Patricia Nicholson Parker

Sunday 5/14/2017 Show: Cooper-Moore

Photo: Cooper-Moore | © Joyce Jones/ Suga Bowl Photography. Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons CC-NC-BY-ND. Used with Permission.

The next show will air on Sunday, May 14, 2017 from 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM Monday Eastern Standard Time on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org. “Suga’ In My Bowl” kicks off its Vision 22 coverage featuring this year’s Lifetime of Achievement recipient composer, performer, instrument builder/designer, storyteller, teacher, mentor, and organizer, Cooper-Moore.

Cooper-Moore has been a major, if somewhat behind-the-scenes, catalyst in the world of creative music for over 40 years. As a child prodigy, Cooper-Moore played piano in churches near his birthplace in the Piedmont region of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

His performance roots in the realm of avant jazz music date to the NYC Loft Jazz era in the early/mid-70s. His first fully committed jazz group was formed in 1970 – the collective trio Apogee with David S. Ware and drummer Marc Edwards. Sonny Rollins asked them to open for him at the Village Vanguard in 1973, and they did so with aplomb. A studio recording of this group was made in 1977, and issued as Birth of a Being on hatHut under Ware’s name in 1979 (re-mixed and re-issued in expanded form on AUM Fidelity in 2015!).

Following an evidently rather trying European tour with Ware, Beaver Harris, and Brian Smith in 1981, Cooper-Moore returned home and completely destroyed his piano, with sledgehammer and fire, in his backyard. He didn’t play piano again until some years after, instead focusing his energies from 1981-1985 on developing and implementing curriculum to teach children through music via the Head Start program.

Returning to New York in 1985, he spent a great part of his creative time working and performing with theatre and dance productions, largely utilizing his hand-crafted instruments. It was not until the early 90s, when William Parker asked him to join his group In Order To Survive, that Cooper-Moore’s pianistic gifts were again regularly featured in the jazz context.

In the early ‘aughts the group Triptych Myth was his own first regular working jazz group in decades and together they blazed some trails (may again!) and released two albums; one rich formative, and one exquisite. Cooper-Moore’s creative life continues well, strong and unabated into the present day.

Among the many instruments Cooper-Moore has built are a diddley-bow, a three-string fretless banjo and a mouth bow played with hands and drumsticks. According to Cooper-Moore, “I have taken stuff out a dumpster to make an instrument which I have used at gigs. If you put me somewhere, and I had to play and didn’t have an instrument, I’d get everything I needed and make an instrument within a few hours.”

We’ll begin the show with an update on this year’s Vision Fest from organizer Patricia Nicholson Parker, and we’ll play a audio from a discussion between Moore and bassist William Parker from a recent salon.

(Bio adapted from Cooper-Moore’s page on Aum Fidelity Records)

Cooper-Moore performs at Vision Fest on May 29 with the Digtal Primitives and In Order to Survive ensembles. See our blog for an extended preview and full coverage of this year’s Vision Fest. WBAI proudly returns as a media sponsor.

This program is hosted, engineered, produced, and edited by Joyce Jones. Listen for our On the Bandstand segment with NYC metro area appearances of Suga’ guests at the end of the first hour with Associate Producer Hank Williams.

Web Extras:

Watch Cooper-Moore in this 2013 live performance at The Stone with William Parker, Hamid Drake, and Daniel Carter.

Watch Cooper-Moore in this 2008 live solo performance with his custom made instruments.

Watch Cooper-Moore in this 2017 live performance at Jazzhouse in Copenhagen with Digital Primitives.

Hank Williams is assistant producer for Suga’ in My Bowl and produces the weekly “On the Bandstand” segment as well as running the show’s website and blog, where he has reviewed several jazz festivals. His writing has also appeared in Left Turn magazine and American Music Review. He teaches at Lehman and Hunter colleges in the City University of New York system.

Sunday 8/21/2016 Show: Connie Crothers Memorial

Photo: Connie Crothers at Vision 21 2016 | Joyce Jones. Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons CC-NC-BY-ND.
 
The next show will air on Sunday, August 21, 2016 from 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM Monday Eastern Standard Time on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org. This broadcast is a memorial to the late pianist Connie Crothers.
 

 
Connie Crothers expressed her musical life as performer, recording artist and teacher releasing feeling–her source–through spontaneous improvisation. This edition is a memorial broadcast in honor of Connie Crothers by guest contributor Chris Becker, who provides an interview he recorded for his book released earlier this year titled Freedom of Expression: Interviews with Women in Jazz. Additional remembrances will be provided by Arts for Arts/Vision Festival organizer Patricia Nicholson Parker, percussionist/drummer Warren Smith and trumpeter Lewis “Flip” Barnes.
 
As a solo performer, she appeared in the Berlin Jazztage, Jazz at Middleheim when she received a feature article in Knack, the Toronto International Jazz Festival, and at Carnegie Recital Hall, presented by Lennie Tristano. Tristano wrote on her first record, “Perception,” SteepleChase, “Connie Crothers is the most original musician it has ever been my privilege to work with.”
 
Crothers recorded duo with Max Roach as part of his historic duets recording project–”Swish,” New Artists–and performed duo with Roach in Tokyo, Bologna, New Orleans and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. They were honored by Harvard University as Visiting Jazz Artists; during the ceremony they performed with the Harvard University Band. For this concert, Anthony Braxton wrote a composition for them.
 
Bio excerpts from Connie Crothers’s website.
 
This program is hosted, engineered, produced, and edited by Joyce Jones.
 
Listen for our On the Bandstand segment with NYC metro area appearances of Suga’ guests at the end of the first hour with Associate Producer Hank Williams.
 
Details for a memorial service haven’t been released yet. We’ll be sure to share them when they are. Watch our Facebook page for details and we’ll be sure to announce it on upcoming On the Bandstand segments, which also appear weekly on our blog.
 
Web Extras
 
Watch Crothers talk about the value of art in this short promo clip for the 2015 Vision Festival.
 

 
Watch Crothers lead a quartet at Brooklyn’s Roulette in this live 2014 clip.
 

 
Watch Crothers and Max Roach in a 2000 live performance from Bologna, Italy.
 

 
Hank Williams is assistant producer for Suga’ in My Bowl and produces the weekly “On the Bandstand” segment as well as running the show’s website and blog, where he has reviewed several jazz festivals. His writing has also appeared in Left Turn magazine and American Music Review. He teaches at Lehman and Hunter colleges in the City University of New York system.

Sunday 5/29/2016 Show: Vision Festival 21 Preview

Photo: Bassist Henry Grimes — 2016 Vision Festival honoree
 
The next show will air on Sunday, May 29, 2016 from 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM Monday Eastern Standard Time on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org. This membership/fund raising broadcast will preview the 2016 Vision Festival and feature interviews with pianist Geri Allen (in her first time Vision appearance), guitarist Marc Ribot, drummer Andrew Cyrille and composer/vocalist Lisa Sokolof honoring the career of bassist Henry Grimes. As usual, we will hear from organizer Patricia Nicholson Parker.
 

 
WBAI is media sponsor of Vision 21, New York’s longest running jazz festival. It starts June 5 with films on the Sun Ra Arkestra at Anthology Film Archives and moves to Judson Memorial Church from June 7 through 12 for nightly live avant garde jazz, poetry, dance, and visual art. See the full schedule at their site.
 
During this membership program, Arts for Art has generously donated 3 one-day passes to offer as thank you gifts for those who support WBAI-FM. You can pledge online or call in during the show. Suga’ will also offer 7 autographed copies of Quincy Troupe’s Miles & Me as a thank you gift for a pledge to help WBAI-FM/Pacifica Radio in New York continue to provide programming you enjoy.
 
From the publisher’s description of Miles and Me:
 
Quincy Troupe’s candid account of his friendship with Miles Davis is a revealing portrait of a great musician and an intimate study of a unique relationship. It is also an engrossing chronicle of the author’s own development, both artistic and personal. As Davis’s collaborator on Miles: The Autobiography,Troupe–one of the major poets to emerge from the 1960s–had exceptional access to the musician. This memoir goes beyond the life portrayed in the autobiography to describe in detail the processes of Davis’s spectacular creativity and the joys and difficulties his passionate, contradictory temperament posed to the men’s friendship. It shows how Miles Davis, both as a black man and an artist, influenced not only Quincy Troupe but whole generations.
 
This program is hosted, engineered, produced, and edited by Joyce Jones.
 
Listen for our On the Bandstand segment with NYC metro area appearances of Suga’ guests at the end of the first hour with Associate Producer Hank Williams.
 
Web Extras
 
Watch the trailer for Vision 21:
 

 
Hank Williams is assistant producer for Suga’ in My Bowl and produces the weekly “On the Bandstand” segment as well as running the show’s website and blog, where he has reviewed several jazz festivals. His writing has also appeared in Left Turn magazine and American Music Review. He teaches at Lehman and Hunter colleges in the City University of New York system.

Sunday 6/28/2015 Show: Vision Festival 20

The next show will air on Sunday, June 28, 2015 from 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM Monday Eastern Standard Time on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org. This broadcast will feature an interview with several artists scheduled to appear at this year’s upcoming Vision Festival.

This year marks the Twentieth Anniversary of the Vision Festival. To celebrate this milestone, Arts for Art (AFA) has organized an event that sets the standard for creative FreeJazz music, dance, visual art, poetry and ideas, embracing values that challenge and inform.

As the AFA press release states, “We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before and have inspired us to be our best, our most profound, and in fact, our most Visionary. We think of artists like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Jayne Cortez, and Amiri Baraka, and consider what our role must be to carry their legacy forward. How do we keep alive in the hearts and minds of a new generation, all of the idealism, integrity and sense of responsibility that lay at the heart of those creative movements? This year AFA celebrates all VISION artists. In particular, those iconic NY artists whose creative voices have helped build our reputation as the world’s premier FreeJazz Festival.”

Join us as we celebrate Vision 20 with former Suga’ guests who will be part of the festivities this year such as Joseph Daley, Craig Harris, Oliver Lake and others. We will also revisit an interview with Arts For Art / Vision Festival / RUCMA organizer Patricia Nicholson Parker laying out the history of the Festival and an additional conversation discussing this year’s commemoration.

Show engineered, produced, hosted, and edited by Joyce Jones. Listen for our On the Bandstand segment with NYC metro area appearances of Suga’ guests at the end of the first hour with Associate Producer Hank Williams.

See the full Vision Fest line-up here and check our blog for a preview and full festival coverage.

Sunday 6/8/14 Show: Vision Festival 19

Photo Credit: Photo Credit: Max Bashirov. Used with permission.

The next show will air on Sunday, June 8, 2014 from 11:00 PM – 1:00 AM Monday Eastern Standard Time on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org. During this installment, Suga’ in My Bowl will spotlight Vision Festival 19 with the “wearer of many hats” Patricia Nicholson Parker and this year’s Lifetime of Achievement recipient saxophonist, pianist and bassist Charles Gayle.

Since 1996 the Vision Festival has brought music, visual art, and dance together under the aesthetic of avantjazz and improvisation. By bringing several expressive art forms together, they inform, inspire, and expand audiences across disciplines.

Each year, Arts for Arts/Vision Festival dedicates an evening to honoring the achievements of one living artist whose music has inspired and influenced the world around him/her. This serves not only to honor our living legends, but also inform the world of the importance of their achievements because of the information that is disseminated about the artists. This year, June 11, 2014, AFA honors Charles Gayle for his Lifetime of Achievement.

Arts for Arts says of Gayle, “A gentle and humble artist, he is clearly one of the greatest saxophone players. He is 75, yet he refuses to lay back and rest on his musical accomplishments, for fear that the music might lose its ability to move us — Charles Gayle does not play for himself, but to serve. His intention is to move and inspire, and he has dedicated his life to this goal.”

The Festival will also celebrate the musicWitness®, Visual Artist Jeff Schlanger. Schlanger created the art on the Vision Festival 19 flyer and live paints during the festival, creating improvised visual art responding to the music.

Check out the schedule for Vision Festival 19 at their website. You can see the Vision program guide with artist interviews, a profile of Jeff Schlanger, and more at ISSUU. We’ll also have festival coverage on our blog.

Produced, engineered, edited, and hosted by Joyce Jones. Listen for our On the Bandstand segment with NYC metro area appearances of Suga’ guests at the end of the first hour with Associate Producer Hank Williams.

Web Extras:

Watch this 2013 performance of the Charles Gayle Trio live at Clemente Soto Velez Center.



Watch visual artist musicWitness® Jeff Schlanger demonstrate his live painting to music and talk about some of his musical influences.