IN CINEMA
RISING TONES CROSS
Made In Harlem: Cinema Blues
Thursday, February 6th at 7PM
Tickets: $15 General Admission/ $7 Reduced Price
Ebba Jahn, 1985, 101 min.
One of the great free jazz documentaries, Ebba Jahn's survey of the NYC post-loft scene is at once a rugged vision of artistic community and an intimate study of the era's most fiery and complex figure, saxophonist Charles Gayle.
This 40th anniversary screening will be followed by a discussion with bassist/composer William Parker, moderated by Andrew Castillo!
About William Parker:
William Parker is a bassist, improviser, composer, writer, and educator from New York City. He has recorded over 150 albums, published six books, and taught and mentored hundreds of young musicians and artists. He has been called “one of the most inventive bassists/leaders since [Charles] Mingus,” and “the creative heir to Jimmy Garrison and Paul Chambers...directly influenced by ‘60s avant-gardists like Sirone, Henry Grimes and Alan Silva.” The Village Voice called him, “the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time” and Time Out New York named him one of the “50 Greatest New York Musicians of All Time.” Parker’s current active bands include the large-band Little Huey Creative Orchestra, the Raining on the Moon Sextet, the In Order to Survive Quartet, Stan’s Hat Flapping in the Wind, the Cosmic Mountain Quintet with Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, and Cooper-Moore, and "Hope Cries For Justice," a duo with Patricia Nicholson Parker which combines music, storytelling, poetry and dance.
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).
