Celebrating Jazz in Brooklyn

A Free Symposium and Performance at Brooklyn College
Special Performance by Randy Weston

On Saturday, April 4, from 1–5 p.m., Brooklyn College will host a free symposium and a concert with the renowned Randy Weston Trio at the Gershwin Theater.

Presented by the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College, the event is part of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium’s Tenth Annual Brooklyn Jazz Festival.

The program will showcase a mix of scholarly discussions on such topics as the history of jazz in Brooklyn from its earliest days to the present, led by BC Professor Jeffrey Taylor, director of the Hitchcock Institute.  Taylor teaches classes in jazz and other genres of American music and is the author of Earl "Fatha" Hines: Selected Piano Solos, 1928-41, and "Earl Hines and Chicago Jazz."

The event also includes a lecture on the music of Bebop master Thelonious Monk by Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

A panel discussion about contemporary jazz in Brooklyn moderated by Guthrie P. Ramsey, an associate professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania, will be followed by a conversation with Kelley and jazz great Randy Weston.

A native of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Weston had played with several of the jazz legends in the 1950s before heading to Morocco where he connected with traditional African music.  Weston, a pianist and composer who received an honorary degree from Brooklyn College in 2006, brought together the rhythms of the Moroccan Gnawa music and his own jazz sound for his album Uhuru Africa (1960).

To round out the day, the Randy Weston Trio will perform at 4 p.m.  Weston will be accompanied by Alex Blake (bass) and Neil Clarke (drums).