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'Gangsterism' on Campus: A Conversation About Jazz, Race and Creative Intent

Time: April 5, 2019, 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.

Location: Hendricks Chapel

Jason Moran (Pianist, Visual Artist)
Larry Blumenfeld (Brooklyn,NY)

Since his arrival on the music scene in the 1990s, Jason Moran has established himself as a restless innovator and a guardian of traditions, a singular leader and a selfless collaborator, and an artist and thinker bent on re-imagining jazz culture and its connections to wider worlds. His music spans ensembles of many forms, symphony orchestras and film scores. He has worked with celebrated visual artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper and Kara Walker, and mounted exhibitions of his own visual art. As the Kennedy Center’s artistic director for jazz, as at museums and other arts institutions, he has reconsidered the presenter’s mission. For the title of his series of “Gangsterism” compositions, Moran lifted a term off the canvas of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting “Hollywood Africans.” For the feeling and intent of his music, he has never lost sight of pianist Thelonious Monk, who he calls “the most important musician, period.”

Here, Blumenfeld extends a dialogue that has stretched across three decades and spilled out in many articles. Following the conversation, Moran performs solo at the piano.

Additional supporters:

  • Council on Diversity and Inclusion
  • S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications
  • Goldring Arts Journalistm Program
  • Hendricks Chapel
  • Museum Studies
  • English / Creative Writing
  • School of Education
  • Latino-Latin American Studies
  • SUArt Galleries
  • Art and Music Histories
  • Setnor School of Music
  • Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition
  • History
  • Samba Laranja
  • CNY Jazz Central
  • Belfer Archives
  • Special Collections Research Center
  • WAER

This event is part of the 2019 Watson Professor residency hosted by Eric Grode - director of the Goldring Arts Journalism Program, and assistant professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

The Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professorship in the Humanities is a preeminent lectureship originally established by the Watson family to support on-campus residencies of prominent humanities scholars, writers, and artists.

Eric Grode, Newhouse