CHARLESTON, S.C. (Charleston Jazz Initiative) - On June 2-4, 2005 during Spoleto Festival USA, the Charleston Jazz Initiative (CJI) will officially launch its multi-year effort to document the African American jazz tradition in Charleston, the South Carolina Lowcountry, and its diasporic movement throughout the United States and
Europe in a series of events titled Return to the Source. Established in March 2003 at the Avery Research Center, College of Charleston by Jack McCray of the Post and Courier and Dr.
Karen Chandler, Associate Professor of Arts Management at C of C, Return to the Source will celebrate the rich jazz tradition of musicians who learned their craft with the famed Jenkins Orphanage Bands and at the former Avery Normal Institute, and who went on to establish careers as sidemen with many of the country's leading jazz orchestras and ensembles.
Return to the Source begins on June 2 with "A Jazz Tribute to William Blake" sponsored by the Jake McGuire Savage Foundation, Washington, DC, the Housing Authority of the City of Charleston and the Piccolo Spoleto Festival. The event honors the late Jenkins Orphanage Band director, William Blake, who taught music to children at the orphanage for decades. The Franklin Street Five will perform at the original home of the Orphanage.
A specially commissioned work by jazz drummer, Quentin Baxter, and the jazz debut of 16-year old singing sensation, LaToya Smith, will also be featured. Franklin Street Five includes Baxter as band leader and drummer, and musicians formerly connected to the Jenkins Orphanage and who were taught by William Blake including Lonnie Hamilton, George Kenny, Oscar Rivers, among others.
On June 3, CJI will host a half-day series featuring many of the world's prominent jazz historians and musicians including the heads of the two largest jazz archives in the U.S. and Europe - Dan Morgenstern, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, and Wolfram Knauer, Jazz-Institut Darmstadt, Germany. Other guests include historian and author, Jeffrey Green, England, and author of Edmund Thornton Jenkins: The Life and Times of An American Black Composer, 1894-1926; New Orleans-based clarinetist and educator at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, Alvin Batiste, and Dr. Larry Ridley, bassist and President, African American Jazz Caucus, International Association for Jazz Education, and Jazz Artist-in-Residence, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York. Each has been extensively involved in jazz performance, education and research during their life's work; many have also researched Charleston and South Carolina musicians. The keynote address will feature A.B. Spellman, poet, critic and author of Art Tatum: A Critical Biography and Four Lives in the Bebop Business, and former Deputy Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC.
The events of June 3 will also feature Carolyn Jabulile White who will open the day's events with libation and a prayer in Gullah; special film tributes; conversations with Jenkins' family and friends; unveiling of a painting by acclaimed Charleston artist, John Doyle developed from source materials from CJI; and live jazz.
The opening of Photojazz, an exhibition of jazz photographs from Atlanta-based documentary photographer, Jim Alexander will conclude the symposium.
The exhibition includes photographs of such celebrated musicians as Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Sammy Davis, Jr., Count Basie, Sarah Vaughn, Miles Davis, Eartha Kitt, and Ella Fitzgerald, as well as former Jenkins Orphanage and musicians including William "Cat" Anderson, Freddie Green and Rufus "Speedy" Jones.
Return to the Source will end on June 4 with the inaugural gathering of the CJI Circle, an international network of CJI advisors.
