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| Special Concert in the Monterey Museum of Art The Monterey Jazz Festival, a leader in jazz education since 1958 and winner of the 2005 and 2006 JazzTimes Readers' Poll for Best Festival, is pleased to announce a special concert on June 26, 2007 at the Monterey Museum of Art, with special guest MJF Artist-In- Residence, Grammy winning trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard. Produced in partnership with the Museum, the concert will complement the Museum's Henri Matisse: Jazz exhibition of important and rarely seen prints, and a display of historical posters, program covers and images covering the MJF's 50 years. The June 26 event includes a special private viewing of the exhibition. Proceeds will benefit MJF's Jazz Education Programs and the Monterey Museum of Art. The concert features the talents of the musicians who make up the core of MJF's Traveling Clinicians program, and are internationally known for their stellar performances: Bruce Forman, guitar; Paul Contos, saxophone; Vince Lateano, drums; and Scott Steed, bass. Terence Blanchard will also perform on trumpet, adding his distinctive musical voice to the mix. Taking place in the Work Gallery alongside the Matisse exhibition at the Monterey Museum of Art, the distinguished musicians will perform jazz standards and repertoire from their own books. Blanchard, Contos and Forman previously played together at the Festival's Next Generation Festival Kick-Off Concert and Salute to Jazz Education on March 23, 2007 at the Golden State Theatre in downtown Monterey to a packed house. Forman, Lateano, Steed and Contos are among the primary musicians who travel to middle and high schools in Monterey County as participants in the MJF “Traveling Clinicians Program” where they work directly with students to shape their skills as musicians. Collectively, they have toured internationally and have recorded with some of the world's leading jazz artists, including Grover Washington, Jr., Freddie Hubbard, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Dianne Reeves, Horace Silver and Diane Schuur. Joining the clinicians as a guest artist will be trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, one of the leading artists of his generation. Born in New Orleans in 1962, he replaced Wynton Marsalis in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1983. Lauded for both his soundtracks and small group work, Blanchard's accolades include multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for the soundtracks to Mo' Better Blues, The Heart Speaks, The Promised Land and 25th Hour, as well as instrumental and album Grammy nominations for Wandering Moon, Let's Get Lost and Flow. In 2005, Terence won a Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album for his participation on McCoy Tyner's Illuminations, an award he shared with Tyner, Gary Bartz, Christian McBride and Lewis Nash. As a soundtrack composer, Blanchard has enjoyed an association with the film director and actor Spike Lee. Starting with 1991's Jungle Fever, some of Terence's scores for Lee's screen and television films include Malcolm X, Crooklyn, Four Little Girls, Summer of Sam, Bamboozled, Inside Man and 2006's four-hour Hurricane Katrina documentary for HBO, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Blanchard will perform music from that documentary with his group and the Monterey Jazz Festival Chamber Orchestra at MJF/50 on September 22 on the Arena stage. He will also perform with his own quintet and with the Monterey Jazz Festival's Next Generation Jazz Orchestra during the 50th weekend in September 2007. The Monterey Museum of Art is proud to unveil one of the most significant works from its own collection. Henri Matisse is widely acknowledged as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. In 1947, while recovering from a prolonged illness and unable to paint, Matisse picked up scissors and vibrantly colored construction papers and created a series of dynamic cut paper collages, which were then transferred to screen prints. In total, about 20 of the brightly- colored images comprise the series, which was sold as a limited edition book of loose prints. Nearly all of the editions are held in museums across the world. A celebration of visual and musical rhythm and color, the Jazz portfoliowill be displayed in its entirety at the Museum's Pacific Street location. Jazz bursts with the energy of chance, capturing the freewheeling attitude and sound of the music. In a sense, Matisse was able to hear jazz with his eyes, and looking towards the future, successfully rendered not only the nonfigurative attitude of art and music, he was able to firmly place abstraction into the minds of every viewer to make a connection with the work, uniting both the subject and onlooker. As the artist wrote to a friend in late 1947, “There are wonderful things in real jazz, the talent for improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.” Jazz stands as one of the artistic triumphs of the 20th century. In celebration of the Monterey Jazz Festival's 50th Anniversary, Henri Matisse: Jazz will be accompanied by an exhibition featuring the fifty years of Monterey Jazz Festival posters, and can be seen at the Monterey Museum of Art from June 16 through October 21, 2007. Created as singular images to promote the Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival posters of the last 50 years have become legendary for their representation of the time, place and attitude of the era. From the early days when the posters were created as hand pulled lithographs to the contemporary ones produced through the offset process, the collection will feature such artists and designers as Earl Newman, Batista Moon Studios, Ron Grauer, Harry Briggs, and Jerry Takigawa. The posters feature abstract and figurative designs and are noted for their constantly striking and memorable images. Vintage MJF posters are still on the market today as collector items. The posters have been also memorialized in a book produced in celebration of the Festival's 50th year, entitled “The Art of Jazz / MJF 50 Years,” which tells the story of the Festival through its graphic imagery and photographic moments, capturing the MJF experience through posters, program covers, and exclusive photographs dating back to 1958. “The Art of Jazz” includes images from each of the Festival's five decades, a list of artists who have performed at MJF, along with a decade-by-decade look at the world and the Festival. write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Jazz News :: home page |