NEW YORK (Jazz at Lincoln Center/ www.jalc.org) - Jazz at Lincoln Center proudly ommemorates the
Jack Johnson Festival in its new home, Frederick P. Rose Hall, for two special evenings of jazz and film on Friday, November 12 and Saturday, November 13 at 8:00pm.
During the first half of the program, acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns, along with Jazz at Lincoln Center Artistic
Director Wynton Marsalis, will provide commentary and present clips from Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Mr. Burns' upcoming documentary on the heavyweight-boxing champion, author, patent-holding inventor and aspiring bass player.
Mr. Marsalis composed the original score and, with the Wynton Marsalis Septet, will perform this extraordinary music during the second half of the program to round out a knockout evening.
This is the first film presentation in Rose Theater - one of the three main performance spaces in Frederick P. Rose Hall - that was designed for jazz, but also accommodates opera, dance, theater and orchestral performances.
Tickets for this special event are $10, $40, $75, $100, $115 and $150 and are available at the new Jazz at Lincoln Center box office on Broadway at 60th St., by calling CenterCharge at (212) 721-6500 or via https://www.jalc.org. These performances are sponsored by Cadillac.
On Saturday, November 13 at 1:00pm, Between the Ropes will feature jazz musicians as they duel in friendly musician battles for an afternoon in Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola, a 140-seat jazz club with down-home yet sophisticated atmosphere, against a backdrop of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline.
Special guest artists, to be announced, will showcase skill and talent during these exclusive one-on-one battles. This event is free and open to the public.
In Unforgivable Blackness, his latest work, Mr. Burns tells the story of the first black heavyweight champion of the world, who challenged the prejudices of his day. During the seven years (1908-15) he reigned supreme, the boxing establishment agitated to find a Great White Hope who might unseat him (the era's openly racist expressions are shocking today). Unforgivable Blackness is a fascinating, complex study of a magnificently gifted athlete who loved to read, party and "womanize," and whose independence and dignity collided both with a racist society and his own large, self-defeating appetites.
Ken Burns has been making documentary films for more than thirty years. Since the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, he has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed documentaries ever made including Huey Long, Statue of Liberty, Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mark Twain.
Ken was the director, producer, co-writer, chief cinematographer, music director and executive producer of the landmark television series The Civil War. This film was the highest rated series in the history of American Public Television and attracted an audience of 40 million during its premiere in September 1990. The series was honored with more than forty major film and television awards, including two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, Producer of the Year Award from the Producer's Guild, People's Choice Award, Peabody Award, DuPont-Columbia Award, D.W. Griffiths Award, and the $50,000 Lincoln Prize, among dozens of others. Ken Burns was also the director, producer, co-writer, chief cinematographer, music director and executive producer of the Public Television series Baseball. Four and a half years in the making and eighteen and a half hours in length, this film covers the history of baseball from the 1840s to the present. It became the most watched series in PBS history, attracting more than 45 million viewers.
Baseball received numerous awards, including an Emmy, the CINE Golden Eagle Award, the Clarion Award, and the Television Critics Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sports and Special Programming.
In January 2001, Jazz, the third in Ken's trilogy of epic documentaries, was broadcast on PBS. This 19- hour, ten-part film explores in detail the culture, politics and dreams that gave birth to jazz music, and follows this most American of art forms from its origins in blues and ragtime through swing, bebop and fusion. Jazz received the Television Critics Award for Outstanding Achievement in News & Information, as well as the Christopher Award, the CINE Golden Eagle Award and the ASCAP President's Award for Outstanding Television Documentary.
The film was also nominated for five Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Non-Fiction Series. The historian Stephen Ambrose has said of Ken's films, "More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source."
Wynton Marsalis is the Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1961, Mr. Marsalis began his classical training on trumpet at age 12 and soon began playing in local bands of diverse genres. He entered The Juilliard School in 1979 when he was 17 years old, joining Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers that same year. Marsalis made his recording debut as a leader in 1982, and has since recorded more than 30 jazz and classical recordings, which have won him nine Grammy Awards.
In 1983, he became the first and only artist to win both classical and jazz Grammys in the same year and repeated this feat in 1984. In 1997, Mr. Marsalis became the first jazz artist to be awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in music, for his oratorio Blood on the Fields, which was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center.
In 1999, he released eight new recordings in his unprecedented "Swinging into the 21st" series, and premiered several new compositions, including the ballet Them Twos, for a June 1999 collaboration with the New York City Ballet. That same year he premiered the monumental work All Rise, commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic along with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (LCJO) and the Morgan State University Choir. Mr. Marsalis signed to Blue Note Records in 2003, and his debut CD, a quartet recording entitled "The Magic Hour", was released March 9, 2004.
Marsalis is also an internationally respected teacher and spokesman for music education, and has received honorary doctorates from dozens of universities and colleges throughout the U.S. He conducts educational programs for students of all ages and hosts the popular Jazz for Young People concerts produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center. Mr. Marsalis has also been featured in the video series Marsalis on Music and the radio series Making the Music.
He has also written two books: Sweet Swing Blues on the Road in collaboration with photographer Frank Stewart, and recently released Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life with Carl Vigeland. On March 20, 2001, Mr. Marsalis was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He helped lead the effort to construct Jazz at Lincoln Center's new home - Frederick P. Rose Hall - the first education, performance, and broadcast facility devoted to jazz.
Listings Information:
Producer: Jazz at Lincoln Center
Event: Jack Johnson Festival Featuring Ken Burns Presenting Clips of his upcoming film Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise And Fall of Jack Johnson, and a Special Performance by the Wynton Marsalis Septet
Date/Time: Friday, November 12 & Saturday, November 13, 2004 at 8pm
Location: Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall on Broadway at 60th Street.
Tickets: $10, $40, $75, $100, $115, $150
Available at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall box office on Broadway at 60th Street (open Monday - Saturday, 10am-8:30pm and Sunday 11am-8:30pm), CenterCharge at 212-721-6500 or via https://www.jalc.org
Listings Information:
Producer: Jazz at Lincoln Center
Event: Between the Ropes: Musician's Battle Featuring Guest Artists vDate/Time: Saturday, November 13 at 1pm
Location: Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall on Broadway at 60th Street.
Tickets: FREE
