 stories on most residential blocks

Hundreds of New York City’s most glorious brownstones and majestic townhouses will be protected from developers and preserved for generations under a major rezoning proposed for West Harlem.

The plan would safeguard an architectural treasure trove by imposing height limits in the neighborhood for the first time ever, radically transforming the zoning of a 90-block area.

If the sweeping proposal from the Department of City Planning is approved, it will mark the first time the neighborhood’s zoning has been updated since 1961 — when Robert Wagner was mayor and Nelson Rockefeller was governor.

The so-called downzoning will preserve roughly 95% of the 1,900 lots bounded by W. 126th St. on the south; W. 155th St. to the north; Riverside Drive on the west, and Convent and Edgecombe Aves. to the east.

That includes Sugar Hill, the affluent historic district named for the sweet life enjoyed by its residents, and Hamilton Heights, traditional home to such African-American luminaries as composer Duke Ellington, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois.

“This is huge!” says Manhattan Borough President and mayoral hopeful Scott Stringer.

“By limiting both height and density, it removes the incentive to demolish small buildings and townhouses and replace them with towers — and that keeps gentrification at bay.”

The rezoning will protect West Harlem’s low-lying scale and “guide future development” to mesh with the area’s prewar apartment houses and Beaux Arts, Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival brownstones, says City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden.

“If my house blows up today, a developer under current zoning could replace the four-story brownstone with a 10- or 15-story building tomorrow,” said Pat Jones, co-chair of Community Board 9’s land use committee. “That out-of-scale development will no longer be possible.”

Heights would be capped at four to six stories on almost all crosstown, residential mid-blocks. They could rise only to six to eight floors on St. Nicholas and Amsterdam Aves. and up to 12 stories on Broadway, a review of the plan shows.

The impetus for the downzoning: Columbia University’s upzoning of an adjacent, 17-acre parcel in Manhattanville, where it will erect a $6 billion, 16-building super-campus, north of 125th St. and west of Broadway, over the next 25 years.

Stringer and City Councilman Robert Jackson, who represents the area, had pressed City Planning officials to rezone the adjoining swath so West Harlem could co-exist with Columbia — and not be dominated by it.

“Columbia is humongous, its endowment is in the billions, and people have a real fear that housing costs will go up and they’ll no longer be able to afford their homes because the new campus will fuel gentrification,” Jackson says.

“Now, developers won’t be able to tear down those homes and build a 25-story tower.”

Under the city’s land-use review procedure, Community Board 9, as of May 7, had 60 days to review the proposal, after which it goes to Stringer, who has a month to review it and suggest changes.

Then it goes to the City Planning Commission, for a 60-day review, and finally, to the City Council, which has 50 days to approve, modify or reject the zoning proposal. Insiders predict it will take effect after some minor tinkering.

Public reviews generally last a maximum of seven months — and that’s a good thing, says state Sen. William Perkins, who represents the area.

“There are preservationists in my district who would chain themselves to those brownstones to protect them,” he says.

“Hopefully, that won’t be necessary now, but we always need to be vigilant and skeptical because there have been zoning betrayals in the past, and that’s why we have a public review process.”

Other provisions of the proposed West Harlem zoning plan would:

* Allow commercial uses in a light-manufacturing district between W. 126th St. and W. 130th St. to spur job creation. The so-called mixed-use zone could attract retail and arts companies or other non-profits.

* Direct future larger-scale development to a single block on W. 145th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave. Only on this one site could a residential building rise to 17 stories, and only if it included a significant amount of affordable housing.

* Steer community facilities — like a gym, a library or a halfway house — to commercial and manufacturing corridors by reducing the amount of floor area they’re permitted in residential areas.

dfeiden@nydailynews.com

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/uptown/major-rezoning-plan-harlem-geared-preserve-brownstones-imposing-height-limits-homes-article-1.1079409#ixzz1vRq6A4Il

Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith: Stride piano’s uptown Rruler

The life of stride pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith was the stuff of legend, but unfortunately, some of that legend seems to have come from Smith’s own imagination. For example, Smith always claimed to have been born in 1897, but his WWI draft registration states that he was born 118 years ago, in November 1893.

Like the date of his birth, the origin of his nickname (“The Lion”) is also subject to debate; Smith always said that he earned it for his bravery as an artilleryman in WWI. After the war, he returned to Harlem and was soon known as one of the three great Harlem stride-piano players (along with James P. Johnson and Fats Waller). Among the Big Three, many remember Smith as the chairman of that particular board: Duke Ellington idolized “The Lion.” Aspiring jazz pianists as diverse as Billy Taylor and Thelonious Monk studied under him. Smith was also a composer, a bon vivant, a student of Judaism and one of those maddening braggarts who could make outrageous claims about his abilities and then proceed to back them up. He was seldom seen without a cigar in his mouth and a derby on his head; he made sure he was noticed, which he usually accomplished by outperforming every other piano player in the room.

When Art Kane published his famous Great Day in Harlem photograph in Esquire magazine in 1958, some wondered where “The Lion” was. Well, Smith showed up for the shoot, but got tired of standing around, so he sat on the stoop of a nearby brownstone while that great photo was taken. Here are five reasons why Willie “The Lion” Smith should have been in that picture.

Copyright 2011 KVIX-FM. To see more, visit http://www.jazz24.org.

Metropolitan Museum Displays Romare Bearden’s The Block, Opens 8/30

 On the occasion of the 100th anniversary  of the birth of Romare Bearden, The    Metropolitan Museum of Art will display    Bearden’s The Block, a six-panel tableau that portrays one city block of the Harlem neighborhood that nurtured his career. On view at the Metropolitan Museum from August 30, 2011, through January 2, 2012, Romare Bearden (1911-1988): A Centennial Celebration is presented in conjunction with a multi-city centennial tribute to the life and work of this great American artist.

Romare Bearden’s embrace of an unusual medium-paper collage-set him apart as an artist. Jazzy, syncopated compositions, made with found materials such as magazine clippings, old photographs, and colored papers elevated the medium to a major art form for storytelling. In The Block (1971), Bearden used the collage medium to present a montage of images in shifting scales and perspectives that alternate between fantasy and reality. It is a world that is at once eminently recognizable and wholly unique.

The Block depicts Lenox Avenue between 132nd and 133rd streets, in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. Bearden created a colorful scene filled with human activity, much of it taking place on the street. Churches, stores, and apartment buildings provide the backdrop for various scenarios, including a funeral, children playing, a homeless man sleeping, and groups of teens and seniors socializing on the sidewalk. What goes on behind closed doors is revealed through windows and cut-aways in the walls that Bearden called “look-ins.”

Bearden’s images are both simple and complex, and layered with meanings that can be inferred from his references to other art and cultures-Renaissance painting, modern art, African tribal sculpture, and Christian iconography. In 1977 his friend the novelist Ralph Ellison wrote that Bearden’s collages created “a place composed of visual puns and artistic allusions…where the sacred and the profane, reality and dream, are ambiguously mingled.”

About the Artist

Born in North Carolina on September 2, 1911, Bearden spent much of his youth in New York City, where his parents knew the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including the poet Langston Hughes, the musician Duke Ellington, the artist Aaron Douglas, and the social reformer W.E.B. Du Bois. In the 1930s, Bearden himself became active in several artists’ groups in Harlem, and by the 1960s he was a central figure in the cultural life of the community, with a growing national reputation. He helped found the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Spiral group (artists supporting the civil-rights movement), and the Cinqué Gallery, a venue for emerging artists. Respected as an artist, orator, author, and social activist, Bearden also mentored many young people seeking opportunities in the arts.

Romare Bearden (1911-1988): A Centennial Celebration is organized by Lisa Mintz Messinger, Associate Curator in the Museum’s Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art.

This installation is part of the 2011-2012 Bearden Centennial celebration, organized by the Romare Bearden Foundation in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem. For more information about these centennial events visit: www.beardencentennial.org.

In conjunction with this installation, audio commentary on Romare Bearden’s work will be available as a stop on the Metropolitan’s Audio Guide program. The Block will also be featured on the Museum’s website at www.metmuseum.org.

Read more: http://broadwayworld.com/article/Metropolitan-Museum-Displays-Romare-Beardens-The-Block-Opens-830-20110817#ixzz1VKsJqFQg

City Center and JALC Announce Cotton Club Parade 11/18-22

On the eve of 112th anniversary of Duke Ellington’s birth, New York City Center and Jazz at Lincoln Center are pleased to announce a new producing partnership that will combine the organizations’ specialties: musical theater and jazz. The collaborative venture will begin this fall at City Center with Cotton Club Parade, a celebration of Ellington’s years at the famed Harlem nightclub. Presented under the auspices of City Center’s acclaimed Encores! series and Jazz at Lincoln Center, Cotton Club Parade will be directed by Warren Carlyle and will feature the renowned Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, who also serves as music director. It will play for six performances, November 18-22, 2011. Tickets will go on sale Monday, August 15 at City Center.Harlem’s famed Cotton Club presented annual revues that featured big band swing and blues, dancers, singers, comedians and novelty acts throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Duke Ellington and his orchestra began a four-year residency in 1927 and continued making guest appearances throughout the 1930s. As in the original revues, the Cotton Club Parade will feature singers, dancers and variety acts (to be announced).Future productions will be presented biannually at each other’s venues. The next production is scheduled for the 2013-14 season at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater.”We are thrilled to be collaborating with Jazz at Lincoln Center to develop new projects involving artists from both the jazz and theater worlds,” said City Center President & CEO Arlene Shuler. “It’s especially exciting that City Center will be presenting Cotton Club Parade as the first Encores! event in our beautiful, newly renovated theater.”Laura Johnson, Executive Producer, Jazz at Lincoln Center, said, “We are delighted to work with City Center to celebrate these two uniquely American musical idioms – jazz and musical theater. From the early 20th century theatrical jazz of Ellington’s Cotton Club floor shows to Tin Pan Alley to the jazz-drenched scores of mid-century book musicals, jazz and musical theater have succeeded in entertaining audiences with some of the most enduring and sophisticated music ever produced by American composers and lyricists.”

Duke Ellington influenced millions of people around the world and at home. During the course of his 50-year career, he composed more than 3,000 songs and played more than 20,000 performances in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia. He gave American music its own sound for the first time with popular hits such as “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Mood Indigo,” “Solitude,” “In a Mellotone,” and “Satin Doll.” Ellington was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1966 and later earned several other prizes, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and the Legion of Honor by France in 1973.

Cotton Club Parade will run for six performances, November 18-22, 2011, according to the following schedule: Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 2 and 8pm, Sunday at 6:30pm, Monday and Tuesday at 7pm. Tickets start at $25 and go on sale Monday, August 15. Further information is available at NYCityCenter.org and jalc.org.

Read more: http://broadwayworld.com/article/City-Center-JALC-Announce-Cotton-Club-Parade-1118-22-20110428#ixzz1Ks5vAlqb

Billy Taylor – Harlem Jazzmobile

Billy Taylor, who died on December 28 aged 89, was a pianist, composer, academic and tireless advocate for jazz (which he described as “America’s classical music”) on radio and television.

His gospel-style composition I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free was recorded by Nina Simone and adopted as the unofficial anthem of the civil rights movement. British listeners, however, know the tune as the introductory music to the popular BBC television show Film Night, presented by Barry Norman.

William Edward Taylor, the son of a dentist and a schoolmistress, was born on July 24 1921 at Greenville, North Carolina, and grew up in Washington DC. He began taking formal piano lessons at junior high school.

Meanwhile, a neighbour, who had been a boyhood friend of Duke Ellington, and had a large record collection, introduced him to jazz. This set the pattern of his musical education through high school and Virginia State College, where he read Music and spent the evenings sitting in with every band he could find.

In 1943, at the age of 22, Taylor determined to try his luck in New York. He arrived on a Friday night and made straight for Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, where ambitious young players were always welcome to sit in. Before the weekend was out he had been spotted by the great tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and hired to play with his quartet at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, the very epicentre of the jazz world at the time.

Taylor soon discovered that his greatest asset was his adaptability. An acute ear for the nuances of individual players enabled him to accompany soloists of widely differing styles. In 1949 he became the house pianist at Birdland, accompanying all the leading figures of the era, including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and the young Miles Davis.

In 1951 Taylor formed his own trio, which appeared at jazz clubs throughout the United States and Canada. Despite the trio’s success, Taylor often found the nightclub ambience frustrating: if people knew more about the music, he thought, they would enjoy it more, and the result would be a better experience for audience and players alike.

He began by writing introductory articles on jazz in popular magazines. This led to a series of lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and eventually to a second career in television and radio. He became a cultural correspondent on the CBS Sunday Morning news programme and had several long-running series on National Public Radio, the most recent being Billy Taylor’s Jazz, recorded at the Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington, to which he acted as an adviser.

One of his most imaginative schemes was aimed at reintroducing jazz to the black neighbourhoods where it had once flourished. Launched in 1965 under the heading Jazzmobile, the organisation staged free concerts by top-class artists in housing estates, parks and even on street corners.

In 1975, reflecting on this and his other educational projects, Taylor produced a dissertation on jazz in musical education, for which he was awarded a doctorate by the University of Massachusetts. Although he later received numerous honorary degrees, it was for this that he made a point of styling himself “Dr Billy Taylor”.

Taylor’s growing fame as the spokesman for jazz inevitably overshadowed his own considerable but unspectacular musical talents. He acknowledged this, but was always keen to point out that, between 1969 and 1972, he acted as the musical director of David Frost’s weekly American television show, the first African-American musician to hold such a position.

Billy Taylor continued working until the end. With his ready smile, unflappable manner and trademark spectacles with large, square lenses, he seemed never to age. One of his last radio appearances was for BBC Radio Two, in the series Jazz Junctions, broadcast last month. His calm voice and unpretentious mastery of his subject were as impressive as ever.

He is survived by his wife and daughter; a son predeceased him.

Metropolitan’s Sixth Annual Living Literature Features Harlem Renaissance Fest

Metropolitan Playhouse hosts The Harlem Renaissance Festival, the theater’s sixth annual Living Literature Festival of performances inspired by the lives and works of American authors. The Festival is a collection of seven new works by artists and companies from near and far taking their inspiration from The Harlem Renaissance. Performances take place daily from January 17 to 30 at Metropolitan Playhouse, 220 East Fourth Street.

Tickets may be purchased online at http://www.metropolitanplayhouse.org, or by phone at 212 995 5302.

The Harlem Renaissance Festival includes musical, poetic, one-act and full-length plays ranging from adaptations to biographical fantasy. Rather than an exhaustive survey of the literature of the period, The Harlem Renaissance Festival is a deep exploration of several well- and lesser-known artists and their oeuvre. All in all each new work is presented four times over the festival. (Project descriptions and schedule follow.)
Artists and figures featured include poets Langston Hughes, Georgia Doulas Johnson, Countee Cullen, Angelina Grimke, and Paul Laurence Dunbar; composers Duke Ellington, Fats Waller; journalist and activist Marcus Garvey, as well as surprising personages such as enterprising purveyer of good eats, Pig Foot Mary, and librarian Belle da Costa Greene-first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Additional events include readings of salient works, and discussions with contemporary artists and scholars.

Artist participants in the festival include Danny Ashkenasi (beTwixt, beTween & be TWAIN “Evocative and exciting … gorgeous … beautiful … A musical voice that commands attention” – nytheatre.com” ); Leah Maddrie (O’Neill Conference semi-finalist, EST Sloan Foundation commission); Daniel Carlton (Artistic Director of Committed Artists of Color); students from the Newburgh Performing Arts Academy; David Lally (Little Edie and the Marble Faun “[a] touching examination of memory and loss.” – Backstage); Juliane Hiam (writer-in-residence at MassMOCA; A Tanglewood Tale – Melvilapalooza); and Xoregos Performing Company.

Previous years’ festivals were the Poefest (2006), Twainathon (2007), Hawthornucopia (2008-”exhilarating”–nytheatre.com), and Melvillapalooza (2009 “divine…. put the life and works of Melville in a new light” – New Theatre Corps), and Another Sky (2010). Metropolitan Playhouse explores America’s theatrical and cultural moment. Metropolitan has earned accolades from The New York Times, The Village Voice, BackStage, and nytheatre.com. Recent noted productions include Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Drunkard, Dodsworth, The Return of Peter Grimm, Year One of the Empire, The Pioneer: 5 plays by Eugene O’Neill, Denial and The Melting Pot.

Tickets are $18.00 per show. Student and senior discounts are $15.00. Children under 18 $10.00. TDF vouchers are accepted. Visit http://www.metropolitanplayhouse.org for more information and to purchase tickets online or call 212 995 5302
Read more: http://offbroadway.broadwayworld.com/article/Metropolitans_Sixth_Annual_Living_Literature_Fest_Features_Harlem_Renaissance_20101227#ixzz19KelFeXy