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Friday, April 5: Japanese Design Weekend

Get a taste of Japan’s rich artistic history this weekend with a three-day celebration of the country’s art and design. Exhibits like , tours and a lecture by acclaimed Japanese printmaker Ayomi Yoshida set the stage for numerous hands-on activities, including Japanese bookbinding and chance to help create an audiovisual Japanese lantern installation with students from Virginia Tech. And bonus: The Tokyo in the City food truck and Mr. Miyagi’s Food Truck will be outside the museums from 11 am–3 pm on Saturday. Free. Through Sunday. Freer and Sackler Galleries.

Saturday, April 6: Poetry Month Family Day

Celebrate today:
National Poetry Month.
Tours and open mics!

That’s our haiku for National Poetry Month, which the National Portrait Gallery kicks off today with poetry workshops, a DC Youth Slam Team performance, tours of  Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets and a short open mic session for children. Stop by to see if you can be a better poet than we are! Free. 10:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. National Portrait Gallery.

Sunday, April 7: Master Builders: A Documentary Featuring African American Architects in the Nation’s Capital

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church at 15th and Church streets, Sterling Brown’s house, Rock Creek Baptist Church—many prominent and historical buildings in Washington, DC were built by African-American architects, who helped to shape the city as we know it today. Master Builders, by filmmaker Michelle Jones, tells the untold story of past and present African-American masters’ contributions to the city. A panel discussion will follow the film with Jones, NoMa historian Patsy Fletcher, former dean of Howard University’s School of Architecture Harry G. Robinson III and others. Free. 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Anacostia Community Museum.

 

Also, check out our Visitors Guide App. Get the most out of your trip to Washington, D.C. and the National Mall with this selection of custom-built tours, based on your available time and passions. From the editors of Smithsonian magazine, the app is packed with handy navigational tools, maps, museum floor plans and museum information including ‘Greatest Hits’ for each Smithsonian museum.

For a complete listing of Smithsonian events and exhibitions visit the goSmithsonian Visitors Guide. Additional reporting by Michelle Strange.

 

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Though you might not know it judging from the forecast most places, spring has indeed arrived. And despite the unpredictable D.C. weather, the snow, sleet, cold rain and wind hasn’t kept the tourists away. Crowds are gathering in the nation’s capital for the first glimpses of the cherry blossoms. For those of you interested in making the most of your visit, the editors over here have released two new spring-themed tours to help showcase the seasonal delights both inside and outside along the Mall.

The Gardens tour will take you to our many well-maintained plots around the Mall to see more than just a few pink blooms by the Tidal Basin, including heirloom plants, geometric splendors reminiscent of the grandest of European gardens and even a Victory Garden.

Meanwhile, our Spring Fling tour will take you inside to show off the riches of the Smithsonian’s arts and sciences collection and celebrate the season with baseball legends, a tree you can wish on, bouquets in paint and even a spring from space.

Head here to download the visitor’s app and get your step-by-step directions, custom postcard feature and greatest hits from the museums.

Every three years, a set of fresh faces enters the halls of the National Portrait Gallery. This year, 48 faces made it. One was covered in glitter, another composed of rice, but all offered a “fresh and provocative way of looking and thinking about portraiture,” according to the museum’s interim director Wendy Wick Reaves. The national Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition brought more than 3,000 submissions, of which Reaves and a panel of six other jurors selected seven short-listed artists, including the grand-prize winner Bo Gehring of Beacon, New York. His Jessica Wickham pairs a video portrait of a woman with her favorite piece of music, Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten” to record her emotional response as she listens to it once more.

Check out a slideshow with all the winners here.

“Unlike other Portrait Gallery shows,” says Dorothy Moss, director of the 2013 competition, “this exhibition is really about the artist.” Indeed, each work is accompanied by a brief statement from the artist and the exhibit’s accompanying app includes in depth written materials from them as well. Moss says the pieces were chosen not just for their mastery of a medium, but also “because they convey the resiliency of the human spirit.” From a group portrait of an artist’s cousins in Kansas who have fallen on hard times to a drag queen from the Dirty South projected as video against glitter, the works all depict people working through a certain confusion of existence, according to Moss.

Some of the works navigate the confusion in deft and intriguing ways, like Gehring’s video installation, whose slow pan of a woman lying on the floor transforms a body into a landscape and sonic experience all at once. By the time the camera, which hovers just above the subject, moves from her orange Crocs to her hands resting on her rising and falling faded jacket and finally meets her eyes, viewers share her gaze for a split second before she looks away. Gehring told Reaves that when she turned away, he wept.

Others deal much more directly with metaphor or history, referencing the practice of portraiture throughout time.

It’s a collection of subjects as diverse as the approaches of each artist to portraiture.

First prize includes an award of $25,000 and a commission from the museum to be included in the permanent collection. Jennifer Levonian’s digital video animation Buffalo Milk Yogurt won second place, while third prize went to Sequoyah Aono for his self-portrait sculpture carved in wood. Commended artists include Paul D’AMato, Martha Mayer Erlebacher, Heidi Fancher and Beverly McIver. Each received a cash prize.

The jurors included Reaves, Moss, chief curator Brandon Fortune, critic Peter Frank, artist Hung Liu, art historian Richard Powell and photographer Alec Soth.

The winners of the competition will be on display March 23, 2013 through February 23, 2014 at the National Portrait Gallery.

For Downton Abbey fans wondering how to spend their time until season four begins next year, PBS is offering a little something to dull the pain. Starting March 31st, we’ll be able to indulge our frothy fantasies with “Mr. Selfridge,” a new series replete with Edwardian finery, intricate plots and engaging actors.

Inspired by Lindy Woodhead’s 2007 biography, Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge, about department store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge, the new Masterpiece Theater series starring Jeremy Piven in the title role, makes an important connection: “If you lived at Downton Abbey, you shopped at Selfridge’s.”

The American-born Selfridge (1856-1947)  learned the retail trade in the years when dry goods outlets were being replaced by dazzling urban department stores. Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, Marshall Field’s in Chicago and Gimbels in New York were vast “palaces of abundance” that treated shoppers like pampered pets. These stores made shopping entertaining, competing for attention with tea rooms, barber shops, fashion shows and theatrical presentations.

In a twist of irony, shopping also provided a platform for women’s empowerment and for the rising emancipation movement. The modern “new woman” rode bicycles and worked in cities and appeared in public alone without fear of scandal. To women who embraced a modern public identity, department stores became a safe haven where they could convene without guardians or escorts. Shopping was a declaration of independence. And the fun was in the details. Fashion was always changing so there was plenty of reason to load up shopping bags and come back for more.

Setting the stage with as much hoopla as possible, the art of selling had became as much a “show” as any theatrical venture. Beautifully appointed, Field’s, Gimbels and Wanamker’s were glittering showplaces, bathed in the glow of newly invented high-wattage electric lighting. And shopper’s found paradise enjoying the displays of exciting new goods in the large plate glass windows. John Wanamaker, whose Philadelphia department store reflected the newest techniques in salesmanship—smart advertising and beautifully displayed merchandise—even exhibited Titians and Manets from his personal art collection.

Harry Selfridge got his start as a stock boy at Marshall Field’s landmark Chicago store. For 25 years, he climbed rung-by-rung the proverbial corporate ladder until he became Field’s partner, amassing a considerable personal fortune along the way. But it wasn’t enough to quench an insatiable ambition and on a trip to London in 1906, he had a “Eureka” moment. Noting that London stores lacked the latest selling techniques popular in America, Selfridge took his leave from Field’s, and opened a London emporium.  Always a dreamer, but quite practical as well, he chose a site ideally situated to attract thousands of people, traveling the Central Line—the London Underground that had opened just six years earlier and would become a boon to West End retailers.

Opening for business on March 15, 1909, the store became a commercial phenomenon, attracting a million people during its first week. A London columnist reported that it was second only to Big Ben as a tourist favorite. The store was a marvel of its day—five stories high with three basement levels, a roof-top terrace and more than 100 departments and visitor services, including a tea room, a barber shop, a hair salon, a library, a post office, sumptuous ladies’ and gentlemen’s cloakrooms, a rifle range, a nursing station and a concierge who could book West End show tickets or a passage to New York. The store’s massive six acres of floor space was gorgeously designed with wide open-plan vistas; brilliant lighting and trademark green carpeting throughout. Modern Otis “lifts” whisked customers quickly from floor-to-floor. “A store, which is used every day,” Selfridge said, “should be as fine a thing and, in its own way, as ennobling a thing as a church or a museum.”

The opening coincided with the burgeoning suffrage movement. The same year,  Alice Paul—a young American Quaker who moved to London to work on the British suffrage movement—made headlines when she disrupted the Prime Minister’s speech by throwing her shoes and yelling, “Votes for women!” Politically awakened, women felt newly empowered in the marketplace and at the department store in particular where they could shop independently, without a chaperone and without fear of causing scandal for doing so. Selfridge himself understood this, once explaining “I came along just at the time when women wanted to step out on their own. They came to the store and realized some of their dreams.”

The act of shopping may have opened doors for turn-of-the-century women, but the dream of suffrage would require organized political engagement for ensuing generations. On her return to the United States, Paul became a leader in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In March 1913, she organized a massive parade in Washington to demand a Constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. The 19th Amendment was ratified seven years later on August 18, 1920; in 1923 Alice Paul drafted an Equal Rights Amendment that would guarantee women’s equality. Congress passed the ERA half a century later in 1972, but of course not enough states have yet voted for its ratification.

Meanwhile, the enticing real-life story of Mr. Selfridge and his department store will take us back to a time when women wore corsets and ankle-length dresses, and couldn’t vote. But they could shop. And perhaps unwittingly, Harry Selfridge furthered their ambitions when he said: “the customer is always right.”