PSO’s Louis Armstrong tribute a Roaring ’20s redux
The streaming concert features jazz musician Byron Stripling, who believes we re on the brink of another cultural renaissance.
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Byron Stripling performs the music of Louis Armstrong with the Portland Symphony. Armstrong’s audacious music was a product of the roaring 20s. Stripling thinks the next Louis Armstrong will emerge in years ahead.
Photo by Sean Turi, courtesy of Portland Symphony Orchestra
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Byron Stripling has a hunch the 2020s will yield music and art that people a century from now will revere and cherish. Just as we look back at the Roaring ’20s of a century ago as a time of cultural swagger with the emergence of jazz, Art Deco and enlightened sensibilities, the people who follow us will treasure what we’re about to create.
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Dream of 25 places where you can to dance to, delight in and listen to different musical styles
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage festival is one of its many musical treats
Credit: Getty
For all the perils of the past 10 months, music has been a great constant – the firm friend who has stayed with us, providing solace with inspiring songs and favourite tracks; a consolatory sound-track to tough times that is never inaudible, however hard the wind is howling outside the door. It will be that way when normality returns, for it is almost impossible to travel and not encounter the sounds and rhythms that help define a destination.
Just as jazz musicians arrange countless combinations of notes and rhythms to create unique songs, people with disabilities navigate a multitude of challenges to create extraordinary lives.
Organizers of the South Beach Jazz Festival want Miami audiences to know that living with a disability doesn’t make anyone any less capable, particularly when it comes to achieving their dreams. In its fifth year, the festival aims to share the diverse rhythms and styles that comprise jazz music and the multifaceted lives of those living with disabilities through a series of performances scheduled for January 8-10.
David New, creative director of the festival and founder of Power Access Inc., a local organization that produces events to increase awareness for those living with disabilities, says the festival’s mission can be summed up in four words: from disability to serendipity.
Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis in August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” streaming on Netflix. Photo courtesy of Netflix.
Just as every premiere of an August Wilson play on Broadway was a major event, every film based on his plays should shake the earth beneath our feet. Especially for those of us who, being white, get to know Wilson’s characters from the outside looking in, film adaptations like “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” should be a clarion call for all of us to listen actively, experience deeply, break some bread, and renew our commitment to those ever-elusive concepts of social justice and true empathy.
The reality is far more complicated . Louis Armstrong. Photograph: Eliot Elisofon/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
The reality is far more complicated . Louis Armstrong. Photograph: Eliot Elisofon/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images
Casual listeners think of him as a gentle giant of jazz, but critics and African Americans often saw him as a sell out or ‘Uncle Tom’. A new book aims to show how radical ‘Pops’ really was
EdPrideaux
Thu 17 Dec 2020 05.08 EST
Last modified on Fri 18 Dec 2020 06.15 EST
“I cannot think of another American artist who so failed his own talent. What went wrong?” asked one biographer of Louis Armstrong. “The sheer weight of his success and its attendant commercial pressures,” answered another.