Smithsonian jazz ’09-’10: four shows and JAM

Cannonball Adderley, Mary Lou Williams and Freddie Hubbard are celebrated in Smithsonian Institution concerts next October, February and April; a December “Swingin’ in the Holidays” performance by the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra completes its year’s jazz offerings. Well, there’s also Jazz Appreciation Month in April (otherwise known for fools and taxes) during which the Smithsonian encourages and promotes jazz activities in the U.S. and abroad. Does this represent enough support of jazz, a Congressionally recognized American treasure, by one of America’s major cultural institutions?

The Smithsonian’s jazz schedule has not previously been announced. The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra’s small group will play material from alto saxophonist Adderley’s solo career and ’57-’59 stint with Miles Davis on Oct. 24, and on April 10 a program titled “Hub-Tones” in honor of trumpeter Hubbard who died last December, will feature music from his days in the ’60s with Blue Note Records and Art Blakey and his ’70s CTI period which produced hits including “Red Clay” and “Straight Life.”

The full 13-piece SMJO, under the baton of its founding director David Baker, performs “Swingin’ in the Holidays” on December 5 with appropriate cheer — last year’s similar concert featured “The Nutcracker” as arranged by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, as well as their version of Grieg’s “Peer Gynt.” The entire orchestra returns on Februrary 20 under the banner “The Lady Who Swings The Band,” a centennial celebration of pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams, spanning her career from Andy Kirk’s Mighty Clouds of Joy through work for Benny Goodman and Dizzy Gillespie and her innovative modernist albums prior to her death in 1981.

Founded by the National Museum of American History in 1990 with a Congressional appropriation, the SJMO over 20 years has presented works by Ellington, Basie, Monk, Goodman, Quincy Jones, Oliver Nelson, Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Stan Kenton, Fletcher Henderson, Erskine Hawkins and others of the canon. Click here for tickets.

Besides concerts, the Smithsonian maintains a “jazz portal” website with information about relevant exhibits at the American Museum of National History and on tour, oral histories and research collections, some basic jazz “classes,” a “This Day in Jazz History” column, and info on Jazz Appreciation Month, a promotional initiative started in 2001 that energizes “a diverse group of organizations, institutions, corporations, associations and federal agencies that have provided financial and in-kind support, as well as organizing programs and outreach on their own.” Of course the Smithsonian is a genuine treasure chest of jazz, its holdings including the Duke Ellington Archives and “hundreds of thousands of documents, music, manuscripts, photographs, films, recordings and artifacts.” A searchable database contains a few hundred representative samples of what it has, which can be accessed by anyone who shows up to look.

This is all fine and good, though four performances a year does not allow a jazz orchestra to be all that it might. Well, there’s always the Kennedy Center — and I’ll post about its jazz program on Monday.And, taken with the jazz concerts at the Library of Congress, that will about exhaust the jazz put on with government imprimatur in the Capitol.Is it any wonder jazz is marginalized by society at large when the official cultural establishment pays such relatively slight mind?

This is the second in a three-part series on major, federally-supported institutions and jazz
Part I Library of Congress
Part II Smithsonian
Part III Kennedy Center

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