IN CINEMA
CONTEMPLATION: JAZZMEN IN THE WILDERNESS
Made In Harlem: Cinema Blues
Thursday, April 3rd at 7PM
Tickets: $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price
BIG BEN: BEN WEBSTER IN EUROPE
Johan van der Keuken, 1967, 32 min.
TONY WILLIAMS IN AFRICA
Willie Ruff, 1973, 38 min.
STOPFORBUD
Ole John, Jens Jørgen Thorsen & Jørgen Leth, 1963, 12 Min.
In this selection of ruminative shorts, American jazzmen seek their place abroad, be it a new home or an ancestral one. Ben Webster idles in Amsterdam, Tony Williams communes with drummers and his forebears in Dakar, and a saintly Bud Powell floats through Copenhagen.
This screening will be followed by a solo trumpet performance from Heru Shabaka-Ra.
Heru Shabaka-Ra is a Philadelphia-based trumpeter who has lived and performed throughout Africa and Europe. He has held a trumpet chair in the Sun Ra Arkestra (under the leadership of Marshall Allen) since 2014, and has played with William Parker, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Darius Jones, Isaiah Collier, James Brandon Lewis, Luke Stewart and Brandon Lopez. He recently performed alongside Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula in his piece My Body, My Archive, which has toured the U.S.
About Made In Harlem: Cinema Blues:
Cinema Blues is a monthly series at the Maysles Documentary Center dedicated to the convergence of jazz and film. Rather than focus on movies soundtracked by jazz, it foregrounds documentaries that capture the many facets of the music and culture: the living history of jazz, its performance, the spiritual & political philosophies of its creators, and the racism & economic struggles they have consistently faced. In this sense, Cinema Blues = a blues cinema, a filmic accounting (in the tradition of writers like Amiri Baraka, A. B. Spellman, Val Wilmer) of the real-life stakes (and breaks) that inform the great Black American classical music. The series also features poetic and experimental films that evoke the spontaneous creativity of the music (cinema as jazz), lectures, panel discussions & musical performances.
Cinema Blues takes its title from a tune by Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and is curated by Andrew Castillo. The series is made possible by the generous support of the West Harlem Development Corporation (WHDC).
