Jazz men and women — and jazz itself — honored

Tonight (Oct. 24) will be a Great Night in Harlem, as pianist Herbie Hancock, winner of the Jazz Journalists Association’s 2014 Award for Lifetime Achievement in Jazz, receives likewise recognition at the Jazz Foundation of America’s gala fundraising
show (goal: $1.7 million to help health-, housing- and employment-challenged jazz and blues musicians), genuinely studded with stars and heartfelt tributes.

The concert at the Apollo Theater, being broadcast live by New Orleans radio station WWOZ starting at 8:30 pm Eastern time, includes the first ever reconvening of Hancock’s music-stretching early ’70s Mwandishi band; Chaka Khan, guitarist Ray Parker, drummer Questlove and bassist Verdeen White of Earth, Wind and Fire hailing Verdeen’s brother and EWF founder Maurice White, who copes with Parkinson’s disease ,and a segment devoted to trumpeter Clark Terry, 93 and ailing yet right now on movie screens in the documentary Keep On Keepin’ On.

Quincy Jones will present Hancock’s award and a dozen sterling musicians ranging from tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath, now 88, to 13-year-old piano prodigy Matthew Whitaker will be featured throughout the evening. For some reason, Bruce Willis will be there, too. If you can’t attend, you can still donate — the JFA does truly great work in support of creators of America’s cultural treasure which, as ArtsJournal today headlines, “don’t get no respect.”

This Great Night caps a couple of weeks of similar ceremonies. In Washington D.C. the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation presented the BNY Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award to pianist-educator JoAnne Brackeen at the Kennedy Center. I was there, along with a prestigious coterie of previous honorees including Kenny Barron, Oliver Lake, Reggie Workman, Larry Ridley, Roy Haynes, Rufus Reid and Muhal Richard Abrams, who performed with a superb quintet. Early in the day, prior to the Award reception, program and concert, this troupe had been gotten a tour of precious jazz artifacts held at the National Museum of American History by Ken Kimery, director of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, and John Edward Hasse, NMAH curator of music. They were reportedly wowed by Ellington’s handwritten signature and scores, Coltrane’s chart for A Love Supreme and Louis Armstrong’s horn.

In Chicago on Oct 15, the Jazz Institute held a gala at the Drake Hotel, during which honors were conferred on Muhal (as co-founder of the AACM, mentor to generations of free-thinking musicians, NEA Jazz Master, and composer/bandleader/pianist extraordinaire — incidentally, he’s performing again with a quintet tonight in NYC), Richard Wang (U of Illinois music prof emeritus), Dr. Carol Adams (exec director of the DuSable Museum of African American History),  James Fahey (director of programming

for Symphony Center Presents), and Marjorie Kiewit (Jazz Institute of Chicago supporter and philanthropist). The JIC gala brought something like $70k to the activist organization that programs the annual free summer jazz festival, but just as importantly runs year-round programs in parks and schools throughout the city, presentations in decentralized locales and has helped enormously to better a scene that now reaches across some longstanding social/racial/ethnic chasms towards more inclusiveness and outright neighborly relations.

Awards events and galas like these are not empty or self-congratulatory, though they are sometimes criticized as such. They all serve as signal occasions meant to raising the profile of (besides $$ for) our American cultural treasure, a gift enjoyed and practiced world-wide, maybe taken for granted or deemed uncommercial but deep in the heart of the soundtrack here at home.

howardmandel.com

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