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A CrossPathCulture Jazz Experience
At 135 West 50th Street, blocks from Rockefeller Center and Times Square, CPC NYC and Gary Keys will present Classics to Contemporaries, a series of live music performances and multi-media, interactive events that will invite New Yorkers to live the jazz experience.
Classics to Contemporaries will transform part of CPC NYC's 8,000 square foot exhibition space into a jazz meeting place where people can gather to hear live music, dance, watch documentary films and video footage, and muse over an impressive archive of jazz photographs. Families and school groups will have opportunities to meet jazz musicians and participate in educational programming.
Opening on December 14, 2001, and launching the full program on January 18, 2002, Classics to Contemporaries will present live performances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights followed by jazz for families on Sunday afternoons. The space will open at 5:30 pm for each evening performance, giving the audience time to view the exhibition of photographs and the continually running film and video footage of jazz legends including Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gilespie, Max Roach, Gerry Mulligan and more. Beginning at 7:30 pm, echoes of their sounds will be heard in live performances by contemporary jazz artists from New York City and around the world.
Saturdays will present a range of established New York and international jazz acts, such as father/son duo Roy and Graham Haynes, John Faddis, Max Roach, the Heath Brothers and others. International artists now being approached include Hugh Masakela of South Africa and Giberto Gil of Brazil.
Some of the jazz performances will be accompanied by exhibitions of new paintings and performances by CPC NYC artist Samaj and a new large-scale sculpture by Peter Bradley.
Greenfield has been the recipient of numerous awards for his work to make jazz accessible to children. He has conducted similar programs in collaboration with The Children’s Museum of Manhattan, The Berks County Jazz Festival in Pennsylvania and public schools throughout the five boroughs. One school principal described the Jazz-a-Ma-Tazz program as “culturally outstanding and truly unique with its ‘hands-on’ approach to introducing jazz music to children.”
The exhibition will be free and open to the public daily. Visitors will be able to view ongoing film screenings, video footage and Gary Keys’ personal collection of photographs of jazz legends along with images from other jazz photographers.
Gary Keys' films to be screened include: "Memories of Duke," "Mexican Suite," “Dizzy Gillespie’s Dream Band,” “Gerry Mulligan’s Quartet,” “Max Roach at Blues Alley,” and "Cuba: Island of Music." In addition, CPC NYC will research, archive and present footage of performances by a range of international jazz artists.
The New York Times wrote of "Memories of Duke," “As the band plays through many of the old Ellington hits, the film provides its own subtextual resonances, now sly, now bittersweet, now ecstatic. Individual players emerge then fade back into that mass of smooth-running machine, and the camera catches both their moments of self-absorbed glory and Mr. Ellington's reactions."
CPC NYC and Trafika Films will document the performances and events on film utilizing the editing suite. In addition, Gary Keys will be using the suite to complete his documentary film on Duke Ellington at the Mexico Olympics in 1968, a project made possible with support from the Museum of Modern Art and the Durst Corporation.