The Charleston Jazz Initiative (CJI), a project of the College of Charleston’s School of the Arts, Arts Management Program, in partnership with the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, announces its Legends Festival, June 4-6, 2010 at several venues on the College campus and in downtown Charleston.
CJI’s Legends Festival is an event in the City of Charleston’s Piccolo Spoleto Festival and the College’s School of the Arts 20th Anniversary. Many events are free; though an RSVP is required at info@charlestonjazz.net or 843.953.4843. For festival details and schedule, visit www.charlestonjazz.net or call 843.953.4843.
CJI’s Legends Festival will celebrate the legacy of jazz in Charleston – a history that CJI has been documenting for over seven years since 2003. The Festival will also honor many jazz “legends” – those with Charleston and South Carolina roots, as well as other internationally-recognized musicians.
CJI recently received a $40,000 NEA Access to Artistic Excellence grant in April. The grant is a significant national distinction for CJI’s efforts, Charleston’s flourishing jazz scene, and the city’s rich jazz legacy. The live recording, along with a studio recording at Charleston Sound, South Carolina’s premier recording studio, will be engineered by professional drummer and educator, Quentin Baxter. The CD is scheduled for release in December 2010 and will be CJI’s first recording that features music from the early 20th century to 2010 that documents Charleston’s influence in the jazz performance traditions of bandleaders, sidemen, and soloists.
In addition to over 25 musicians, the Legends Festival will also feature many respected jazz historians and scholars who are advisors to CJI. They include: Jeffrey P. Green, British biographer of Edmund Thornton Jenkins: The Life and Times of an American Black Composer, 1894-1926 (Greenwood Press, 1982); Dan Morgenstern, author and Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, the largest and most comprehensive jazz archive in the country, and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master; Wolfram Knauer, Ph.D., author, and Director of the Jazz-Institut, Darmstadt, Germany, the largest jazz archive in Europe; A.B. Spellman, former Deputy Director, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC, jazz author and critic, and namesake of the A.B. Spellman National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy; and Larry Ridley, Ph.D., bassist and Executive Director of the African American Jazz Caucus, New York City.
CJI’s Legends Festival is funded in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; The Humanities Council of South Carolina, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the City of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs and the City of North Charleston Cultural Arts Program through their joint administration of the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant Program and the South Carolina Arts Commission which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund of the Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina.
For more information, visit www.charlestonjazz.net or www.piccolospoleto.com. You can also contact Dr. Karen Chandler at chandlerk@cofc.edu or 843.953.5474.
