SAT FEB 27 2016
Dee Dee Bridgewater and Irvin Mayfield with the
New Orleans Jazz Orchestra
CHAN CENTRE FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
“This album is a testament to the continued relevance of New Orleans,
not only as a thriving city but also as a muse for communicating truth, love and beauty. Dee Dee Bridgewater leads us through a new artistic moment while answering a mandate created over a century ago by Jazz geniuses like Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong. She proves through her art that New Orleans is not just a city, but more importantly an idea that can make your heart and soul feel better. ” – Irvin Mayfield on Dee Dee’s Feathers
Dee Dee Bridgewater with the
and
Irvin Mayfield
New Orleans Jazz Orchestra
Presented by the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
Pre-show talk 7:15pm, Royal Bank Cinema
“The Road from New Orleans to Dee Dee’s Feathers” with Nou Dadoun
Concert 8:00pm, Chan Shun Concert Hall
Dee Dee Bridgewater Vocals Irvin Mayfield Trumpet, Conductor
New Orleans Jazz Orchestra
Khari Allen Lee Lead Alto Saxophone Joe Goldberg Alto Saxophone Ricardo Pascal Tenor Saxophone Ed Petersen Tenor Saxophone Jason Marshall Baritone Saxophone
David Harris Trombone Emily Fredrickson Trombone TJ Norris Trombone
Barney Floyd Trumpet Leon Brown Trumpet Ashlin Parker Trumpet Eric Lucero Trumpet
Victor Atkins Piano Davy Mooney Banjo, Guitar Grayson Hackelman Bass Adonis Rose Drums
The set list will be announced from the stage. The performance will consist of two 45-minute sets, and one 20-minute intermission.
Please remember to turn off your phones, and note that photography and recording are not permitted. Thank you! 3
PHOTO: Greg Miles
Dee Dee Bridgewater
Over a multifaceted career spanning four decades, GRAMMY and Tony Award-winning jazz giant Dee Dee Bridgewater has ascended to the upper echelon of vocalists, putting her unique spin on standards and taking intrepid leaps of faith in re-envisioning jazz classics. Ever the fearless voyager, explorer, pioneer and keeper of tradition, Bridgewater recently won the 2011 GRAMMY for Best Jazz Vocal Album with Eleanora Fagan (1915-1959): To Billie with Love from Dee Dee. Tonight she performs songs off Dee Dee’s Feathers, a musical journey through the history of New Orleans that has been described as “a tangible example of rebirth and healing and love, through the art of jazz” (Soledad O’Brien, CNN). From the beginning Bridgewater’s career has crossed musical genres. She earned her first professional experience as a member of the legendary Thad Jones/Mel Louis Big Band, and throughout the ‘70’s she performed with jazz notables like Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and Dizzy Gillespie. After a foray into the pop world during the ‘80s, she relocated to Paris and began to turn her attention back to jazz. After signing with the Universal Music Group as a producer (Bridgewater produces all of her own CDs), she released a series of critically-acclaimed titles beginning with Keeping Tradition in ‘93. All but one have received GRAMMY nominations. Bridgewater also pursued a parallel career in musical theatre, winning a Tony Award for her role as “Glinda” in a 1975 production of The Wiz. Her other theatrical credits include Sophisticated Ladies, Black Ballad, Carmen, Cabaret and the West End Production of Lady Day, for which Bridgewater received the British Laurence Olivier Nomination for Best Actress in a Musical. She also hosts NPR’s award-winning weekly syndicated show JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater, now in its second decade on the air.
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Finally, as a Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Bridgewater continues to appeal for international solidarity to finance global grassroots projects in the fight against world hunger.
Irvin Mayfield
In 2009, Mayfield entered into a historic partnership with the Royal Sonesta Hotel and created Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse, bringing jazz “back to Bourbon Street” in the historic French Quarter of New Orleans. That same year he was nominated to the National Council for the Arts by President George W. Bush, and was subsequently appointed by President Barack Obama in 2010. He served in this position through 2014. In 2010 Mayfield also received The Chancellor’s Award from the University of New Orleans (the highest ranking award given to a professor). He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Dillard University in 2011.
PHOTO: Greg Miles
Now a two-time GRAMMY and Billboard Award-winning artist with twenty-five albums to his credit, Irvin Mayfield began playing the trumpet when he was only nine. In an interview for the book Traditional New Orleans Jazz: Conversations with the Men Who Make the Music Mayfield admits that, at first, he hated practicing. Thankfully, his father–also a trumpet player–pushed him to keep it up. Today, Mayfield is the founding Artistic Director of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, and currently serves as Artistic Director of Jazz at the Minnesota Orchestra.
Under Mayfield’s direction, The New Orleans Jazz Orchestra won the 2010 GRAMMY Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble with its critically acclaimed Book One on the World Village/Harmonia Mundi label. Prior to Book One, Mayfield recorded Love Songs, Ballads & Standards with Ellis Marsalis, an early mentor and patriarch of one of the great New Orleans jazz families. The Half Past Autumn Suite, Mayfield’s first of several commissions, is a musical tribute to renowned African American artist Gordon Parks. Commissioned by the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2000, the score accompanied an exhibition of the photographer’s work. It was later recorded with Parks, Wynton Marsalis and the Irvin Mayfield Quintet, and released on Basin Street Records. This litany of achievements would be astounding even for a more senior musician, but Irvin Mayfield is a mere thirty-seven years old. Nevertheless, as Cynthia LeJeune Nobles writes, “one could arguably make the case that…he has already achieved his boyhood goals. It is likely, however, that Mayfield himself would strongly disagree. For him, there is much more to be done.” (Traditional New Orleans Jazz: Conversations with the Men Who Make the Music, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012) 5
New Orleans Jazz Orchestra The mission of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO) is to create jazz to enhance life, transform place, and elevate spirit through the tenants of beauty, truth, and love. Artistic Director Irvin Mayfield founded NOJO in 2002 as a powerful vehicle for celebrating and advancing the cultural and historical legacy of New Orleans jazz. The concept came to Mayfield after he created the Institute of Jazz Culture at Dillard University. As he looked around the city for a partner in the jazz industry, he found that there was no institution committed solely to the business of jazz–performing it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week–in the city that created it. This led Mayfield to assemble a 16-piece band and enlist NOJO President & CEO Ronald Markham. In early 2003 NOJO had its first performance at Tipitina’s. NOJO made history on November 17, 2005 when its members symbolically reopened the city of New Orleans with a performance of a piece composed by Mayfield (titled All the Saints) at Christ Church Cathedral. This was the first major cultural event inside the city following Hurricane Katrina. NOJO has headlined all of America’s major performing arts venues and clubs, and has produced the first local, ticketed Jazz Concert Series in the history of New Orleans. NOJO’s latest album, Book One, won the 2010 GRAMMY Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble. NOJO recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary with The NOJO 10, a series that featured events at Preservation Hall, Tipitina’s, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and New York City’s prestigious Carnegie Hall.
at the Chan Centre
Words
in Motion
Fri Mar 18 & Sat Mar 19 2016 / 7:30pm
Telus Studio Theatre chancentre.com/beyondwords
Writer/choreographer partners Carmen Aguirre & Olivia C. Davies, Aislinn Hunter & Anusha Fernando and Nancy Lee & Paraskevas Terezakis bring three very different visions to the marriage of words and movement.
Exploring the role of the arts and artists in society. chancentre.com/connects
The Road from New Orleans to Dee Dee’s Feathers Pre-show talk with Nou Dadoun 7:15pm: Royal Bank Cinema, Chan Centre In 2014 Dee Dee Bridgewater and Irvin Mayfield made plans to commemorate the 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by celebrating the musical legacy and culture of the great city of New Orleans. The resulting project, Dee Dee’s Feathers, mixes up a gumbo that celebrates musicians like Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Dr. John, songs like “St. James Infirmary” and “House of the Rising Sun,” and New Orleans places and institutions like Congo Square, the Tremé district and the Mardi Gras Parade. In his pre-concert talk Nou Dadoun, host of CFRO’s A-Trane Radio Program, gives a guided tour through the back alleys of the birthplace of jazz to the doorstep of the party hosted by Dee Dee Bridgewater, Irvin Mayfield and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. Earlier this month we asked Nou some questions (full Q&A available at chancentre.com). Excerpts from this interview offer a taste of Nou’s reflections on this evening’s concert: Chan Centre: What sparked your passion for music? Nou Dadoun: I like to say that I have ‘curious ears’! I grew up in the ‘60s when music was a central part of teenage social life, and I had the opportunity to hear and see many great musicians from that era live. My ‘curious ears’ had me looking for connections: Led Zeppelin covered Willie Dixon and Leadbelly, The Cream covered Skip James, Robert Johnson and Blind Joe Reynolds. While tracking down old blues recordings, I discovered recordings by Duke Ellington from the ‘20s, like “The Mooche” and “Black and Tan Fantasy.” I was hooked. But I love listening to and discovering all kinds of music–I’m always looking for the story behind the music. CC: What is it, in your opinion, that’s so alluring about jazz? ND: Jazz is alluring to me because it’s such a big umbrella; it covers so many different styles and forms of expression. Jazz was born in New Orleans as a ‘mongrel music’ –a combination of ragtime piano, John Philip Sousa brass band marches, light opera imported from Europe, and African rhythms–and spread across America after 1917, when the Storyville red light district in New Orleans was shut down by the US Navy. In every decade since, jazz has reinvented itself through swing, bebop, cool, hard bop, free jazz, fusion, and so on. This is sometimes the result of musicians exploring new avenues of sound and expression by improvising with modes like Kind of Blue, by improvising freely and building musical structure on the fly, or by absorbing influences from other music: the soul of gospel music, the energy of rock, or the rhythm of hip-hop. As jazz has traveled around the world, every country has absorbed its lessons and transformed it again: Brazil, South Africa, Italy, India, Jamaica, Indonesia and many others all have distinct flavours of jazz. Jazz was, and continues to be, the original “world music”. How could one fail to be intrigued by that?
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CC: How did the collaboration on Dee Dee’s Feathers between Dee Dee Bridgewater and Irvin Mayfield with the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra come about? ND: Dee Dee Bridgewater was invited to the groundbreaking of the People’s Health New Orleans Jazz Market, a purpose-built performance space and jazz community centre sponsored by NOJO. Afterwards, Bridgewater and Mayfield talked about putting together a tribute to the resilience of New Orleans ten years after Hurricane Katrina had taken its toll on the city (Mayfield suffered personal tragedy in Katrina; his father drowned in the disaster.) In the next few weeks they worked out the themes and the tunes, and a month later sessions at Esplanade Studios–located in a historic church that was extensively restored after Katrina–resulted in the music for Dee Dee’s Feathers. Originally planned for sale only at the Jazz Market, Bridgewater and Mayfield were so pleased with the results that they decided on a general release for the album and subsequent tour! CC: How does Dee Dee’s Feathers pay tribute to the musical legacy of New Orleans? ND: The legacy of New Orleans runs through the entire Dee Dee’s Feathers project, all the way back to the greatest musician ever to come from the city, the legendary Louis Armstrong. Louis is celebrated in a song he originally recorded with his Hot Seven featuring Earl Hines back in 1927 titled “St. James Infirmary Blues”, and in his 1967 late career hit “What a Wonderful World”. Other nods go to the legendary Professor Longhair and his collaborator Earl King in “Big Chief” (with a guest appearance from Mac Rebbenac, better known as Dr. John), Lionel Batiste from the Tremé Brass Band with the band’s theme song “Tremé”, and Harry Connick Jr. in “One Fine Thing”! CC: How does the music of Dee Dee’s Feathers evoke a feeling of place? ND: I’ll give two examples. In the 18th century, before New Orleans became part of the United States in the Louisiana Purchase, African slaves were barred from congregating in public places. In the early 19th century, the city set aside a space where slaves were allowed to gather to have markets, sing, dance, and play music. This space became known as Congo Square. As legend has it, the African-based music performed there became famous and was eventually absorbed into the amalgam of early jazz. The song “Congo Square” from Dee Dee’s Feathers evokes the drum, dancing, and spirit of the only freedom that slaves in the New Orleans of that era would ever know. New Orleans is also famous for its Carnival–the celebration that precedes the fast of Lent. The Mardi Gras parades date back to the middle of the 19th century, when African Americans were not allowed to participate. To get around such restrictions, African Americans dressed as Native Americans (who were allowed to participate) and named their teams (or krewes) after Native American tribes like The Wild Tchoupitoulas. The song on the album titled “Big Chief” is named for the krewe leader, who would decide where to lead the parade on the day of the celebration. See more at chancentre.com 8
UBC School of Music Fanfares The fanfare that was performed in the lobby prior to this concert (7:30pm and 7:45pm) was commissioned by the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts as part of an ongoing partnership with the UBC School of Music and their composition students and performers. Farewells & St. James Infirmary Drawing on the rich colours of jazz harmony and the plaintive, expressive quality of the saxophone quartet, Farewells is a brief meditation on the melancholy of goodbyes. It is preceded by an arrangement of St. James Infirmary, an American traditional song of disputed authorship, often attributed to Irving Mills, and made famous by Louis Armstrong in 1928. Duncan Maunders is a Vancouver-based composer of choral and instrumental music. He holds a Bachelor’s of Music in Jazz Studies from Capilano University and is currently pursuing his Masters at UBC. His music is eclectic, understated, and austere. Mo Miao Soprano Saxophone Alex Toa Alto Saxophone Haley Heinricks Tenor Saxophone Mia Gazley Baritone Saxophone
Upcoming Events at the Chan Centre Full details at chancentre.com Feb 28 at 2pm: Gifted Artists Concerto Gala Presented by the Mozart School of Music Mar 5 at 7pm: 22nd Annual UBC Medicine Spring Gala Presented by the UBC Faculty of Medicine
Mar 9 at 7pm: 100 Years WISE: Women in Science and Engineering, Bridging the Past and the Future Presented by the University of British Columbia, Centennial Session
Mar 11 at 8pm: UBC Symphony Orchestra and UBC Opera Ensemble feat. Edmund Chung Presented by the UBC School of Music Mar 12 at 4pm: MYVoice at the Chan Centre Presented by Chor Leoni and MYVoice Mar 12 at 7:30pm: VanMan Male Choral Summit Concert Presented by Chor Leoni
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The Chan Centre would like to thank our 2015/2016 series sponsors: The Chan Endowment Fund and the UBC Faculty of Arts
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“The finest jazz singer to emerge in the last decade... outstanding.” - The New York Times Cécile McLorin Salvant MAY 1
A SOUND EXPERIENCE Tickets and info at: chancentre.com
Arlo Guthrie APR 21 Anoushka Shankar APR 8