Results tagged “kennedycenter”

The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz honors its namesake by hosting its annual International Jazz Competition, which since 1987, has provided a springboard to some of the genre's brightest young stars. Past winners include Joshua Redman, Joey DeFrancesco, Chris Potter, and Jane Monheit, making the competition the most prestigious in the world. On Friday, as part of its Discovery Artist series, the Kennedy Center hosts 2008's winner, up-and-coming saxophonist Jon Irabagon, the first Filipino-American to win the award.

Jazz supergroups always make me nervous. A promoter or artist assembles an all-star cast of musicians in order to sell tickets, and they generally do, but the music is often lacking. Group improvisation requires everyone to be on the same page, listening to one another. If there are too many cooks in the kitchen, and too many oversized egos, the resulting music is often less than the sum of its parts. But bassist Dave Holland assures us this is not the case when it comes to his most recent collaboration, the Overtone Quartet, which will be performing on Saturday at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater. While the members of Overtone convened for the first time as a band for a series of shows in New York last month, there are deep connections among its members.

The Kennedy Center kicks off its fall season with its annual Open House Arts Festival, a highlight of its performance calendar. Every year, as part of its Performing Arts for Everyone initiative, the Center opens its doors to the public and folks can see cutting edge artists from around the world in nearly every performance space the venue has to offer. This Saturday marks the 25th installment of the festival, dubbed Stage & Street Spectacular. In recognition of that milestone, the event’s organizers took a step back to assess their approach.

is so earnest and so consciously stylized that at some key moments, there's a temptation to stop taking it seriously and instead succumb to laughter.

It's summer, which means it's time for glossy, eye-popping, multi-million dollar blockbusters. And those aren't just limited to movie screens. The touring production of the wildly popular, multiple Tony-nominated musical adaptation of Alice Walker's now-classic novel The Color Purple is in D.C. for the next month, and is just as jaw-dropping a spectacle as anything Hollywood has in store.

The Kennedy Center's recent production of (both with early stops at Arena Stage) and Signature's snagging of the regional Tony award, it's shaping up to be a good year for D.C. theater on the national stage.

This year's Duke Ellington Jazz Festival celebrated the musical heritage of New Orleans. Fittingly, the festival's fifth iteration came to an end with the first family of New Orleans jazz convening at the Kennedy Center to honor its patriarch, the great pianist and educator, Ellis Marsalis.

It's been a week since D.C. received the sad news that HBO was pulling its sponsorship of Screen on the Green, the popular outdoor summer film festival on the National Mall. In that time, there has been a flurry of activity by devotees attempting to salvage the festival for this summer and hopefully into the future. Two Facebook groups sprung up almost immediately looking for support for saving SotG, and late last week the two merged into one, now over 1700 members strong. Of course, creating and getting members into a Facebook group is easy and largely a symbolic gesture taken on its own. What's pleasantly surprising is that the group's organizer, D.C. Council staffer Jesse Rauch, is taking real and substantive steps to find a new sponsor. After speaking to HBO, Rauch was able to find out the budget necessary to put on the series — $150,000 — and has been in contact with movie studio representatives and the MPAA about sponsorship, all thanks to contacts within the Facebook group.

After a spring season of more challenging operas — a vicious Peter Grimes and a controversial, Americanized Siegfried — Washington National Opera brought home the bacon on Saturday night, opening its final production, Puccini's Turandot. The company presented this opera last time only in 2001 (with Alessandra Marc in the title role), and the Kirov Opera brought its road staging to the Kennedy Center in 2006. To answer the natural question — do we really need to see Turandot again so soon? — the company brought the colorful, somewhat slapstick, but still disturbingly savage production created by Andrei Şerban for Covent Garden 25 years ago (with none other than Plácido Domingo as Calaf) to Washington. Since most of the singing was quite good and the orchestra sounded in top form, this is indeed a production worth seeing.

Every now and then a young musician comes along and accomplishes so much, so quickly, that the rest of us are forced to wonder what we are doing with our lives. That is the position in which we found ourselves when, during a recent interview, we tried to hide our envy while asking Esperanza Spalding what it was like to perform at the White House earlier this year before the President, first lady, and Stevie Wonder, at a ceremony awarding Wonder the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

It's exciting when a show with epic scope and epic ambitions translates into epic results.

Anoushka Shankar's musical explorations reflect her own personal journey, which includes an intercontinental upbringing that stretched from New Delhi, to London, to Southern California. The talented 28-year-old sitarist/composer has carved out a niche in impressively diverse musical settings. Her playing can be heard in the international electronica circuit, the orchestral world of Carnegie Hall, and, of all places, the twisted universe of prog-rockers Jethro Tull, with whom she toured India in late 2008.

       

A nearly packed house in the Kennedy Center's concert hall greeted the winners of this year's Mayor's Arts Awards last night. In its 24th year, the award was created to celebrate the "indelible contributions to our cultural community by promoting artistic excellence and elevating the stature of our Nation's Capitol." The finalist list largely features long-time D.C. institutions and arts educators in theater, dance, music, and the visual arts, awarding accomplishments such as innovation and dedicated service to the arts.

Written by DCist contributor Monica Shores

The buzz surrounding Friday's Millennium Stage performance was palpable, with the line forming hours ahead of time for a free concert that was part of the Kennedy Center's outstanding Arabesque festival. The performer was K'Naan. Judging by the standing room crowd that filled the entire length of the Kennedy Center's Grand Foyer, he stands on the cusp of being a "next big thing." Judging by his energetic and thought provoking performance, his reputation is deserved.

The Master Musicians of Jajouka were “discovered” by Beat-generation writer Brion Gysin, and later visited by Brian Jones and Timothy Leary on their lysergically-inclined wanderings around Morocco in the 1960s. Leary famously remarked that he had "found" a “four thousand year old rock and roll band” in the foothills of the Rif Mountains below Tangier. While the group's history remains contentious and questions about their roots still linger (Philip Schuyler's article "Joujouka/Jajouka/Zahjouka" gives the most comprehensive account) and while they’re hardly rock and roll, Leary’s sense of time lapse was appropriately and unsurprisingly apt: when the Master Musicians lock into a groove, minutes quickly turn to hours and hours to minutes.

For the next few weeks, the District will be a hub of Arab culture as the Kennedy Center presents Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World, a festival that begins tonight and runs through March 15. The festival will feature artists from all 22 nations that comprise the League of Arab States. The performances, many of which are free, will cover multiple artistic media, ranging from spoken word, to music and dance, to visual art.

Assembling a concert that celebrates a career spanning seven decades must be a daunting task. What material should be included? Should the program be more celebration or performance? While the audience will expect the classics, what of the more obscure material of which the artist might be proud? The Kennedy Center tried to balance all of these factors on Saturday night in mounting an 80th birthday celebration for legendary jazz tenorman and composer, Benny Golson.

The Mariinsky Ballet, the St. Petersburg company formerly known as the Kirov Ballet, brought its charming, old production of Don Quixote to Washington this week. Alexander Gorsky's adaptation of the classic 1869 choreography by Marius Petipa dates back to the first decade of the 20th century, and not much about it has changed since then. Anyone interested in the cutting edge of ballet is unlikely to be much taken with this bit of history, but for the ballet neophyte it would be a grand, agreeable introduction - a light-hearted, at times slapstick ballet in which the only suicide turns out to be fake.

At his Election-Eve chat at the Birchmere, Henry Rollins considered the post-presidential role of one George W. Bush. In Rollins's speculative, Bergman-movie vision of the Bushes' Golden years, they occupy a swank Houston condo, their suites situated on opposite sides of the long dining room where they take their silent meals together, the air so thick with tension it scares the help. Of course, pundits with loftier credentials than those of a punk singer-turned-storyteller will probably weigh in on this topic. Who is Hank Rollins to say what will happen to our sad president, whose nature and motives have already been examined by some of the sharpest journalistic minds of our generation? In such matters, Rollins is, as he freely admits, a lightweight.

It’s already a cliché – or perhaps a symptom of our diseased, decaying age - that getting shot is nowadays regarded as a smart career move (see Curtis James Jackson III, DBA Fifty Cent). Time was, if a young buck wanted to make a name for himself, he had to kill somebody.

Those present on Saturday night to see ace drummer Terri Lyne Carrington (pictured left) witnessed a performance that showcased a strong tension that exists in today's jazz scene. On the one hand, those who celebrate musicianship, free-flowing improvisation, and a dedication to craft would have appreciated the high level of artistry that was on display during Saturday night's first set at the KC Jazz Club. On the other, those of us who value the emotional connection between musicians and audience found the show lacking.

Over the past two decades, saxophonist Steve Wilson has earned himself a solid reputation within the jazz community, both as a sideman and a band leader. He is probably best known for his mid-90s work with Chick Corea's Origins ensemble, but he has also made notable appearances with legendary saxophonist Joe Henderson, bassist Avishai Cohen, and clarinetist Don Byron, in addition to a host of others.

The after effects of Hurricane Katrina rarely get headlines these days. A historic presidential election, economic troubles, and other natural disasters have seen to that. Still, the suffering continues for many despite the inattention of the national debate. While artists don't have ability to enact policy changes to save a city on the brink, they can use the stage and microphone to draw attention to this ongoing issue.

The projection screen at the back of the stage flickered to life with a giant from the District's past, when it truly was Chocolate City. The clip featured Petey Green, the legendary talk show host, who gave the audience his own inimitable thoughts on the proper way to eat a watermelon. Thus began Amino Alkaline--The Watermelon Syndicate, Mos Def's new concert production that teams the MC with a 25-piece band. Potent hip-hop grooves, supplied by some of the country's finest young jazz and orchestral musicians, coupled with the rapper's on-point delivery resulted in an impressive performance that showcased a consummate artist in his prime. The Kennedy Center also deserves credit for mounting this event, which drew as diverse an audience as one is likely to see in a formal concert hall setting.

For the past seven years, the Kennedy Center has launched its season with Prelude, a month-long series of events that are available to the public for free or at a low cost. Prelude gives a chance for new patrons to see the range of performances the Kennedy Center offers, while regular patrons have a chance to experience more contemporary and innovative works.

This year’s Metro DC Dance Awards honored the best of the city’s dancers, choreographers, and companies on Monday night at the Kennedy Center. As evidence of the flourishing dance hub Washington is consistently becoming, it was standing room only for the sold out ceremony.

Drama lovers, a word: Here in the lavishly appointed ahr-eee Theater cubicle of DCist’s state-of-the-art underground headquarters, we have what you call an ethos. For us, casting arbitrary, semi-informed judgment on the bustling stage traffic of Our Nation’s Capitol is about a lot more than just getting free tickets to the latest hot offering from reliable companies like Catalyst or Solas Nua or Rorschach. No, here at DCist, we’re all about standing up for the little guy; the scrappy innovator, the lonely torch-bearer of the avant garde, the little-shows-that-could -- and just might! -- if only they can find a sympathetic critic to champion them.

The evening's host and main attraction was the great Bobby McFerrin. Those who know nothing of McFerrin outside of the campy "Don't Worry Be Happy" are missing out on one of this country's artistic treasures. With a voice that would put any "American Idol" to shame, McFerrin transcends genres, having performed and recorded with artists as varied as Yo-Yo Ma and Chick Corea, breaks barriers with his choral ensembles, and has even become a respected orchestral conductor.

While the Kennedy Center's annual Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival should be applauded for honoring the women of this great American art form, it is a shame that it is even necessary. While artists such as the festival's namesake and a host of others have made major contributions to jazz, the fact of the matter is that this music is still heavily male dominated. When asked how she viewed the festival, drummer par excellence Allison Miller (pictured) chose to look at it from a broader perspective.