Posts Tagged With: jazz in harlem

CHECK OUT JAZZ BY THE RIVERSIDE!

AZIZA MILLER PERFORMS AT JAZZ BY THE RIVERSIDE

Upcoming: 

Aziza Miller

Jazz By The Riverside

 Friday, April 20

$10

Call 914 512 5395 to order or CLICK HERE!

Aziza Miller Ten years ago, Linda Williams, best known in music circles for her 5 _ years playing and conducting for Natalie Cole, had an epiphany: it was time for a change – time for a new name, a new direction, a new life.

Aziza, the performer, the composer/lyricist, the complete artist was born. After her Hollywood period in which she composed the melody for Miss Cole’s “La Costa”, a contemporary standard, then wrote and recorded “City Living”, her debut album on Clive Davis’ Arista Records, Aziza turned to the daunting task of raising her son Brandon. She spent years happily shaping her young man’s life until he graduated with an Aerospace Engineering degree from U.S.C. and became Lt. Brandon Miller, pilot, U.S. Navy. Finding herself in the proverbial “empty nest”, Aziza brought out her yellow writing pad and began chronicling her thought and feelings. Somewhat to her amazement, the poet in her emerged! Reams and reams of poetry, song lyrics and topical statements poured out of her busy pen. Marrying those words to melody had always been her forte, so the composer in her got to work setting lyric to melody. Watching Aziza perform we sense the organic nature of her songwriting. Everything becomes a part of her work – a trip on the subway, a walk through the neighborhood, a fantasy about the man she will love, a statement about the man she will no longer love, her paean to the great ladies of jazz, and yes her exhortation to all the ladies to strut their divalicious ways – it all sums up her positive take on life. Watching her audiences nod their heads in agreement as she weaves her way through the types of relationships “out there” today, one gets the sense that she is talking for them, saying the things they think but can’t really express. She is becoming their voice, their spokesperson in a world that doesn’t always make sense. Her audience knows she makes sense to them.

JAZZ BY THE RIVERSIDE

Riverside Church

10th Tower

91 Claremont Avenue

Between 121 & 122 Claremont Avenue

(One block over west of Broadway)

New York, NY 10027

Dates:

Friday, April 20, 2012 @ 8:00 pm

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‘A Great Day In Harlem’

NPR posted this great photo along with the history behind it.: On an August morning in 1958, 57 jazz musicians gathered on a Harlem stoop to pose for a group portrait taken by jazz enthusiast Art Kane (who went on to become a famed fashion and rock ‘n’ roll photographer). The famous photo, shot on the front steps and sidewalk outside a brownstone on 126th Street, became the centerfold in Esquire’s January 1959 issue, The Golden Age of Jazz. You can read the full story here.

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National Jazz Museum in Harlem Acquires New Recordings

Lester Young

The National Jazz Museum in Harlem announced they now have over 100 hours of live performances by Jazz icons from 1935-1941. Harlem’s Executive Director Loren Schoenberg discovered the collection after a 24 year cultivation that started with his meeting William Savory in 1980. Savory died in 2004 and Schoenberg acquired the discs in April, 2010 for the museum through Savory’s heir, Eugene Desavouret, of Malta, Illinois. The collection includes live performances by Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Lionel Hampton, Fats Waller, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and more. You can read the full story here.

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