Gil Goldstein and Bobby McFerrin.

Joann Stevens, of the American History Museum, is the program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM). She last wrote about Hawaiian cowboys.

In a career spanning nearly four decades, jazz artist Gil Goldstein’s talents have earned him kudos as educator, performer, composer, producer, arranger and film scorer. But perhaps his most notable role is as collaborator and mentor. Drawing on a formula of humility, curiosity and seemingly boundless creative energy, Goldstein’s collaborations have earned him worldwide recognition and the respect of A-list musicians exploring uncharted musical territory.

He has arranged for artists as diverse as Chris Botti, David Sanborn, Milton Nascimento, Randy Brecker, Manhattan Transfer and Al Jarreau, and performed with Pat Martino, Lee Konitz, Gil Evans, Billy Cobham, and Ray Barretto, among others. Film and TV music projects include performances, orchestrations and arrangements in ABC After School Specials, the films De-Lovely, Little Buddha, Frida, and dozens of others.

Not bad for a kid who got his musical start playing accordion in Baltimore, Maryland, where he recalls a TV show that had  ”maybe 100 kids” featured on accordion.  “When it was no longer hip, I said I’d better get rid of this thing,”  he says explaining  his move from accordion to piano and synthesizer.  Still the accordion is a great instrument to learn to play music on, he says. “It’s always been part of my consciousness.”

Goldstein’s current collaboration is with ten-time Grammy-winning vocal innovator Bobby McFerrin. On May 13, the pair will perform at the Kennedy Center with Goldstein lending his talents as arranger and performer on piano and accordion to support McFerrin’s new Spirityouall, a concert series and recording project featuring some of the beloved spirituals he recalls from his youth.

The creative duo.

McFerrin’s project also pays tribute to his father Robert McFerrin, Sr, the first African-American male to perform with the New York Metropolitan Opera, and the singing voice of Sidney Poitier’s Porgy in the film Porgy and Bess. Arranged and produced by Goldstein, the project is the kind of comfort zone stretching challenge that Goldstein relishes to expand his musical education and creativity and take him in new directions.

“I didn’t grow up with spirituals,” Goldstein says of his unfamiliarity with the music.  While working on the project an encounter with jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding, who he’d collaborated with on her jazz chart busting CD, provided needed insight and inspiration. “She turned me onto an African American hymn book.  It was perfect!  I learned so much.  I’m always learning.”

His respect for lifelong learning and the exchange that comes from “good” mentoring and collaborations are staples of Goldstein’s creative process.  When he co-arranged and co-produced Spalding’s third CD, Chamber Music Society, neither knew it would become the best-selling contemporary jazz album of 2011, selling over 100,00 units, a rarity in modern jazz.  They just knew they were creating something mutually satisfying and exciting.

Spalding went on to be named #1 in the Contemporary Jazz Artist Category that year and become the first jazz artist to win a Grammy in the Best New Artist Category, beating out pop idol Justin Bieber.  It was her first Grammy win. (Spalding was also a recipient of Smithsonian magazine’s first annual Ingenuity Awards in 2012.)

“Esperanza had a concept for Chamber Music Society.  I just enabled it,” says Goldstein.  He connected her to the best string players and encouraged her artistic vision for a jazz/classical/world music music fusion album that incorporated the work of 18th-century poet William Blake.  Supporting an artists’ vision ”is a kind of mentoring,” he says. ”That was one of those good ones, a win-win.”

A 2010 commission from the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Frederic Chopin’s birth also sparked a collaboration with McFerrin. This time Goldstein adapted Chopin’s piano music to big band and McFerrin’s voice. Polish folk music that had influenced Chopin was added for zest along with compositions by Debussy and Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, both artists inspired by Chopin.

The best mentoring and collaborative relationships are mutually beneficial, he says, a two-way street fueled by creativity and respect. As an accompanist, he says he strives for flexibility, leaving “space” for artists  “to express themselves.  That’s how I learned,” he says. “I was a terrible student who didn’t take well to someone telling me this is how you have to do it. I became an arranger by making it up, by being prepared to fail.”

That learning style might partly explain why his music education stretched out over five colleges.  He spent two years at American University, one at Berklee College of Music, and another two at the University of Maryland, before receiving a BA in music. He then earned a masters in music at the University of Miami (where jazz guitarist Pat Metheny was a classmate) and a doctorate at The Union Graduate School.

Today Goldstein teaches at New York University, the Mead School for Human Development and the New School.  He says he encourages his students to retain a healthy respect for and awe of musical elders that have been trailblazers. He credits guitar influences like Jim Hall and Pat Martino as inspirations, and remembers college classmate Metheny ”being very clear and humble about who his influences are. I think that’s a healthy thing to have a degree of respect for somebody. No one develops in a vacuum.”

Rev. Dennis Kamakahi performs at the 2012 Na Hoku Hanohano Awards. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

Joann Stevens, of the American History Museum, is the program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM). She last wrote about Darius Brubeck.

With his quiet dignity and self-assurance, leadership becomes Slack Key guitarist Reverend Dennis Kamakahi. Whether leading a cultural renaissance in his home state or a day of recognition at the Smithsonian, the Grammy-award winning composer, recording artist and Episcopalian minister exudes a presence as solid and beautiful as the music he composes and performs. Kamakahi was a member of the folk music group “The Sons of Hawaii” from 1974 to 1992 and his music was featured in the award-winning 2011 George Clooney film, The Descendants.

Kamakahi’s achievements as an Hawaiian folk musician and cultural historian recently found a welcome spotlight as curators at the National Museum of American History accepted his 6-string guitar, albums, sheet music and personal photographs as part of the museum’s music and history collections, a first for a modern Hawaiian composer.

A representative from the office of Congresswoman Colleen Hanabusa (D-HI) read a message praising Kamakahi as “one of the finest musicians Hawaii has ever known.”

“Through your humility, grace and love for others,” she said, “you have positively influenced so many and have represented Hawaii with dignity.”

“This is an experience, to be alive at a time you can donate something and pique the curiosity of people,”  Kamakahi, told an audience of well wishers. He then used the donated guitar to play and sing songs with stories and melodies as exotic and mysterious as his state.

Kamakahi’s role as cultural ambassador is as much family mantle as professional choice.  His grandfather and father were guitarists. His father played trombone in the Hawaiian Royal Band and jazz with his mentor James “Trummy” Young, trombonist with the Louis Armstrong All Stars. Hawaiian culture dictated that the eldest grandchild ”be given” to the grandparent of the same gender to mentor as guardian of the cultural heritage.

At the donation ceremony at the American History Museum. Photo by Harold Dorwin

Music is in Kamakahi’s blood and his story is a fascinating one. His goal to become a classical music conductor was abandoned after a music theory teacher encouraged him to “to go back to your roots, to Hawaiian music.” In 1973, Eddie Kamae, ukelele virtuoso and co-founder of the Sons of Hawaii, invited the 19-year-old Kamakahi to join the group.

Now “we’re the last two left,” he says of the legendary band. “He’s the oldest.  I’m the baby. You are what your teachers are.”

That makes Kamakahi a cultural activist, who along with Kamae, ushered in Hawaii’s cultural renaissance of the 1970s, helping to lift stigmas that had repressed Hawaii’s indigenous music and traditions for decades. Slack Key guitar music, predating ukelele music, rose like a  Phoenix from cultural ashes.

Slack Key music history is steeped in the lore of the Vaqueros, Spanish and Mexican cowboys who developed cattle ranching as a business and culture in the American Southwest and West. Vaqueros were brought to Hawaii to tame an overpopulation of cattle and taught Hawaiians to become cowboys or Paniolos. They also brought guitars, trading tunes and songs around camp fires. When the Vaqueros left, the guitars remained, adopted by Paniolos who invented their own tuning—slack key—to  accommodate Hawaiian music.

“It was mostly tuned to the voice,” Kamakahi explains of the style. “The high falsetto style of singing emerged because of [the Paniolos].” Every tuning has a nickname. Families guarded tunings so closely they became family secrets. While the term Paniolo is used generically, today, to mean cowboy, it was originally reserved only for students of the Vaqueros, says Kamakahi.  It’s a ”high title” going back to those days. Descendants of the original Vaqueros still live on the Big Island of Hawaii. And Kamakahi’s songs herald their histories along with those of Hawaii’s culture, religions, landscape, heroes and traditions.

Detail from the donated guitar. Photo by Harold Dorwin

“I write for story telling,” he says of his music. Hula, considered only a dance form by most mainlanders, is actually a form of storytelling that presents Hawaiian music and narrative through motion. Koke’e, a Kamakahi tune that became a Hula  standard, was composed on the guitar donated to the Smithsonian.

“Original slack key music used maybe two chords,” he says. Two stories demonstrate the music’s influence and progression over the years.

Kamakahi counts the late legendary blues singer/composer Muddy Waters as a friend who used the Delta G  slack key tuning throughout his career. He used to ask me, ‘Why don’t I sound like you when I play?’  I told him it’s because you don’t live in Hawaii.”

The 2011 film The Descendants, starring George Clooney, became the first feature length movie offering a full slack key music score. Kamakahi’s tune Ulili E  performed with son David was featured in the film and in promotions. He said the power of the music and Clooney’s insistence on cultural authenticity won over the director after he and others invited them to a jam session at a local club.

“You can sing Hawaiian songs, but if you don’t know what you’re singing about (culturally) it’s not Hawaiian.”

While in DC he turned 60. Alumni and friends of the National Capital Region Chapter of the University of Hawai’i Alumni Association celebrated with a feast of Hula, food,  music, and fundraising to support student interns. Kamakahi says he’ll still perform but wants to focus on educating others in and outside of Hawaii about the region’s history, music and culture.

He marvels that Slack Key has loyal fans as far away as Russia, Finland, France and South Africa.  Exposure from The Descendants generated mail from around the world.  Yet he’s concerned about the music’s future in Hawaii.

“It’s a sad time for Hawaiian music. It’s an exported music now,” he says. “It used to be in Waikiki,” a staple of tourism where musicians like Don Ho developed careers playing music lounges. That changed in the 1980s when hotel general managers recruited from outside Hawaii cut costs by replacing live music with karaoke. “Musicians like me had to go to the mainland,” says Kamakahi.

His hopes for young Hawaiian musicians is that promoting the culture will support its survival and evolution.

“Most people in Hawaii don’t know what the Smithsonian is,” he says. But Kamakahi knows the recognition validates his artistry and his culture. “I hope the Smithsonian recognition will place focus on the music back home. This honor will outlast me because it’s not only for me. It’s for those who came before me and for those who come after me.

“I tell young musicians you need to travel the world so your music will affect others, and theirs yours. Music is a communicator. It breaks down barriers. Music is the universal language that brings us together.”

He explains with an anecdote.

“I was playing at the Vancouver Music Festival and played with a West African band whose rhythms,” rooted in the blues “we hear every day in Hawaii.  The bass player was in nirvana that we knew their rhythms.

“Rhythm is everywhere. Your heartbeat is the first rhythm you hear. The heartbeat is the first thing that connects you to life,” he says smiling broadly. “That’s why we’re all musical. We have a heartbeat.”

Hear from the Slack Key legend himself in an episode of the American History Museum’s podcast, History Explorer. 

Father and son: Darius and Dave Brubeck in Wilton, Connecticut, September 2011. Image courtesy of Darius Brubeck

Joann Stevens of the American History Museum. She is the program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) and last wrote about the Aloha Boys.

Dave Brubeck.  The legendary jazz pianist, composer, and cultural diplomat’s name inspires awe and reverence.  Call him the “quintessential American.” Reared in the West, born into a tight knit, musical family, by age 14 he was a cowboy working a 45,000 acre cattle ranch at the foothills of the Sierras with his father and brothers.  A musical innovator, Brubeck captivated the world over six decades with his love for youth, all humanity, and the cross-cultural musical rhythms that jazz and culture inspire. In 2009, as a Kennedy Center Honoree he was feted by President Barack Obama who said “you can’t understand America without understanding jazz.  And you can’t understand jazz without understanding Dave Brubeck.”

In 2012, Dave Brubeck passed away a day before his 92nd birthday, surrounded by his wife of 70 years, Iola , his son Darius and Darius’ wife Cathy.  To understand Brubeck’s legacy one must know him as a musician, a son, husband, father and friend.  In tribute to Dave Brubeck during the Smithsonian’s 12th Annual Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) and UNESCO’s International Jazz Day, his eldest son, Darius, offers a birds-eye view into life with his famous father and family and how their influences shaped his personal worldview and career as a jazz pianist, composer, educator, and cultural activist, using music to foster intercultural understanding and social equity. A Fulbright Senior Specialist in Jazz Studies, Darius Brubeck has taught jazz history and composition in Turkey, Romania, and South Africa, among other nations.  He has created various ground breaking commissions such as one for Jazz at Lincoln Center that set music he composed with Zim Ngqawana to extracts of speeches from Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, read by actor Morgan Freeman.

Darius Brubeck on tour summer 2012 with Darius Brebeck Quartet. Image courtesy of Darius Brubeck

What did you learn from your father as a musician and cultural ambassador that guides and inspires you today?

Nearly everything.  But here is what I think relates to JAM and this UNESCO celebration. Dave combined being as American as you can get—raised as a cowboy, former GI, always in touch with his rural California roots—with being internationalist in his outlook. People in many countries regard him as one of their own, because he touched their lives as much as their own artists did. If it were possible to explain this with precision, music would be redundant. Of course it isn’t.

He was always curious, interested in people, intrigued rather than repelled by difference, and quick to see what people had in common. I realize, now especially, that I absorbed these attitudes and have lived accordingly, without really thinking about where they came from.

How was it growing up with a famous jazz musician father who had friends like Louis Armstrong, Gerry Mulligan and Miles Davis?

In retrospect, the most important thing was seeing what remarkable human beings these musicians were. They had their individual hang-ups and struggles, but in company they were witty, perceptive, self-aware, informed, and, above all, ‘cool.’   I learned that humor and adaptability help you stay sane and survive the endless oscillation between exaltation and frustration— getting a standing ovation one moment and not being able to find a place to eat the next. Dave and Paul (Desmond) were extremely different people but their very difference worked musically. You learn perspective because your own vantage point is always changing.

For your family music, and jazz in particular, is the family business. How did that shape you as a person and your family as a unit?

It made us a very close family. People in the ‘jazz-life’ really understand that playing the music is the easiest part. The rest of it can be pretty unrewarding. My mother worked constantly throughout my father’s career, and still does. Many people contact her about Dave’s life and music. In addition to writing lyrics, she contributed so much to the overall organization of our lives.  We were very fortunate because this created extra special bonds between family members as colleagues, and as relatives.

Performing together as a family is special. It’s also fun. We all know the score, so to speak. We all know that the worst things that happen make the best stories later. And so we never blame or undermine each other. There have been big celebratory events that have involved us all. Dave being honored at the Kennedy Center in 2009 must count as the best. All four musician brothers were surprise guest performers, and both my parents were thrilled.

During the seventies, my brothers Chris and Dan and I toured the world with Dave in “Two Generations of Brubeck” and the “New Brubeck Quartet.” Starting in 2010, the three of us have given performances every year as “Brubecks Play Brubeck.”  We lead very different lives in different countries the rest of the time. The professional connection keeps us close.

Darius Brubeck with students from Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, 2007. Image courtesy of Darius Brubeck

The Jazz Appreciation Month theme for 2013 is “The Spirit and Rhythms of Jazz.” How does your father’s legacy express this theme?

I know you’re looking for something essential about jazz itself but, first, I’ll answer your question very literally. Dave wrote a large number of ‘spiritual’ works, including a mass commissioned for Pope John Paul’s visit to the U.S. in 1987. His legacy as a composer, of course, includes jazz standards like In Your Own Sweet Way. But there is a large body of liturgical and concert pieces in which he shows people how he felt about social justice, ecology, and his faith.

The ‘spirit of jazz’ in Dave’s music, as he performed it, is an unqualified belief in improvisation as the highest, most inspired , ‘spiritual’ musical process of all.

Cultural and rhythmic diversity is what he is most famous for because of hits like “Take Five,” “Unsquare Dance” and “Blue Rondo a la Turk.” The cultural diversity of jazz is well illustrated by his adaptation of rhythms common in Asia, but new to jazz.  He heard these during his Quartet’s State Department tour in 1958.

Brubeck (above, with local musicians) traveled to India on a State Department tour in 1958. Image courtesy of the Brubeck Collection, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library

You were a Fulbright scholar in jazz studies in Turkey. Your father composed “Blue Rondo” after touring the country.  How did Turkey inspire him? What did you learn from your time in Turkey and touring there with your father?  

Dave first heard the rhythm that became the basis of “Blue Rondo a la Turk” in Izmir, played by street musicians. I was actually with him in 1958, as an 11-year-old boy. He transcribed the 9/8 rhythm and when he went to do a radio interview, he described what he heard to one of the radio orchestra musicians who spoke English. The musician explained that this rhythm was very natural for them, “like blues is for you.” The juxtaposition of a Turkish folk rhythm with American blues is what became “Blue Rondo.”

The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s music encounter with Indian classical musicians at All-India Radio was also very significant. Dave didn’t perform the music of other cultures, but he saw the creative potential of moving in that direction as a jazz musician, especially when it came to rhythm.

Jazz is open-ended. It always was fusion music, but that doesn’t mean that it is just a nebulous collection of influences.

When I was in Istanbul as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in 2007, my first thought was to encourage what musicologists call hybridity, the mixing of musical traditions. This was met with some resistance from students and I had to re-think my approach. In effect, they were saying, ‘No!  We’re not interested in going on a cross-cultural journey with you during your short time here.  We want to learn what you know.’

They were right.  When, and if, they want to combine jazz and Turkish music, they’ll do it themselves, and vice versa. Jazz is world music. It’s not ‘World Music’ in the sense of ‘Celtic fiddler jams with Flamenco guitarist and tabla player.’ Rather it is a language used everywhere. Anywhere you go you’ll find musicians who play the blues and probably some ‘standards’ like “Take the A-Train” or “All the Things You Are.”  The other side of this is that local music becomes international through jazz.  Think about the spread of Brazilian, South African and Nordic jazz.

In Turkey, Brubeck (above: arriving with his family) first heard the rhythms that would form the basis of “Blue Rondo” from street musicians. Image courtesy of the Brubeck Collection, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library

In the eighties in South Africa, you initiated the first degree course in jazz studies offered by an African university. Jazz is known globally as ‘freedom’s music.’ South African was under apartheid when you did this.  Why was it important for you to do this on that continent, in that country, at that time?

Before I answer, I have to say that my wife, Catherine, is South African. Her political and music connections led to my going to Durban in 1983 to teach at the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal).

There wasn’t a university degree in jazz studies in the whole of Africa. It is somewhat ironic that the first one should be taught by a white foreigner in apartheid South Africa. The ANC in exile was in favor of my going or we wouldn’t have gone. They knew they would be in government sooner or later  and saw that transforming important institutions from the inside was a positive step.

There was already an established jazz scene in South Africa that had produced great artists like Hugh Masakela  and Abdullah Ibrahim, but they couldn’t work in their own country. So this was a crucial choice for me at the time and an opportunity to do something that mattered. Local musicians didn’t have the training for the academic world; working in a university certainly isn’t the same as gigging and giving music lessons. A lot of ‘improvisation’ made it work. For example, changing entrance requirements so that African students and players could join the program.

How we progressed is too long a story to go into here, but the new opportunities and, eventually, the especially created Centre for Jazz & Popular Music visibly and joyfully changed the cultural landscape on campus, in Durban, and also had an impact on higher education generally. Today, 30 years later, there are numerous universities and schools that offer jazz.

What are your aspirations as a jazz musician and educator? What impact do you want to have on the world?  

I’ve just described the biggest thing I’ve done in my life. It took up almost 25 years and I’m in my sixties now. So that might be it, but who knows? I’m back to playing music full-time because I love doing it, not just the music but the life-long friendships and connections that develop in the jazz world.

Also the travel, the especially strange and wonderful opportunities like playing in Israel and Saudi Arabia within a few months of each other. I secretly hope that in some instances my concerts and compositions help people see beyond the barriers of race, nationalism and ideology. That’s what I try to do, anyway.

I don’t have particular career aspirations, except the desire to continue improving as a musician. When I feel I’ve gone as far as I can, I’ll quit. Meanwhile I enjoy having my own quartet, touring sometimes with my brothers, and also lecturing and teaching when the occasions arise.

Dave Brubeck (center) with sons, 1973; Image courtesy of the Brubeck Collection, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library

What’s on the horizon for the Brubeck Institute and your career that most people don’t know?

I hope the Brubeck Institute will take on an even more international role. While it is historically fitting that the Institute and the Brubeck Collection be located at the University of the Pacific in California where my parents studied and met, the true mission is global.

At the start of this conversation I said my father was instinctively internationalist.  I think the Brubeck Institute should carry this spirit of cooperation and ecumenism into the future. I will certainly help where I can.

This year I’m hoping to play in far flung Kathmandu, where they have a jazz festival, also to return to South Africa for some reunion performances. I really appreciate that although I live in London, the university where I taught for 25 years has made me an Honorary Professor.

JAM 2013 explores jazz and world culture with Smithsonian museums and community partners in a series of  events.  April 9, free onstage discussion/workshop with Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez at American history; free Latin Jazz JAM! concert with Hernandez, Giovanni Hidalgo and Latin jazz stars at GWU Lisner Auditorium; April 10, Randy Weston and African Rhythms in concert w. guest Candido Camero/onstage discussion with Robin Kelley and Wayne Chandler ; April 12 Hugh Masakela at GWU. 

Use of historic materials in the Brubeck Collection  are granted by permission of the Brubeck Institute at the University of the Pacific.

The Aloha Boys bring island sound to the East Coast.

Joann Stevens of the American History Museum. She is the program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) and last wrote about the Gees Bend Symphony.

A warm thought for a cold Spring Day.  Aloha reigns in Washington, DC!

For decades thousands of Hawaiian transplants and local natives of the islands’ ancestry have transplanted their cultural roots into the city’s hard clay soil. The result has been a flowering of ethnic education, dance schools and music, cultural exhibitions and slack key guitar concerts that have now created the area’s first Slack Key Guitar Festival at the Birchmere, and the rise of troubadors like the Aloha Boys.

The Aloha Boys, Hawaiian transplants, met 20-years ago at Halau O’ Aulani, a Hawaiian cultural school in Arlington, VA., where their children were studying. The “dads” formed a group to provide much needed Hula music to the school. The rest, as they say, is history. DC cultural history.

Since then the Aloha Boys have performed everywhere from school functions and backyard picnics to the Smithsonian’s American Indian Museum and its American History Museum, and the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage. They have even represented Arlington County heritage events in Rheims, France.  In May, they perform at New York City’s Carnegie Hall.

Guitarist Glen Hirabayashi, a founding member of the group, said the catalyst for the group’s founding was their wives.  One wife was reared in Hawaii.  Another is a native of McLean, VA.  “My wife was a military brat who grew up most of her life in Arkansas,” Hirabayashi said. Yet each of the women held dear their cultural roots and insisted that their daughters, then two and three-years old, learn Hula. Hirabayashi says the children grew up enmeshed in Hawaiian culture and learned to seamlessly meld their East Coast identities with their Hawaiian enculturation.

The group’s daughters also carry on their heritage.

“We go back (to Hawaii) once a  year,” Hirabayashi said of his family.  “And you couldn’t tell that they weren’t local kids.  They do everything that everyone else does.  It’s wonderful seeing my kids appreciate the things I kind of took for granted.”

His youngest daughter, Amy Melenani (her name means “beautiful song”)  is now a junior at Virginia Tech and a notable Hula dancer.  She will be a featured performer at the 2013  National Cherry Blossom Festival.  His oldest daughter, Ashley Hokunani (her name means “beautfil star”) is married and relocated in North Carolina.  Yet. she still talks about her favorite song, Koke’e, and “her best memories ever” being when the legendary Slack Key guitarist Dennis Kamakahi “played and sang that song in our basement.”

Hirabayashi says Hawaiian music has a solid following in the Washington area, with concerts at Wolf Trap and Birchmere, selling out.  Ukelele music is experiencing a renaissance, he says, with the popularity of artists like jazz ukelele player Benny Chong, and music industry leaders like NAMM offering more than 50 ukelele exhibitors at its recent show.

But its Slack Key guitar and artists like Kamakahi that he would like to see more widely exposed, to preserve the music’s rich heritage and cowboy culture, Hawaiian style.  According to history, King Kamehameha III imported Spanish and Mexican cowboys to the Big island of Hawaii in the 1830s to help control a cattle boom that had overpopulated the island and become a nuisance. The cowboys brought their guitars and played music with the Hawaiian locals, known as Paniolo. Eventually the Paniolo adopted the guitar for their own ancient chants and songs.  Unfamiliar with or unlearned in how the Spanish tuned the guitar, the Hawaiian cowboys developed their own tuning style that became known as Slack Key.

Tuning styles became so secretive “That families have their own tunings,” said Hirabayashi. “It wasn’t until recently that it (tuning) was shared. Legend was that the Spanish cowboys didn’t teach Hawaiians how to tune them.  So they (Hawaiians) came up with their own tuning.”

Performers entertain at one of the regular ArtJamz events in the Kogod Courtyard. Photos by Anchyi Wei

Every third Thursday of the month, the free concert series, Take 5! transforms the Kogod Courtyard at the Smithsonian American Art Museum into an American town hall, making it a center of social, artistic and cultural egalitarianism where all are welcome and few remain strangers. Like New York City’s legendary Town Hall, there are no bad seats in the Kogod Couryard. The atrium features soaring heights and live trees. Lights like floating stars are embedded in a glass ceiling. Banquettes and tables and chairs are sprinkled around the courtyard, offering a warm and calming ambiance that equally invites conversation or solitude.  This is a community chill-out space in chilling times. A musical oasis in the midst of the city.

Recent free concerts have highlighted the music of Lee Morgan or offered a tribute to Wayne Shorter, featuring local saxophonist Elijah Jamal Balbed. Jazz trumpeter Mike “Bags” Davis  takes the stage February 21, performing the music  of legendary bebop trumpeter/composer Kenny Dorham whose big sound took him from the big bands of Lionel Hampton, Billy Eckstine and Mercer Ellington to gigs with jazz leaders Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey, among others.

Start with a blank canvas, end with a masterpiece.

But Take 5! is not a performance series where “we’re playing jazz just for the sake of jazz” insists American Art’s program producer Laurel Fehrenbach. The series is the museum’s nod to “an American art form we can’t hang on walls,” and a tribute to American biography, honoring the lives of pioneering and emerging jazz artists who have transformed America through the art of sound.

During an average performance, the jazz park atmosphere of the courtyard attracts more than 200 people. Capturing old jazz heads and jazz novices. Parents with toddlers and children find the space as friendly as millennials enjoying a glass of wine from the cafe. Board games, checkers, Monopoly, Life and Candyland, engage families sitting up close to feel the music or in the back to play with the kids. Free educational handouts offer insight into the cultural histories and careers of the featured artists.

Art Jamz,  a local studio and ”participatory art” program provides a bohemian touch, offering paint supplies, canvas and teachers to anyone who signs up to explore their artistic side, creating art against the backdrop of live music.

Turns out, you can take it with you.

“We want the courtyard to be full, lively and used by whoever wants to use it,” says Fehrenbach, who says she is open to new collaborations with local organizations. She says the family friendly space and concerts have become a welcome accident stumbled upon by people living in the Penn Quarter neighborhood or workers heading home from daycare with kids. Bright and open with a cafe, the courtyard makes it possible for nearly everyone to find the right spot to fit their situation.

The upcoming Take 5! Schedule offers:

March 21, Corey Wallace Tribute to Grachan Moncur III

April 18, The Music of Pepper Adams featuring Frank Basile  

May 16, Night &  Day Quintet Performing Gershwin and Porter

Joann Stevens of the American History Museum.

Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April. Recent posts include Wynton Marsalis, Honoring Duke Ellington and The Making of a Millennial Jazz Musician: Elijah Jamal Balbed.

Jason Moran, Alicia Hall Moran, The Bandwagon and Bill Frisell in the KC Jazz Club October 26, 2012. Photo by Scott Suchman

A museum exhibition can showcase a collection. But music gives it soul, emotionally connecting the public to the spirit and rhythms of people and unknown stories behind objects. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History is among a vanguard of museums who have used live music performances and commissions for decades to interpret and showcase American history and collections.

The Chamber Music Society performs on the Smithsonian’s quartet of rare Stradivarius instruments bringing cultural and artistic context to classical music scholarship.  The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra (SJMO) enriches jazz collections with live performances of unpublished music from the collections and appearances by jazz masters representing living history. The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City—a Smithsonian Affiliate—has musicians of diverse genres interpret art on exhibition and musically engage the public in themes inherent in Himalayan art and culture.

Other museums are catching onto the music-collections connections.

In 2008, Moran, artistic adviser for jazz at the Kennedy Center, was commissioned by The Philadelphia Art Museum to compose music for a Gees Bends Quilts exhibition. The result was a jazz symphony that melded rhythms from the community’s past with improvisational jazz felt in the moment. When the quilts and the stories were put away, the music remained in their stead. Recently, Moran staged his Gees Bend jazz at the Kennedy Center. During this Black History Month, jazz vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater is taking the music and the Gees Bend story to the nation via the first national broadcast of the composition, offered over NPR’s JazzSet.

Women from Gee’s Bend work on a quilt during the 2005 ONB Magic City Art Connection in Birmingham, Alabama’s Linn Park. Photo by Andre Natta, courtesy of Wikimedia

To develop the piece, Moran, his wife Alicia, an accomplished opera singer, and members of his band traveled to Gees Bend to conduct research and embrace the people of the remote community. Their improvisational conversation is recorded in musical masterpieces ranging from Alica’s rendition of the Quilter’s Song, first recorded in the field in 1941 for the compilation How We Got Over: Sacred Songs of Gees Bend, to the band’s musical interpretation of  a quilt pattern. The Morans have created similar music commissions to help museum’s present history and collections. A case in point is Bleed, created for the Whitney Museum of Art.

Baltimore photographer Linda Day Clark  has traveled to Gees Bend annually since 2002 after discovering the community on assignment for The New York Times. In a podcast for the Philadelphia quilt exhibition, she discusses the “amazing microcosm of culture” in Gees Bend, calling it both “a blessing and a curse” for its historic authenticity.

Day related a conversation she’d had with Gees Bend elder Arlonza Pettway, a descendant of slaves. Pettway told Day about sitting on her great grandmother’s quilt to hear the stories of her great grandmother’s capture in Africa, being held captive with other slaves, lured onto a ship, and their experiences during the Middle Passage.

“We’re looking at a group of Africans brought over during slavery,” says Day, ”and when slavery ended, they stayed. Very few people in Gees Bend have moved in or out.”

Located in a bend of the Alabama River, with one road leading into and out of the community, Gees Bend was founded by a North Carolina cotton grower, Joseph Gee, and 18 slaves who relocated with him to the region to farm cotton. The Gee family later sold the plantation to a relative, Mark H. Pettway.

During this 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington, the Smithsonian is presenting the exhibition Changing America to commemorate African Americans’ quest for freedom and equity in America. It may be argued that little has changed in Gees Bend in 150 years. Yet the stories this community has preserved and the artwork  it creates continues to inspire and inform a rapidly changing world outside its reach.  And with artists’ like Moran history is becoming music to their ears.

Joann Stevens of the American History Museum.

Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April. Recent posts include Take 5! Where Old Jazz Heads Meet Jazz Novices Over Sweet Notes and Wynton Marsalis, Honoring Duke Ellington.

Duke Ellington had international appeal. Here he performs in West Germany. All photos courtesy of the Duke Ellington Collection, Archives Center at the American History Museum

Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, the spiritual architect and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, celebrates jazz legacy in a big way. In celebration of the organization’s 25th anniversary, Marsalis has made the legendary composer Duke Ellington a major focus of the orchestra’s nation-wide anniversary tour, with the band performing familiar and lesser known compositions of the man, who as pianist, band leader and musical impresario is often acknowledged as ”beyond category.”

Call it the Crescent City honors the District of Columbia, in recognition of Ellington’s hometown and Marsalis’ New Orleans roots. At a recent concert that filled the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, Marsalis told the audience he feels he hasn’t paid “proper homage to the great Duke Ellington” in recent trips to DC. So he’s correcting the oversight by devoting half of this concert to Ellington’s legacy and music. Jazz at Lincoln Center organizers say the orchestra  has and will continue to give Ellington similar prominence throughout the tour.

The evening was an Ellington feast. Compositions like The Mooche and the iconic Mood Indigo which the Duke “played every night for 40-something years,” Marsalis reminded the crowd, were captivating. Braggin in Brass, a tune that took the trombone section through physical and musical gymnastics, was performed rarely and recorded only once, said Marsalis. “I think it was because the trombone section told him we don’t want to play this anymore.”

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, born April 29, 1899 in Washington, D.C., was a global giant in jazz for more than 50 years. As a cultural ambassador, Ellington garnered global recognition for jazz as an original American art form and was admired by fans and heads of state, worldwide, for his artistry. Over the years, Washington, D.C. has celebrated its native son with numerous honors including a community-building contemporary art mural, the development of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a statue of Ellington at the piano in front of the legendary Howard Theater and the dedication of a park in his name in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood.

But perhaps two of the city’s best tributes to Ellington was the installation of the Duke Ellington Collection—an archival treasure trove of photographs, records and other materials, including 100,000 sheets of unpublished Ellington music at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Archives Center, and the establishment, through federal appropriation, of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra as  ”the nation’s jazz orchestra”  to preserve and disseminate Ellington’s jazz legacy and that of other jazz legends, to the nation and the world via tours, recordings, education, and concerts.

On a State Department tour in 1963, Ellington performs in Iraq.

While in Iraq, Ellington partakes in the local scene with hookah and tea, along with Paul Gonsalves.

Hard at work, Ellington composing at the piano in Pakistan.

Ellington with a group of Indian musicians.

Ellington on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Sharing the stage with Peggy Lee, Ellington performs on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Ellington at the piano for a performance at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, California in 1970.

Conducting at the Claremont Hotel, Ellington flashes a big smile.

Ellington signs autographs in the rain in the USSR in 1971, his patience appearing to wear thin.

Striking a familiar pose, Ellington composing at the piano.

Joann Stevens of the American History Museum.

Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April. Recent posts include The Making of a Millennial Jazz Musician: Elijah Jamal Balbed and Oscar Peñas: A Music Man on a Mission.

Elijah Jamal Balbed performing. Photo by Jesse Allen

When I met Elijah Jamal Balbed, he was 19, wailed like an old bebopper, and had already been named “Best New Jazz Musician of 2010″ by Washington City Paper. He’d been recruited for a Jazz Appreciation Month performance at Meridian International to honor the Cold War jazz diplomacy of  jazz masters like Dizzy Gillespie and Dave Brubeck. Along with jazz kids, ages 9 to 20, Balbed comprised an impromptu quintet that quickly owned the bandstand, following a performance by star bassist Esperanza Spalding.

As the kids rocked, bureaucrats clapped on beat, hooted with glee, and murmured about jazz kids in the hip hop generation. Hmm. Maybe we need to rethink America’s music diplomacy after all.

“It’s America’s classical music, so it (jazz) can’t die,” declares Balbed, now 23, recalling that meeting recently at the American Art Museum. He’d just concluded a set at the museum’s “Take 5!” jazz concert series where he, the junior member and leader of the group, had presented a program introducing the Early Compositions of Wayne Shorter to a mostly middle-aged audience of more than 200 people. Most of the music performed had been recorded on Vee-Jay Records, a Chicago label entirely owned and operated by African Americans, from its founding in 1953 until its demise in 1966. The label also recorded Lee Morgan, John Lee Hooker, Little Richard, Jerry Butler, and even the Beatles.

But education is one of Balbed’s strong suits. Along with communicating across generations. He knows how to get people jamming to straight-ahead jazz music and history as he brings home his focused message: ”music is more than just a back beat. . .just open up your ears a little and feel something past the notes.”

Performing in D.C. Photo by Manabu Yoshinaga

What the young musician wants audiences to feel is America’s cultural history. Sometimes as a soft hug, other times a bear-like squeeze. Jazz is his instrument of communication to transmit stories and feelings through the complex rhythms and compositions of artists like saxophonist/composer Shorter, now 80.  The concert featured Balbed and the group: Alex Norris (trumpet); Samir Moulay (guitar); Harry Appelman (piano); Herman Burney, Jr. (bass) and Billy Williams (drums) performing early Shorter tunes like Blues A La Carte, Harry’s Last Stand and Devil’s Island.

Balbed credits mentors, past and present, with helping him find his passion for jazz, and developing an ear. Shorter has shaped American musical history as much as he has experienced it. His early career included stints with Maynard Ferguson’s Orchestra, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis, forays into fusion with Davis and Weather Report, and collaborations with musicians from Brazilian vocalist Milton Nascimento and folk singer Joni Mitchell to rock artists Carlos Santana and Steely Dan. In 2000, Shorter formed the first acoustic jazz group under his name with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade.

Balbed was introduced to jazz as a freshmen at Albert Einstein High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, where “I hoped to get in the honors jazz band,” he recalled smiling.  A hope quickly dashed by music director Joan Rackey. “She put me in the baby jazz band and told me,  ‘you don’t listen to enough jazz yet.’ She was right. I give her a lot of credit for grooming me. ”

He also credits Paul Carr and the jazz studies program at Howard University. But most of all he credits Washington, DC, a city with a strong jazz history and present, for his music education and opportunities. He currently plays every Monday night with the house band at the historic Bohemian Caverns, dubbed the “sole home of soul jazz.”

“There’s such a strong jazz scene in DC,” he said. “There’s a lot to feed off of in the city. Throughout college I was able to start gigging around the city and progress.”

The next Take 5! program will be held February 21, from 5 – 7 pm.  It features Mike “Bags” Davis and the music of Kenny Dorham. Balbed performs next February 15 at the Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival in Rockville, Maryland and February 16 at the HR-57 Center for the Preservation of Jazz & Blues in Washington, D.C.

Joann Stevens of the American History Museum

Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April. Recent posts include Oscar Peñas: A Music Man on a Mission and  Hawai`i’s Troubadour of Aloha

Peñas is currently working on a new album. Photo by Kristofer Dan-Bergan

Jazz guitarist Oscar Peñas is on a journey to build an authentic jazz voice; a personal style that communicates his depth of feeling for the music that captivated him and his friends as teens growing up in his native Spain and that now tells the story of his American journey. “It’s a work and progress,” he said sighing.  An exhilarating and sometimes scary ride that challenges him to overcome the confines of his classical guitar training and European formalism even as it invites him to celebrate them.

“But that’s why I like jazz,” he says, “for its openness. It is music you can integrate your culture in to.  It is the most authentic sound of North American culture.”  Past and present.

Jazz, America’s original music, is embedded with more than 100 years of American slave and immigrant history. In its rhythms, one can almost hear and feel the multicultural history it represents. Jazz can showcase the history of America’s progress towards democracy and its  shortcomings in equity and inclusion. But jazz is not just about America’s past. Peñas, and other artists like him, represents a growing underground of edgy, internationally diverse musicians for whom jazz is gaining resonance and a fan base that crosses generations and borders.

Oscar Peñas and Gil Goldstein playing together, along with Moto Fukushima. Photo by Wayne Tucker

This April, Jazz Appreciation Month will celebrate JAM with the theme “The Spirit and Rhythms of Jazz” to honor the historic and evolving multiculturalism of jazz worldwide, facilitated through celebrations like JAM and UNESCO’s International Jazz Day.

Leading the vanguard are noted and emerging jazz artists like Peñas, Danilo Perez, Esperanza Spalding, Elijah Jamal Balbed, and the group Slum Gum, many in collaboration with venerated jazz masters like Randy Weston, Gil Goldstein, Cecil Taylor, and Wayne Shorter, among others. They highlight jazz’s heritage, are building its legacy and demonstrate daily, why jazz is America’s original music, a beloved global cultural treasure.

Peñas grew up with the music of artists like Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and other jazz pioneers. They’re viewed today as “traditional” jazz artists, he said, but were the social and musical rebels of their time. Their music inspired him to find and to live his passion, and he believes their music and messages are instructive for youth searching for purpose and pathways today.

“They were innovators when they came out,” he said excitedly. “Using teamwork and their listening process” they made great music that pushed artistic boundaries and the social status quo.  “And if you learn to communicate and do something in common,” through music that is transformative, “that can’t be a bad thing,” he reasons.

His new album will feature collaborations with Esperanza Spalding, Jason Palmer and others. Photo by Kristofer Dan-Bergan

Today the 41-year-old guitarist works with friends and mentors like Goldstein and NEA Jazz Master Taylor to compose and perform his own boundary pushing music that he hopes has resonance with his peers and the next generation. Inspiration, he said, is drawn from the ups and downs of everyday life, as well as political and social issues.

Consider Julia, a hauntingly beautiful tune performed with Goldstein on accordion—an atypical but expressive jazz instrument.  The tune’s bolero rhythm celebrates life, joy and the lyricism of Spain, Peñas says. It also mourns a death, the loss of his beloved nine-year-old cousin, Julia, who died of a rare genetic disorder while Peñas was home for the Christmas holidays in 2006.

“I wrote it a few days after she passed.  It was kind of my therapy to express that tremendous loss.  It came along very fast.”

Music of Departures and Returns is an emerging project with band mates Franco Pinna, a native of Argentina, and Moto Fukushima, a native of Japan. It confronts “the question mark of where’s home,” says Peñas, and explores the feelings of immigrants in a world of global citizens. Though he has lived in the U.S. for many years, Peñas admits to feeling ungrounded.  “I don’t know where home is anymore,” he says. “For me Brooklyn, New York, feels like home. And my original hometown [Barcelona] feels like home too.” So do other places. The eight track CD will feature guest performances by Spalding and trumpeter Jason Palmer, among others, exploring diverse cultures.

Recognized by the ASCAP Lab for New Composers, Peñas says his quest is to deepen his musical voice while maintaining its personal and professional integrity. Friends and mentors like Goldstein and Taylor are helping. With them gigs and neighborhood jam sessions easily flow into life lessons about music, cultural history and risk taking that keep him real.

A few years ago, he remembered a wake up call delivered by Taylor. “I like what you’re doing but I don’t know why you don’t use your cultural background more,” said the classically trained African American jazz pianist known for his own expansive cultural roots and boundary pushing music.

Peñas reflected on the comment and used it to transform his music.”He was telling me I was doing good,” he says. “I just didn’t sound authentic.”

Joann Stevens of the American History Museum.

Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April. Recent posts include Hawai`i’s Troubadour of Aloha and Remembering Dave Brubeck, Goodwill Ambassador.

David Baker, front row with glasses, with the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra.

Guest blogger, Joann Stevens is the program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month at the American History Museum. Courtesy of the author

At age 80, David Baker has slowed his pace but still has the jazz lean and look of musicians from an earlier era. Proving that old beboppers don’t grow stale, they just change rhythm and keep swinging, the elegantly dressed, Baker recently braced himself with a loose, bemused expression on his face, as if enjoying a private joke, while fans, friends, and musicians buzzed excitedly around him, taking photos, offering platitudes and congratulating him for his two decades of  service as the director and artistic advisor of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra (SJMO).

Baker recently stepped down to become SJMO’s Maestro Emeritus.

“They’re wonderful! I can’t believe I’ve just found them just as I’m leaving the area,” gushed a woman who had brought several family members to the Baker Tribute and SJMO Holiday Concert at Church of the Epiphany earlier this month.  “Now I don’t want to move to Florida!”

Another fan, education consultant Anne Saunders raved: “I’ve been coming to these concerts 20 years. David brought us this! Washington didn’t have anything this wonderful before we got this from David Baker.”

The orchestra was taking a break. They’d just delivered a swinging, hot concert of cool jazz featuring only Baker compositions. Tunes with titles like To Dizzy with Love, Screamin’ Meemies  and Some Links for Brother Ted were rich fodder for musicians who played their beloved maestros music with fun and fervor under the direction of  the orchestra’s longtime lead alto sax player Charlie Young. An educator at Howard University, Young has been named SJMO conductor.

“I won’t try to fill David Baker’s shoes. No one can,” said Young, who has his own impeccable credentials as a  performer and recording artist with organizations such as the National Symphony Orchestra, the Count Basie Orchestra, and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.

“David has built an institution that will last like so much at the Smithsonian—beyond us,”  said Cedric Hendricks, who worked with Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) to successfully pass public law in 1987, recognizing jazz as an original American art form. ”That’s the beauty of the Smithsonian. It is the nation’s treasure chest.”

Baker performed with the SJMO at the pyramids in Egypt.

Baker is a living Smithsonian treasure. He is recipient of the Institution’s coveted James Smithson Medal, named in honor of its founding benefactor. His tenure with SJMO began in 1991 as co-director of the orchestra after he invited Gunther Schuller, a mentor and friend, to join him (Schuller stayed with the orchestra five years) in building a body of world-class work.  Baker’s achievements include: The development of a SJMO music library of more than 1,200 pieces; he saw the then newly acquired Duke Ellington Collection come off  the archive shelves and become the centerpiece of SJMO performances, education, and public events worldwide.  Transcending performances took place at the White House Jazz Festival, Harlem’s Apollo Theater, the Kennedy Center, the National Cathedral, the Cultural Olympiad at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, as well as across the nation and several countries, including in Egypt at the Pyramids.

Baker’s ever present wit and playfulness became his signature. Nationally syndicated columnist David Broder once noted that Baker energized a museum crowd telling them: “We’re in a museum, but John (Hasse, the museum’s music curator) has got clearance for head nodding, foot stomping and butt-shaking. So go ahead!  And they did.”

A new book, David Baker: A Legacy in Music, celebrating his life, tells the story and countless others that illuminate the Maestro’s extraordinary career, talent and geneorsity of spirit.

With musical gifts that extend from the classical world to all that’s jazz, Baker is a virtuoso performer on multiple instruments. He is a veteran of the bands of George Russell, longtime friend Quincy Jones, Stan Kenton, Maynard Ferguson, and Lionel Hampton.  Included among his many honors is an Emmy for his musical score for the PBS documentary “For Gold and Glory“, “Living Jazz Legend” recognition from the Kennedy Center, the NEA Jazz Master’s Award, Sonneborn Award, and the Indiana Historical Society’s Living Legends Award.

Currently he is Distinguished Professor of Music and Chairman of the Jazz Department at the Indiana University School of Music in Bloomington.  He has taught and performed throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.  And his compositions total more than 2,000, and include jazz and symphonic works, chamber music, ballets, and film scores. His credentials don’t stop there. He has served as Chair of the Jazz Faculty of the Steans Institute for Young Artists at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, and numerous times on the Pulitzer Prize Music Jury, where he was instrumental in bestowing that coveted prize on jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman in 2007.

“It has been a supreme honor playing under David Baker,” said SJMO trombonist, Jen Krupa, who said she studied Baker’s work and books before joining the orchestra. ”It’s a dream come true.”

To play in SJMO was “To be in the university of David Baker,” added SJMO trumpeter Tom Williams.

Catch the next SJMO performance February 23, 2013. Tickets here.  

Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April. Recent posts include Hawai`i’s Troubadour of Aloha and Remembering Dave Brubeck, Goodwill Ambassador.

“Waiting for the Hour” by William Tolman Carlton. Courtesy of the White House Historical Association

Guest blogger, Joann Stevens is the program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month at the American History Museum. Courtesy of the author

Watch Night Service 2012 might make history as well as commemorate it.  Guess we’ll have to watch and see.

The roots of Watch Night Service celebrated in many African American communities nationwide are founded in American slave and liberation history. Lore has it that on midnight, December 31, 1862, the New Year was ushered in by slaves watching and praying for news that President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had become law. At the time more than three million African Americans in the U.S. were in bondage, primarily in the south.

The document penned by President Lincoln in 1862 during a critical juncture in the Civil War declared that on Jan. 1 all slaves in confederate states would be legally free and that “such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.”

After the proclamation became law, nearly 200,000 former slaves (joined by 10,000 freedmen) entered the Union Army along with 19,000 who joined the Navy to fight for their freedom.

In the painting above, slaves and an apparent lone white woman congregate on Watch Night to await a dramatic shift in American history as the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in confederate states, is about to take effect.  The watch held by the old man in white shirt and red vest is set at five minutes before midnight…or freedom.  The 1863 painting by William Tolman Carlton is sometimes known by the abbreviated title, “Waiting for the Hour.”

The 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation is being commemorated at the Smithsonian with the exhibition Changing America, among other events. And serving as preamble is a show at the American Art Museum where a host of works tell the story of how Americans, and particularly American artists, perceived the anxieties of a nation divided and at war. The National Archives will celebrate with Watch Night and New Year’s Day events that include their exhibition of an original copy of the proclamation, music and  a dramatic reading of the proclamation by scholar andactivist artist Bernice Reagon.

End of year worries, whether mythical or fiscal has everyone on edge.  Should we stay up late on December 20, watching to see if we make it past December 21?  That’s the date that the Mayan Calendar allegedly signals the end of the world.  (The Smithsonian National Museum of American Indian has created the Mayan calendar project to alleviate your fears.)

Once over the Mayan Calendar hurdle, we have to watch that we don’t “Fall Off the Cliff” as the government scrambles to determine and pass fiscal policies to replace those on a countdown to expire Jan. 1.

Lots of watch nights to watch for.

Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April. Recent posts include Hawai`i’s Troubadour of Aloha and Remembering Dave Brubeck, Goodwill Ambassador

Guest blogger, Joann Stevens is the program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month at the American History Museum. Courtesy of the author

Six years ago, Jake Shimabukuro and his music were largely unknown on the American mainland. He was popular in his native Hawai`i and in Japan where he’d spent a decade touring and convincing music industry leaders there to accept a solo performing, ukulele player.  His life is secret no more.

Today Shimabukuro’s solo concerts fill symphony halls. Fans range from cutting edge hipsters to high-brow arts patrons. An impromptu solo performance on YouTube of the musician playing a Beatles song sitting atop a rock in New York’s Central Park  has received more than 11 million views. Youth from pre-schoolers to grad students are awed by his artistry and eclectic mix of music which includes traditional Hawaiian songs, jazz standards, classical music, pop tunes, and so on.  Music critics have compared his originality to that of rock legend Jimi Hendrix and jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, citing Shimabukuro’s explosive energy onstage and his ability to coax unheard of musical sounds and performances from the ukulele.

Yet the most engaging characteristic of Shimabukuro’s propulsion to rock star-like status is perhaps his spirit of Aloha —the expression of Hawaiian principles of life, love and human interaction that guide his world view. Aloha has made him a recognized troubadour of culturally-influenced music that people find healing and inspirational.

Shimabukuro considers himself a traditional ukelele player, though his fans encompass young and old. Photo by Sandra Vuong, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

“A decade ago I was watching Jake,” Konrad Ng, director of the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center, told a capacity crowd at a recent event that featured a Shimabukuro performance and the screening of a documentary about the musician by filmmaker Tadashi Nakamura, who postponed graduate school to travel with the artist. “Jake Shimabukuro exemplifies the meaning of Aloha with his humility and grace,” said Ng, who is from Hawaii. “He is our Ambassador of Aloha.”

This night, the mostly young audience was diverse by age, race and cultural background, with a healthy representation of Asian Americans. The auditorium fell dark, a spotlight trained on the lone performer. Occasionally cell phone lights popped up like fire flies, but the intrusions were minor. The focus was intensely tuned to the music and Shimabukuro’s commentary.

Jake (right) talked with filmmaker Tadashi Nakamura (left) about his music. Photo by Sandra Vuong, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

Hawaiian music and culture, he told the audience, have shaped his life and guided his values. Ukulele was his comfort when his parents divorced, and during the long hours that his mother worked to provide for him and a younger brother. ”My family is everything to me,” he said, citing his mother as his first music teacher, when he was four. “I always consider myself a traditional Hawaiian musician first. That’s the music I was raised with.”

He played a traditional Hawaiian song, followed by an original composition that he wrote as a tribute to Japanese American soldiers—like Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye—who fought for the U.S. during World War II, demonstrating their unswerving allegiance to a nation that doubted their loyalty.

“They made life better for me,” he said of the soldiers. “I named this song Go for Broke.” Respecting and recognizing ancestral pioneers, family members and supporters, is important to him.  He said that NEA National Heritage Fellow Eddie Kamae is a role model and source of inspiration.  The makers of Kamaka ukuleles believed in his music from his teen years, providing instruments for him long before his global fame. He is passionate about bringing Hawaiian music and culture to new generations.  While in Washington, DC, he visited Eastern Senior High School.

On May 10, 2013, the PBS network will air Tadashi Nakamura‘s documentary, Life on Four Strings, a deeply moving, honest portrait of the people, places and events that created and re-shaped Shimabukuro over his 30-plus years.  Working with Nakamura on the documentary in tsunami ravaged Sendai, Japan, the hometown of Kasuza Flanagan, the manager who devoted her life to building his career, was the hardest.  Shimabukuro says that he was overcome by what he saw and was unable to speak much while there. The film’s images of Shimabukuro with Flanagan in Japan tell the story,  showing the despair that surrounded them, but also the hope as he played his ukulele in schools that had been turned into refugee camps and in nursing homes.  His music, he says, was his voice, bringing a bit of love and inspiration.

The documentary Life on Four Strings was co-produced by the Center for Asian American Media and Pacific Islanders in Communications. Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April. Recent posts include Remembering Dave Brubeck, Goodwill Ambassador and Playlist: Eight Tracks to Get Your Holiday Groove On.

This 2010 poster was created by LeRoy Neiman as a tribute to Dave Brubeck, a 2009 Kennedy Center Honoree. Courtesy of the American History Museum

Guest blogger, Joann Stevens is the program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month at the American History Museum. Courtesy of the author

Dave Brubeck, who died Wednesday at age 91, was a quintessential jazz artist of the 20th and 21st centuries. He didn’t just perform music, he embodied it, taking us to outer stratospheres with compositions like Take Five included in “Time Out,” the first jazz album to sell a million copies. Tributes are sure to highlight Brubeck’s tours, music milestones, awards, complex rhythms and honors like making the cover of Time magazine in 1954.

I’ve loved Brubeck’s music since hearing Take Five at age 10. But it was only after joining the Smithsonian’s Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM) initiative in 2008 that I met him, saw him perform live and experienced his lifelong commitment to social justice and unity in the U.S. and worldwide. Brubeck said “freedom and inclusion” were core principles of jazz. This was a creed he lived by and the legacy he leaves. The National Museum of American History has supported that legacy in its JAM programming.  These are some of the remembrances that I wish to share of our relationship with Dave Brubeck, Goodwill Ambassador of music around the world.

Every year, JAM creates a jazz poster that is distributed, free worldwide with help from the U.S. State Department, the Department of Education and other collaborators. When the then 88-year-old artist LeRoy Neiman learned that Brubeck was to be a 2009 Kennedy Center honoree, he created a playful portrait of a white-haired Brubeck as elder statesmen, in recognition of his lifetime achievements. That lasting image became a grace note to American jazz, and was distributed to every U.S. middle school, to every U.S. embassy, to 70,000 music educators and to some 200,000 people, worldwide, who wrote us and requested copies.  A framed copy, autographed by Brubeck, hangs in the museum director’s office.  Brubeck’s message reads “Jazz Lives!  Keep Playing!”

At a White House reception for the 2009 Kennedy Center honorees, President Barack Obama introduced Brubeck with these words: “You can’t understand America without understanding jazz.  And you can’t understand jazz without understanding Dave Brubeck.” The president shared a cherished childhood memory.

The President then recalled the few precious days he’d spent with his absentee father: “One of the things he did was to take me to my first jazz concert.” That was 1971, in Honolulu. “It was a Dave Brubeck concert and I’ve been a jazz fan ever since.”

Brubeck pictured circa 1960. Photo by Associated Booking Corp., Joe Glaser, President, New York, Chicago, Hollywood. Courtesy of the American History Museum

First concert, a concept that introduces children to jazz, is carried on today by an elite corps of jazz students, selected annually, for the Brubeck Institute Jazz Quintet.  They have performed regularly at the Smithsonian’s free JAM music programs. But even free can be costly to schools serving low income, immigrant neighborhoods, where travel budgets are small or non-existent. Unable to bear the travel expense, an area elementary school music teacher asked JAM’s help to deliver jazz programming to the classroom instead. The Quintet and Brubeck program leaders responded, first holding chat sessions and then playing two sets for 800 students and invited area teachers.  The air was electric with the joy of children, most of them immigrants from Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, hearing Blue Rondo A La Turk  and other Brubeck tunes. Later the children created art and poetry about the band and how the music made them feel.  The arc of Brubeck’s Jazz legacy was in full swing that day.  Teachers marveled at the Quintet’s performance, admitting ”we didn’t think they’d be that good.”

April 2008 marked the 50th anniversary of Dave Brubeck’s State Department Tour as the first U.S. jazz musician to perform behind The Iron Curtain. Meridian International, a JAM collaborator, presented a series of panel discussions and concerts.  Jam sessions, a traveling exhibition, featured images of Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and other jazz legends from the Archives Center’s jazz collections.  John Hasse, curator of American music, joined Brubeck and others on the program.

“Dave Brubeck was a pioneer and brillant master of jazz cultural diplomacy,” Hasse said.  “Serving on a program with him was a privilege I shall always cherish.”

Especially poignant during the anniversary was to have Brubeck at the Smithsonian for an onstage oral history.  He talked candidly about his life, music and vision for a united humanity. He recalled the days of Jim Crow when tours with an integrated band proved challenging in the U.S. and abroad. Still, Brubeck rarely backed down about having African American bassist Eugene Wright  in the band.  He faced many challenges with a courageous, wry humor.

In the early 1960s, just before Brubeck was to perform before a crowd of boisterous students in a college gymnasium in the south, the school’s president told the band it couldn’t perform with Wright on the stage. The band packed up to leave. With the crowd cheering impatiently for Brubeck to perform, the administrator and the state governor, who had been called, caved on the condition that Wright take a place in the shadows at the back of the stage. With a firm grace, Brubeck placed a standing mic next to his piano and told his bassist ”Your microphone is broken. Use this one.”  With Wright at center stage, the band performed to an exuberant, capacity crowd.

A friendship with jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong produced a collaboration with Brubeck and his wife, Iola, that created the Real Ambassadors, a cutting-edge, jazz musical that faced the nation’s race issues with lyrics like those in the song They Say I Look Like God, that had Armstrong sing: “If both are made in the image of thee, could thou perchance a zebra be?”

A concert in South Africa with Brubeck and his sons was mired by the shadow of death threats that the musicians received, if the integrated band performed.

“What did you do?” the interviewer asked.

Flashing his characteristic toothy grin, Brubeck said he told his sons.  ”Spread out on stage.  They can’t get us all.”

Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April. Recent posts include Playlist: Eight Tracks to Get Your Holiday Groove On and  Danilo Pérez: Creator of Musical Guardians of Peace.

What would the holidays be without Eartha Kitt, seen here performing in the Broadway show Timbuktu. Photo by C.M. Nell, Courtesy Smithsonian Archives

Guest blogger, Joann Stevens is the program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month at the American History Museum. Courtesy of the author

It’s that time of year again when the airwaves jingle with a potpourri of holiday music, performances and mashups, featuring songs and artists with jazz, pop culture, film, classical and sacred music roots. Some of the chestnut classics are playing 24/7 on radio stations (for those of you who still listen to radio) across the land.

Speaking of chestnut classics, during his 29-year career, jazz vocalist and pianist Nat King Cole recorded four versions of his chestnuts roasting by open fire “The Christmas Song” before arriving at the 1961 version that became the perennial favorite. Surprisingly, the tune was composed on a hot summer day in 1944 by Mel Tormé and Robert Wells. Whitney Houston released her stellar version in 2003. Two years later, the music licensing organization ASCAP noted that the song was number one among the ten most performed holiday tunes during the first five years of the 21st century.  Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, were two and three, respectively.

I always keep my ear out for Eartha Kitt.  The original Cat Woman purrs for holiday furs, cars and jewels in Santa Baby, a satirical tune co-written in 1953 by Philip Springer and Joan Javits, niece of U.S. Senator Jacob Javits.

Whether your tastes veer towards the traditional or something a little funkier, here’s an eclectic mix of jazz and other music by seasoned and emerging artists to explore this season, along with some interesting bedtime stories you probably didn’t know. So curl up with your hot cocoa and click through some of my holiday favorites.

For all he did, including giving us one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time, Nat King Cole got his own stamp in 1994. Courtesy of the National Postal Museum

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s Nutcracker Suite.  Tchaikovysky swings in the hands of these classically trained jazz masters. In 1960 the duo reinvented the ballet classic, mixing rhythms and musical styles. These two selections bring sass to the Nutcracker Overture  and make the Sugar Plum Fairies sound like they’re hung over from too much partying at the Sugar Rum Cherry Dance.

Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.  At four foot nine, country music-rock star Brenda Lee was known as Little Miss Dynamite.  She was 13 when she recorded this classic in 1958.  Her version became a chart buster in 1960 and reigns as the all time favorite, played by radio formats from Top 40 to Country Music to Adult Contemporary and Adult Standards.  Nielsen Sound Scan rated digital track sales at 679,000 downloads.  Miley Cyrus also had fun with the song .

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Composed by Hugh Martin Jr., who also wrote “The Trolley Song” and “The Boy Next Door” for the film Meet Me in St. Louis, starring Judy Garland.  This song from the film might have become the most depressing holiday song ever written.  Luckily studio executives and Garland intervened, requesting  rewrites to give the public a more hopeful classic.  Compare the original lyrics to the holiday friendly versions sung by Frank Sinatra and Luther Vandross. 

The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late). What more can I say?  Gotta love Alvin and the Chipmunks in this song composed by Rostom Sipan “Ross” Bagdasarian, who had a knack with novelty music.  The son of Armenian immigrants, Bagdasarian was a bit stage and film actor whose first musical success, ”Come-on-a-My House,” was a dialect song that became a hit for Rosemary Clooney, the aunt of actor George Clooney.  The song was co-written with Bagdasarian’s cousin, the famous writer William Saroyan. Go ahead, do your best impersonation. ALLLLLVIN!

Oh Chanukah.   This traditional song commemorating the Jewish Festival of Lights was standard fare in the New York City school programs when music appreciation and performances were used to explore cultural diversity and heritage. Enjoy the traditional song by this young choir and an offering of  Klezmer holiday music by a high school sax quartet.  Klezmer Jazz  a fusion of  the rhythms and traditional music of the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe with American jazz, evolved in the U.S. in the 1880s.

Carol of the Bells.   One rarely hears jazz played on the Hawaiian ukelele or such performances compared with Miles Davis, unless you’re Jake Shimabukuro — a largely self-taught virtuoso who was introduced to the instrument by his mother. Listen to his take of the classic Carol of the Bells, a song based on a traditional Ukranian folk chant, followed by a rocking jazz performance .

Yagibushi. Okay it’s not a holiday carol but if  music by jazz performer Chichiro Yamanaka, a standout at the 2012 Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival, doesn’t rouse you for the holidays, nothing will.

Kwanzaa.  Kwanzaa is observed from December 26 to January 1 in Canada and the U.S. to honor African and African American cultural traditions that teach valuable life principles.

And Now for Something Completely Different. Jazz pianist/composer and NEA Jazz Master Randy Weston has made African and world culture the core of his creative process. Blue Moses is a composition influenced by time Weston spent in Morocco learning the traditions and musical culture of the Gnawa  people—West Africans taken to North Africa as slaves and soldiers around the 16th century.  In an interview with Jo Reed, Weston said that within the Gnawa music ”I heard the blues, I heard Black jazz, I heard the music of the Caribbean, I heard the foundation which proved to me that the rhythms of Africa, they remained alive, but disguised in different forms, whether in Honduras, or Haiti, or Jamaica, or Trinidad, or Brazil, or Mississippi. ”

Happy Musical Holidays!

Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April. Recent posts include Danilo Pérez: Creator of Musical Guardians of Peace and Jason Moran: Making Jazz Personal. 

Read more articles about the holidays with our Smithsonian Holiday Guide here

Danilo Pérez performs at the Kennedy Center November 30. Photo by Raj Naik, courtesy of the artist

Guest blogger, Joann Stevens is the program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month at the American History Museum. Courtesy of the author

Grammy award-winning jazz pianist and composer Danilo Pérez is a global citizen of music, equally inspired by the rhythms of world cultures and ecologies as with the traditional and contemporary sounds of his native Panama. It’s all music to his ears, and Pérez, who is a 2009 recipient of the Smithsonian Latino Center’s Legacy Award, is legendary for creating artistic mashups that connect continents and cultures, as well as history.

Mentored by jazz luminaries such as Dizzy Gillespie and Wayne Shorter, in 1989 Pérez was the youngest member of the Dizzy Gillespie United Nations Orchestra, a portent of things to come. Other recognitions include: Founder of the Panama Jazz Festival and the Danilo Pérez Foundation; Artistic Director of the Mellon Jazz Up Close series at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, and the Berklee Global Jazz Institute; tours or recordings with the Wynton Marsalis Band, Wayne Shorter Quartet, Jack DeJohnette and Tito Puente, among others; featured performer at the this year’s first International Jazz Day concert at the United Nations on April 30; and finally, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and Cultural Ambassador of Panama.

Recently we caught up with Pérez by telephone to discuss his latest recognition as UNESCO Artist of Peace, to promote UNESCO’s message and programs.

Congratulations!  How did the Artist of Peace recognition develop?

It was very important for me to accept the invitation to perform at the UN concert for the first International Jazz Day. I made wonderful connections through Herbie Hancock. Mika Shino (Executive Director of UNESCO’s International Jazz Day) is our advisor working with Herbie Hancock, Dee Dee Bridgewarter and myself.  She is very practiced in this world (of the UN). They saw me in New York and then looked at all the things I’ve been doing. This honor was even supported by the President of Panama. My relationship with Wayne Shorter also had a lot to do with this. He introduced me to [many] of these people and helped create recognition for my work in Panama. They saw that I was working on a scale of social activism to change peoples’ lives. When I found out the news, I saw this as another leg in the journey of my life. Four years ago I got the Legacy Award at the Smithsonian. That same year I was awarded by Spain. It keeps going, like a journey.

How will you represent UNESCO in this role?

The two big things I will represent is UNESCO as the guardian of education, science, and culture, and as a peace builder. One of the biggest commitments of my life is to education and how it can bridge conflict.

Will your global jazz institute have a role in the work?

I created the Berklee Global Jazz Institute to foster social change through music and interconnected learning. We use different disciplines such as science, mathematics and painting to create a musician who is more complete. We also teach creative music and ecology by taking kids into the jungle to interact with the sounds and force of nature.

We won a grant to take this learning to Africa next year through the U.S. State Department. We’re going to Benin and to Burkina Faso. Possibly a third country. My dream is to create a curriculum that can be expanded, developed in Panama and taken to all of Latin America.  Berklee is the center of our learning laboratory. We also have exchanges with other countries. The main goal of the Institute is to create the Guardians of the Creative Process, to develop a new  generation of musicians to become future ministers and ambassadors of culture.

What can jazz artists teach the world about peace?

Having a gift means having a responsibility. Social and cultural interchanges can be advanced through music.

How has life prepared you for this leadership role?

Four things in my life prepared me. The first was my father, an educator who taught me interconnected learning, which he practiced on me. In 1967, he wrote a thesis about music as a tool to teach other subjects. As a kid I didn’t like mathematics. Through music I became an electronics major.

The second was my relationship with Dizzy Gillespie. He taught me the value of thinking about music globally—to use music as a tool to bridge differences and bring people together. I played in his United Nations band.

Another part that is very moving for me was the U.S. invasion of Panama on December 20 (1989). I was having my first concert in Panama, since leaving, on December 22. I decided to do the concert anyway. I did the concert while the invasion was going on. I said, ‘if I die, I want to die playing piano.’ But we brought  people together from the left and the right wing. Jazz is the best tool of diplomacy.

Lastly, is my relationship with Wayne Shorter. He is a genius who helped me connect my life with music. He told me, ‘play what you wish the world to be like.’ Think of the things music can be for. What is the purpose of music? The humanity?

You have two special concerts on the horizon, one at the Kennedy Center Nov. 30, the other at Carnegie Hall Dec. 8

I’m bringing my trio to the Kennedy Center, Adam Cruz and Ben Street. We’ve been together more than 20 years. We have a strong connection.  We’re going to premier some of the new music for the future recording. My music is hopeful and mysterious. Be prepared for something interactive.

December 8 they’re premiering my Octet, a piece I wrote for the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the Pacific Ocean by the Spaniards. Of course the Indians actually helped the Spaniards. The piece is about the Pacific Ocean talking to me in a dream, telling me the story of the ocean as a holder of the secrets of the ages. It’s called Tales of the Sea and experiments with traditional folkloric music, jazz and classical music. I call it a perspective to unite the world.

Joann Stevens is program manager of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), an initiative to advance appreciation and recognition of jazz as America’s original music, a global cultural treasure.  JAM is celebrated in every state in the U.S. and the District of Columbia and some 40 countries every April.