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20th Anniversary: Charlie Parker Jazz Festival
Gregory Porter / Patience Higgins’ Sugar Hill Quartet / Andy Milne & Dapp Theory/ Sullivan Fortner
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the beloved late summer jazz favorite, the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival. Come celebrate with a day’s worth of jazz legends and rising stars.
With a voice that can caress or confront, embrace or exhort, Grammy nominee Gregory Porter exhibits an incredible degree of vocal mastery. His distinct style ranges from jazz, funk, R&B, blues and gospel, all soulful while still maintaining the elegance he learned from his earlier influences. Playing on major stages around the globe as well as on famous television shows, The New York Timeshas said, “Gregory Porter has most of what you would want in a male jazz singer, and maybe a thing or two you didn’t know you wanted.” http://www.gregoryporter.com
Patience Higgins is true to his name. He waited nearly 25 years to release a recording of his own, “Live in Harlem,” which is not to suggest he has been idle. The New York-based multi-instrumentalist has been the quintessential journeyman, working with R&B legends Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and jazz institutions like the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and Count Bassie Orchestra, to name a few. The Sugar Hill Quartet is one of the great jazz bands of modern Harlem. Led by Patience Higgins a cooking, muscular-toned tenor man somewhere between Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins. Mr. Higgins is also well known for his work on Broadway, including The Wiz, Aint Misbehavin, Chicago, and many others.
Dapp Theory is at the meeting point of lyrical jazz piano, funkified polyrhythmic exploration and spoken word poeticism. Leader, pianist and composer Andy Milne is one of the most important and respected voices in jazz today. His band, Dapp Theory has been on the scene since 1998 helping re-draw and extend the boundaries of jazz. Jazz Times Magazine describes their latest CD, Layers of Chance as “remarkable chemistry . . . so impeccable, it’s practically a musical Unified Field Theory”. www.dapptheory.com
Sullivan Fortner plays jazz piano with bravado and percussive force. While earning his Bachelor of Music degree, this young jazz pianist was a member of the Oberlin Jazz Septet (OJS), the Conservatory’s elite student jazz ensemble. A graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, Sullivan has also recorded with such luminaries as Albert “Tottie” Heath, Benny Powell, and Silde Hampton and currently performs with the Roy Hargrove Quintet. This up and coming musician is an act worth watching out for, leading The New York Times to claim, “[Fortner is] unknown around New York, though maybe not for long.”
In celebration of the 20th anniversary, we will be presenting 5 word artists / poets between sets who will help celebrate the legacy of Charlie Parker and further illuminate jazz in a diverse way. Sunday’s artists include: Jon Sands, Sheila Maldonado, and Nikhil Melnechuk.
Jon Sands is a Brooklyn based author who wrote The New Clean (Write Bloody Publishing, 2011), and starred in the 2011 web-series “Verse: A Murder Mystery” from Rattapallax Films. He is also the director of Poetry Education at the Positive Health Project (a syringe exchange center in Manhattan), as well as a youth mentor with Urban Word-NYC. www.jonsands.com.
Sheila Maldonado is the author of one-bedroom solo (Fly by Night Press, 2011), her debut poetry collection. Her poems have appeared in Rattapallax, Callaloo, Meridians, Stretching Panties, Live Mag!, online at The Acentos Review and anthologized in Me No Habla with Acento: Contemporary Latino Poetry. She has received a Pushcart nomination, two Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grants and was granted residencies at the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, New York and at Fundación Valparaíso in Andalucía, Spain.www.sheilamaldonado.com
Nikhil Melnechuk runs the monthly BOWWOW poetry series, and co-created the weekly Ginsberg Turn On at the Bowery Poetry Club. He reads at the HOWL Festival, co-produced the First Annual New York Poetry Festival on Governors Island, and organized and contributed to the Witness Downtown Rising Renga at World Trade Center 7, with Bob Holman and Todd Stone. Nikhil has read at Yale and Wesleyan Universities, and at salons in Rome, Bombay, Paris, Brussels, New York, and London. Two of his poems were orchestrated and sung by Stephanie Johnstone and her choir. Nikhil is seeking publication for his book-length poem, The Zoo In You.
Cost: FREE
Appropriate for: All Ages
Sponsored by:
This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
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Is Ernestine Anderson still on this bill? She was listed and now not.
Ernestine Anderson is no longer on the bill due to some health issues.
I would love to bring my mother who is in a wheel chair will that be a problem? Please tell me the hours and exactly where it is. We can take a bus.
Thank you,
Marion
This event begins at 3pm and is in Tompkins Square Park. Click on the “Directions to Event” link at the top of the page for a map. I believe all public parks are wheelchair accessible.