Seating: Reserved Seating
Additional Performances:
Friday, March 29—7:30PM
Ambrose Akinmusire
Described by NPR Music as “a trumpeter of deep expressive resources and a composer of kaleidoscopic vision,” composer, trumpeter, and bandleader Ambrose Akinmusire has made a home at the crossroads of different musical forms and languages, from post-bop and avant-garde jazz to contemporary chamber music and hip-hop to singer-songwriter aesthetics. Akinmusire returns to Harlem Stage during its 40th Anniversary Season to present banyan seed. He builds on his interest in the intersection of the griot, mentor, and oral historian in social history to develop a multi-part suite. Like the banyan tree, which starts as a plant growing on another plant to become a tree of far-flung roots and interwoven vines, the project incorporates interviews with jazz elders to share ideas, knowledge, history, and community with younger musicians, and to connect audiences to the living stories of jazz — its social innovation and endless creativity.
Joining Akinmusire on stage is Cosmo Lieberman (alto saxophone), Emmanuel Michael (guitar), Esteban Castro (piano), Jeremiah Edwards (bass), and Timothy Angulo (drums).
AFTER THE PERFORMANCE
After the performance, renowned music and cultural journalist, Larry Blumenfeld, joins Ambrose Akinmusire to discuss the banyan seed project.
Larry Blumenfeld
LARRY BLUMENFELD has written regularly about music and culture for The Wall Street Journal since 2004. His work has also appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times, New Orleans Times Picayune, Daily Beast, NPR, Salon and TIDAL, among other publications and websites. His criticism focuses on jazz, Afro Latin and “creative” music. His reporting often centers on connections between these cultures and issues of social justice. He was the 2019 Jeanette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University, and has received the Jazz Journalists Association’s Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Writing, an Open Society Institute Katrina Media Fellowship (researching cultural recovery in post-flood New Orleans), and a National Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia University. His writing about New Orleans has appeared in the essay collections, “Pop When the World Falls Apart” (EMP/Duke University Press) and “Best Music Writing, 2008” (Da Capo Press). His essay “Exploding Myths in Morocco and Senegal” appeared in “Music in the Post-9/11 World” (Routledge Press). He programs and hosts the long-running series “Jazz and Social Justice,” at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem; is Editorial Director for Chamber Music America and editor-at-large of Jazziz magazine; and curates the Wells Fargo Jazz Series of Spoleto Festival USA and the Deer Isle Jazz Festival in Stonington, Maine. He lives, writes and plays basketball in Brooklyn, NY.
Commissioned by Harlem Stage through its WaterWorks Established Artists Program and supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Stavros Niarchos Foundation, Thompson Family Foundation, and the Leonard & Robert Weintraub Family Fund.
This program is also supported, in part, by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Diana King Memorial Fund presented by the Charles and Lucille King Family Foundation.
