Jazz Salon at Art of Jazz...
Presented by Art of Jazz, Pages, This is not a Reading Series and The Mercury Press
TORONTO (Oct. 14, 2006) - Share your love of jazz with Canada’s acclaimed jazz musicians and authors at the Jazz Salon, Saturday, October 28th, at The Art of Jazz studio. The Mercury Press, Pages Books and Magazines/This Is Not A Reading Series, and The Art of Jazz proudly co-sponsor an afternoon of jazz literature and performance, featuring music performances by Jane Bunnett and friends, interviews with authors David Lee and Mark Miller, and an opportunity to
have your books and CDs signed.
Critically acclaimed as Canada’s unassailable “pre-eminent jazz critic, analyst, historian and keeper-of-the-flame,” award-winning jazz critic and biographer Mark Miller celebrates the publication of A Certain Respect for Tradition: Mark Miller on Jazz, Selected Writings 1980-2005. Jazz bassist, scholar, and writer David Lee (co-author with Paul Bley of Stopping Time) launches The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field,
an engaging look at a milestone of jazz history.
Pages bookstore owner,Toronto Arts Award winner, jazz enthusiast and film programmer Marc Glassman will lead interviews with Miller and Lee at this unique event, which will also present music sets by Jane Bunnett and friends.
This inaugural event, held at the Art of Jazz studio in the Historic Distillery District, a year-round facility where international artists meet to teach, play and learn together, will also feature the music of Jane Bunnett, David Virelles and other guest soloists.
This is a rare opportunity to interact personally with the authors and musicians in an intimate setting and experience the sounds of improvisation on the studio's new Yamaha C1 Grand Piano, generously donated by Yamaha Canada.
Please join us at:
ART OF JAZZ
Suite 202, Case Goods Building (Building no. 74)
Historic Distillery District
55 Mill Street, Toronto
Saturday, October 28
4 p.m. - 7 p.m.
NO COVER.
A Certain Respect for Tradition is a celebration of jazz and, equally, of Mark Miller’s distinguished career as a writer. Drawing on more than four thousand articles, most published by The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Miller has chosen some ninety profiles and reviews according to the simplest and most subjective of criteria: these are pieces he likes about musicians whose work he admires — from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to John Zorn, Jabbo Smith to
Enrico Rava, Rosemary Clooney to Phil Minton, Dorothy Donegan to Cecil Taylor.
Mark Miller served as the jazz critic for The Globe and Mail from 1978 to 2005 and, in addition to A Certain Respect for Tradition, has completed six other books about jazz since 1982, including Such Melodious Racket: The Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914-1949 (1997), The Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada (2001) and Some Hustling This! — Taking Jazz to the World, 1914-1929 (2005), all for The Mercury Press. He has also written for several popular and scholarly
publications, notably Coda, Down Beat, the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. His photographs of jazz musicians have been published widely; several appear in A Certain Respect for Tradition.
The Battle of the Five Spot is an engaging look at a milestone in jazz history. In 1959, when the California saxophonist Ornette Coleman brought his quartet to New York’s Five Spot Café, the music spurred a stormy controversy, and a struggle between old and new styles of jazz that has never quite subsided. David Lee explores the debate around Coleman’s innovation in terms of its relationships to social change and issues of power within arts communities,
referring to such disparate sources as writer Norman Mailer (a Five Spot regular), composer Leonard Bernstein (who leaped to his feet at the end of one Coleman set and declared that “this is the greatest thing that has ever happened in jazz”).This is a unique and lively look at how and
why the soft-spoken Coleman’s exciting new music changed the way jazz was played, listened to and talked about.
David Lee, born in Mission, B.C., toured internationally and recorded as a double bass player with the Bill Smith Ensemble,worked for the jazz magazine Coda, and with his wife, Maureen Cochrane, ran the publishing house Nightwood Editions. He is the co-author of Stopping Time, the autobiography of jazz pianist Paul Bley, and lives with his family in Hamilton, Ontario.
Jane Bunnett, the Toronto soprano saxophonist, flutist and bandleader, has built her career at the crossroads between Cuban music and jazz. Twice nominated for Grammy awards and a fixture of the nominations for Canada’s Juno awards, she has turned her bands into showcases for the finest musical talent from Canada, the United States and Cuba. Paquito D’Riviera, the great Cuban saxophonist, has said of her: “Jane is brilliant and she’s been trying
so hard to play the real thing.What she’s doing is valid and legit.”
Bunnett’s startling new album, Red Dragon’Fly, is the most ambitious expression yet of her very personal Cuban-jazz fusion: a strongly melodic selection of tunes from a half-dozen nations, backed by the Penderecki String Quartet and performed by Bunnett’s own band, which these days features the formidable 21-year-old pianist David Virelles. Bunnett has come so far. She’s ready for the next step. Yet in the beginning, all she wanted was a cheap
vacation.
This is Not a Reading Series, Pages’ special events programme, incorporates music, movies, performance art, interview, sculpture, photography, puppetry,acrobatics, comedy,webcasting and dancing into a unique launching pad for contemporary books.
The Mercury Press’ titles have won and been nominated for dozens of awards, including the Governor General's Award and the Toronto Book Award. Mercury specializes in cutting edge Canadian literary books, including jazz, politics, fiction, poetry, autobiography and murder mysteries:
Art of Jazz is a not-for-profit organization dedicated year-round to the development of jazz artists and audiences in Canada and abroad. Through artistic and educational programming in the concert hall, classroom and community, including: The Art of Jazz Celebration; Art of Jazz Community Voices; The AOJ Orchestra; and community outreach and jazz education for all ages, all Art of Jazz programs embrace the full breadth of jazz and its related artistic expressions.
For more information or author or musician interviews, please contact The Mercury Press at (416) 531 4338 or mpress@pathcom.com. |
