Handpicked jazz greats visit Pitt

Before the annual Pitt Jazz Seminar became an institution of blue notes, modal scales and offbeat rhythms, it was just an invitation to the visiting Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers. Pitt Jazz Seminar & Concert

Pitt Campus & Carnegie Music Hall

Seminars: Scattered throughout today and tomorrow Nov. 4-, 5, 6

Concert: The concert is on the SaturdayNov. 6 at 8 p.m.

Seminars: Ffree,. Concert: $18 or $8 (with student ID)

412-648-7814 — (William Pitt Union Ticket Office)

http://www.news.pitt.edu/news/additional-details-about-40th-annual-pitt-jazz-seminar-and-concert

Before the annual Pitt Jazz Seminar became an institution of blue notes, modal scales and offbeat rhythms, it was just an invitation to the visiting Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers.

“How about you guys come up to Pitt tomorrow or the next day?” event organizer Nathan Davis said to the jazz legends while he was playing tenor sax with them on their tour stop in Pittsburgh in 1970. “Art turned to his band and said, ‘Let’s go up and help Nathan get started.’”

Forty-one years and 40 official festivals later, the Pitt Jazz Seminar and Concert returns with a downbeat this weekend to help bring this American art form back to the Pitt community.

Each artist who participates in the seminar and concert is a significant force in jazz.

“Each of these guys are handpicked,” said Davis, who is also the director of Pitt’s Jazz Studies Program. “That’s what’s so hard about this kind of thing. We’re not calling up an agent and sending a group out with one guy who’s important and three sidemen. Each one of the guys are major contributors to jazz.”

Visiting instructors began giving lectures yesterday  and will continue to do so today and tomorrow. Davis said these jazz experts will give lectures and demonstrations enabling them to explain their processes in a way that no textbook or run-of-the-mill instructor can.

Davis explained the theory he uses to organize the event: “Instead of me saying what Dizzy did,let Dizzy say what Dizzy did. That way you can take away the truth because it’s coming right from the horse’s mouth.”

Beyond the educational factors for those who focus on musical technique, the seminars offer an opportunity for music students to experience something they can’t get inside a classroom.

“I want students to experience the spirituality of the music,” said Pitt music professor James Johnson.

He encourages his students to attend two seminars as part of his African American Music course, helping them connect what they’ve been learning in class to the incomparable experience of the music itself.

The seminars feature a variety of musicians on an equally wide variety of instruments — like a tribute to pioneering Pittsburgh jazz drummer Kenny Clarke by Winard Harper or a similar salute to guitarist Wes Montgomery and vibraphonist Milt Jackson by two modern masters at those instruments, Bobby Broom and Dave Pike, respectively.

Tomorrow at 8 p.m. at the Carnegie Music Hall, all the musicians who gave seminars this week will bring their considerable skill to play a jazz concert together.

In between seminar sessions, some of the musicians will share their craft with the Pittsburgh community members who can’t make it to campus events through outreach events.

“We pair one of the artists who volunteers with some Pitt students who qualify,” Davis said. “They go out and play together at places like the Ronald McDonald House to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to see them.”

Davis also hopes that locals recognize the importance of the Pitt jazz collection..

“We have one of the most important jazz archives in the country right here. We have 40 years of video and audio of everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Sonny Rollins. The recordings represent the major people.”

Though the archives represents jazz’s part, Davis looks forward to Pitt being a center of learning that will affect jazz’s future.

“Check with the people who come from Japan and Russia,” he said, “one of the first things they want to see is the jazz showcase in the Union.

It has Sonny Rollins’ saxophone, Kenny Clarke’s drums, Clark Terry’s trumpet … they want to see the original stuff and we’ve got it here … one of the head starts Pitt students have got is jazz.”