19th Annual New Mexico Jazz Festival

Schedule:

4:30 pm - 6:30 pm - A.B. Spellman Poetry Reading: Between the Night and Its Music at Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeehouse

The New Mexico Jazz Festival is proud to partner once again with Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeeshop in Santa Fe — to present a reading by the amazing A.B. Spellman who, at age 90, has just released a new book of poetry called Between the Night and Its Music/New and Selected Poems on Wesleyan University Press. A.B. who is known to festival-goers as the retired NEA Deputy Chairman and architect of the NEA Jazz Masters Program (and NEA Jazz Master, himself) who has conducted the fascinating Meet the NEA Jazz Master conversations every year since the festival’s founding in 2006. This year we will focus on A.B.’s own artistic work as both a writer and performer. We will present this reading at Collected Works on Saturday and on Sunday the 21st at 7:30pm at the Lensic we will present the Grammy Award winning collaborative piece called Passion for Bach and Coltrane featuring A.B. as poet and orator along with the Imani Winds Quintet; the Harlem Quartet; and jazz trio comprising Alex Brown, Edward Perez and Neal Smith. A. B. Spellman is an acclaimed American poet, music critic, and arts administrator. He is widely recognized as a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a cultural and literary movement that emphasized Black identity, pride, and artistic expression. Between the Night and Its Music brings together A. B. Spellman's early work with a collection of powerful new poems. Spellman's literary career took flight in 1965 with his debut poetry collection, The Beautiful Days, which introduced his distinctive voice blending elements of jazz, blues, and African oral traditions. In 1966, Four Lives in the Bebop Business established Spellman as a respected music critic and scholar. It was a groundbreaking work that chronicled the lives and struggles of four influential jazz musicians. Spellman held senior positions at the National Endowment for the Arts for thirty years with lasting impact on arts funding for inner cities and rural and tribal communities. In addition to poems from The Beautiful Days (1965) and Things I Must Have Known (2008), this book contains a trove of new and uncollected poems, confirming Spellman's continued centrality to contemporary American literature. This is an essential volume for readers already familiar with Spellman, and an excellent introduction for new readers. Lauri Scheyer's introduction situates Spellman's work within jazz writing, Black Arts, and American poetry broadly. FREE.

7:30 pm - 9:30 pm - Dianne Reeves w. John Beasley, Romero Lubambo, Reuben Rogers, and Terreon Gully at The Lensic Performing Arts Center

Last at the New Mexico Jazz Festival in 2017, NEA Jazz Master Dianne Reeves who is the pre-eminent jazz vocalist in the world today,was described by The New York Times as "the most admired jazz diva since the heyday of Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday." With an arsenal of talents on display in every song she sings, her virtuosity, improvisational prowess and unique jazz and RandB stylings have earned her five Grammy awards for Best Jazz Vocal Performance for three consecutive recordings (a Grammy first in any vocal category) as well as honorary doctorates of music from Julliard and Berklee College of Music. Featured in George Clooney’s six-time Academy Award nominated film, Good Night, and Good Luck, for which she won a Best Jazz Vocal Grammy award for the soundtrack, Reeves’ broad repertoire ranges from the American Songbook, to Motown, RandB classics, reggae and Latin inspired tunes and she continues to enchant audiences throughout the world. Reeves has performed with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim and many others and she the first Creative Chair for Jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic as well as the first vocalist to ever perform at the famed Walt Disney Concert Hall. In recent years, she has toured the world with "Sing the Truth," a musical celebration of Nina Simone, which also featured Lizz Wright and Angelique Kidjo and has performed at the White House on multiple occasions. Joining Ms Reeves will be an all-star group comprising Romero Lubambo, guitar; John Beasley, piano; Reuben Rogers, bass; and Terreon Gully, drums.