Artists Studio: Dominique Eade and Ran Blake with Kavita Shah

ABOUT THE ARTISTS STUDIO “Sitting in a chair in the Veterans Room and slowly panning side to side and up and down (which you will do when you go there), you encounter a kind of visual music: the energy in that design and those colors, the shades of brown and blue and black and pale yellow, alive and roaring at you.”

— The New York Times When the Veterans Room reopened in 2016 after an extensive revitalization, it was lauded as “a riot of color, visual rhythm and contrasting details,” and “if walls could speak, these would alternately whisper of refinement and roar with audacity” (Wall Street Journal). Designed by Louis C. Tiffany & Co., Associated Artists, the room is a monument to the American Aesthetic Movement and represents the innovation of exceptional young artisans approaching the decorative arts with a bold new vision. This season, the series adds to the exuberance of the space with interventions by some of today’s most creative voices who have a distinct relationship to sound with a visual aesthetic that blurs the boundaries between installation and performance. Curated by jazz pianist, composer, and MacArthur fellow Jason Moran, these interventions utilize the newly restored space as visual material, while allowing these imaginative innovators to explore exciting new directions in their practice.

UPCOMING EVENTS:

ALVIN CURRAN March 14

MATANA ROBERTS April 24

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE September 14

JULIANA HUXTABLE October 10

2017 ARTISTS STUDIO

IN THE NEWLY RESTORED VETERANS ROOM

Tuesday, November 21 at 7:00pm and 9:00pm Veterans Room, Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory

DOMINIQUE EADE & RAN BLAKE Pause Folk Songs of Naboréa (World Premiere) by

KAVITA SHAH This performance is approximately one hour and thirty minutes in length, performed with a brief pause.

SEASON SPONSORS

SERIES SPONSORS

The Artists Studio is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the city council, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Altman Foundation, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Achelis and Bodman Foundation, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, The Kaplen Brothers Fund, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation.

DOMINIQUE EADE & BLAKE RAN Tonight’s Performance will feature selections from: Walter Schumann Charles K. Harris Johnny Cash

Pretty Fly/ Lullaby After the Ball Give My Love to Rose

Ran Blake Traditional Spiritual

Memphis (For Martin Luther King) Elijah Rock

Mancini/Mercer Dave Goulder

Moon River The Easter Tree

Gene Roland Joe Green Gene Roland

Winter in Madrid All About Ronnie Falling

Clifton Davis Never Can Say Goodbye (For Jeanne Lee) Ran Blake Short Life of Barbara Monk Dominique Eade Solo For Monk Jean Ritchie Gunther Schuller Bob Dylan Karl Suessdorf Huddie Leadbetter

West Virginia Mine Disaster Improvisation on “Magic Row” It’s All Right Ma, (I’m Only Bleeding) Moonlight in Vermont Goodnight Irene

Production Acknowledgements Sascha von Oertzen, Sound Designer Steinway & Sons The performance is dedicated to Gunther Schuller, Amy Cho, and Dorothy Wallace.

In a career that spans five decades, pianist, composer, and educator Ran Blake has created a unique niche in improvised music as an artist and educator. With a characteristic mix of spontaneous solos, modern classical tonalities, the great American blues and gospel traditions, and themes from classic film noir, Blake’s singular sound has earned a dedicated following all over the world. His dual musical legacy includes nearly 50 albums on some of the world’s finest jazz labels, as well almost 50 years as a groundbreaking educator at Boston’s New England Conservatory.

A recent Italian reviewer, Vincenzo Roggero, sums up Ran’s merging of traditions and unique noir piano style: “Blake combines Max Roach with Edith Piaf, Duke Ellington with Stevie Wonder, Nino Rota with Yiddish music. All lit by his unique style influenced by the blues as the gospel, classical as jazz, but inimitable in combining these elements through touches almost imperceptible, silences full density, sparse but decisive cluster, lines dangerously poised between tonality and dissonance. It is music played on whispers, rather than shouts, but no less intense or penetrating.”

Fellow MacArthur Grant recipient and Kennedy Center Artistic Director for Jazz, Jason Moran, recently said, “It’s this thunder-crack of sound that explodes from the instrument once he puts his hands on it. Ran’s unlike anything else that exists. I hope musicians hear him and ask themselves, `Shouldn’t we be taking more chances?’”

No doubt, Blake’s music still sounds fresh and unmistakably unique.

Nearly 50 years after his innovative release, The Newest Sound Around with vocalist Jeanne Lee (RCA-Victor), he continues to evolve his noir language on the piano, making him one of most resilient artists in jazz history.

Blake’s most recent recordings are Ghost Tones: Portraits of George Russell (A-Side Records, 2015), Live at the Kitano with Sara Serpa (Sunnyside, 2015), Down Here Below, Vol. 2: A Tribute to Abbey Lincoln with Christine Correa (RedPiano, 2015), Chabrol Noir: A Tribute to Claude Chabrol with Ricky Ford (impulse!, 2016), and Town and Country with Dominique Eade (Sunnyside, 2017).

For those interested in keeping up with Ran’s musical activities, please visit ranblake.com, where you can also sign up for his monthly newsletter and order his new book, Primacy of the Ear. For news from the New England Conservatory’s Contemporary Improvisation Department, please visit necmusic.edu.

Dominique Eade is a vocalist, improviser, and composer whose wide-ranging work with artists from Anthony Braxton and Ran Blake to Stanley Cowell and Dave Holland over the past four decades has earned critical recognition from The New York Times, Downbeat, Jazz Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications here and abroad. She has recorded seven CDs under her own name, including two for RCA Victor featuring artists such as Fred Hersch, Victor Lewis, and Benny Golson. Recognized in numerous polls and awards including Downbeat’s Top Ten Female Jazz Vocalists, New York’s Annual Jazz Awards, and the Boston Music Awards, Eade has performed throughout the United States and Europe and was featured in festivals such as The Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival, The Porto Jazz Festival, The Knitting Factory’s “What is Jazz?” Festival, The Molde International Jazz Festival, and many others.

Though she lived in New York City in the early ninties, Eade has been on the faculty of New England Conservatory in Boston since 1984, during which time she has been closely associated with mentor and collaborator Ran Blake. Eade was a member of the Ran Blake Quintet featuring Ricky Ford and Blake and Eade have released two CDs as a duo. The most recent, Town and County (Sunnyside Records) came out in June 2017 and is already being considered one of the year’s best by many journalists.

Also renowned as a teacher, the list of Eade’s private students is impressive and continues to grow. It includes Luciana Souza, Roberta Gambarini, Rachel Price (Lake Street Dive), Jo Lawry (Sting), Michael Mayo (Thelonious Monk Institute), Richard Saunders (Third Story with Chance), Sara Jarocz, Aoife O’Donovan and Heather Masse (Prairie Home Companion), Akenya Seymour (Noname, Chance), Sara Serpa, Sofia Rey, and many others.

KAVITA SHAH Folk Songs of Naboréa by Kavita Shah Prayer Song/Alaap Nya Ka Tcha Pa ô Naboréa (Anthem) Forest Exploration Rain Dance Frenzy Ancestral Sleep Song Sodade* Where Do We Go? Dirge Anthem Reprise

Program Note Traveling has always made me feel at home, and helped me in piecing together those elements of my past that are out of reach.

*All words and music by Kavita Shah, except “Sodade,” by Luis Morais and Amandio Cabral.

This trip was new for me in its whirlwind nature; seeing so much of humanity in such rapid succession precluded my focusing on any one tradition, but instead highlighted—in such an acute manner— that which makes us human across political, racial, linguistic, and socioeconomic boundaries. I also grappled with the integral role music plays in our society, and has played in human societies for millennia.

Eleni Arapoglou, voice Tomas Cruz, voice Christie Dashiell, voice Michael Mayo, voice Sofia Ribeiro, voice Kavita Shah, voice Vuyo Sotashe, voice Yacouba Sissoko, kora Flag by multidisciplinary artist Nyugen E. Smith “Now that Western-style civilization no longer has the resources it needs to regenerate itself on its own and to thrive once again, can it learn something about humankind in general, and about itself in particular, from the humble societies, those long held in contempt, which until relatively recently had escaped its influence?” -Claude Lévi-Strauss Folk Songs of Naboréa is a song-cycle for seven voices that traces the folk music of Naboréa, a futuristic, post-nuclear society. Having witnessed the pinnacle of technological advance only to see it destroy their world, the first settlers of Naboréa, who came from far and wide, opted to return to a subsistence-based, nomadic lifestyle. Unable to communicate in one language, they were forced to adapt quickly in order to survive, abandoning previous social constructs of tribe, nation, and race in the process. Eventually, Naboréa flourished, as did its artistic practice, with music, in particular, serving an important function in agro-religious, celebratory, and commemorative rituals.

Today, artifacts found on Naboréa are but debris of a former Earth.

Similarly, the folk songs of Naboréa carry remnants of the past-some distinguishable, some faint. Embedded within them are the memories of collective loss and the promise of future regeneration.

When I received the invitation to take part in this Artists Studio series, I was at the end of a sabbatical voyage that took me from the Hopi and Navajo plans of the Southwest to Paris and Amsterdam to Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cape Verde, Senegal, Ethiopia, and Tanzania to Beirut and back to New York. Though I had no set agenda, I quickly found myself documenting folk songs, asking questions and befriending musicians along the way.

Somehow, out of all this, Naboréa was born, a world that perhaps has always existed for me, but now feels within grasp. Little did I know when I began this process how comforting that possibility would be.

I would like to thank Jason Moran, Nils Vigeland, Nyugen Smith, my ensemble members, and you, the audience, for being a part of this journey.

—Kavita Shah New York, November 2017

Vocalist and composer Kavita Shah makes work in deep engagement with the jazz tradition, while also addressing and advancing its global sensibilities. A lifelong New Yorker of Indian origin, Shah incorporates her ethnographic research on Brazilian, West African, and Indian musical traditions into her original repertoire. She was named Downbeat Best Graduate Jazz Vocalist in 2012 and won the ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Award in 2013; her highly-acclaimed 2014 debut album—the internationally-minded project VISIONS (Inner Circle Music/Naïve Records)—was was co-produced by guitarist Lionel Loueke. Shah’s second album, a program of standards in duet with bassist François Moutin – with special appearances by pianist Martial Solal and by NEA Jazz Master Sheila Jordan, Shah’s mentor – is due for release in 2018.

Raised in Manhattan, Shah traces her commitment to jazz to the childhood influence of uptown saxophonist Patience Higgins, a former neighbor whose band she would later join at hallowed Harlem spots like Minton’s and the Lenox Lounge. Trained first as a classical pianist, Shah spent her formative years in the prestigious Young People’s Chorus of New York City, absorbing and performing in a vast range of musical idioms. An early and enduring fascination with Spanish literature and Afro-Cuban music helped guide her to major in Latin American Studies at Harvard, where her B.A. honors research on contemporary Afro-Brazilian music and politics, drawing on fieldwork in Salvador da Bahia, won several prizes. After a brief stint working for The Nation and Human Rights Watch, Shah went on to earn a Master of Music degree in Jazz Voice at Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with Theo Bleckmann, Peter Eldridge, Steve Wilson and Jim McNeely.

From her formal training, Shah draws a keen interest in complex arrangements and adventurous approaches to the voice as an instrument, leading her to collaborate with contemporary composers like Steve Newcomb and Miho Hazama in settings ranging from chamber groups to jazz philharmonic. Just as important to Shah, she grounds her own compositions in the art of the song as passed down through the tradition – not least by Jordan, the great NEA Jazz Master who has been her artistic and professional mentor.

Shah’s research interests in traditional music practices have taken her to Brazil, Cape Verde, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Turkey, and India, where her work has been supported by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Jerome Foundation, and Asian Cultural Council. Shah credits tradition, as embodied in its elders, for grounding her own personal and artistic identity and her vision of music as not just pursuit of virtuosity, but cultural work.

Shah has sung her music at major concert halls, festivals, and clubs on five continents, including the Kennedy Center, Winter Jazz Fest, Rochester Jazz Festival, Melbourne Jazz Festival, Brisbane Jazz Festival, Perth Jazz Festival, San José Jazz Festival, Safaricom Jazz Festival in Nairobi, Art Basel: Miami, Blue Note, Jazz Standard, Joe’s Pub, Iridium, Duc des Lombards, Blue Whale, Vermont Jazz Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rubin Museum, and National Jazz Museum in Harlem. She has worked with such artists as Lionel Loueke, Sheila Jordan, Martial Solal, François Moutin, Greg Osby,

Steve Wilson, as well as tabla guru Samir Chatterjee (India), mridangam player Rajna Swaminathan (US/India), percussionist Rogério Boccato (Brazil), acoustic guitarist Bau (Cape Verde), Ethiojazz founder Mulatu Astatke (Ethiopia), and kora master Yacouba Sissoko (Mali).

Nyugen E. Smith is a Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist and educator who lives and works in Jersey City, NJ. His practice consists of sculpture, installation, writing, video, and performance and is influenced by the conflation of African cultural practices and the remnants of European colonial rule in the Black Diaspora. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a 2016 Leonore Annenberg Arts Fellow.

ABOUT THE ARMORY Part American palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory is dedicated to supporting unconventional works in the visual and performing arts that need non-traditional spaces for their full realization, enabling artists to create, students to explore, and audiences to consume epic and adventurous presentations that can not be mounted elsewhere in New York City.

Since its first production in September 2007, the Armory has organized and commissioned immersive performances, installations, and cross-disciplinary collaborations by visionary artists, directors, and impresarios in its vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall that defy traditional categorization and to push the boundaries of their practice. In its historic period rooms, the Armory presents smallscale performances and programs, including its acclaimed Recital Series in the intimate salon setting of the Board of Officers Room and the Artists Studio series in the newly restored Veterans Room.

The Armory also offers robust arts education programs at no cost to underserved New York City public school students, engaging them with the institution’s artistic programming and the building’s history and architecture.

Built between 1877 and 1881, Park Avenue Armory has been hailed as containing “the single most important collection of nineteenth century interiors to survive intact in one building” by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, with an 80-foot-high barrel vaulted roof, is one of the largest unobstructed spaces in New York City.

The Armory’s magnificent reception rooms were designed by leaders of the American Aesthetic Movement, among them Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White, Candace Wheeler, and Herter Brothers.

The building is currently undergoing a $215-million renovation designed by Herzog & de Meuron and Platt Byard Dovell White Architects as Executive Architects.

ABOUT THE VETERANS ROOM “...the Armory, a once-crumbling landmark, has transformed itself into one of the world’s most sought-after venues for performance, music, and supersized art projects. And in a sense, the Veterans Room, of all the Armory’s opulent reception rooms, has the deepest spiritual kinship with a work of contemporary art, the feel of an installation by a young collective whose members were reacting to one another and making it all up as they went along.”

— The New York Times The Veterans Room is among the most significant surviving interiors of the American Aesthetic Movement, and the most significant remaining intact interior in the world by Louis C. Tiffany and Co., Associated Artists. This newly formed collective led by Tiffany included some of the most significant American designers of the 19th century at early stages of their very distinguished careers: Stanford White, Samuel Colman, and Candace Wheeler among them. The design of the room by these artisans was exotic, eclectic, and full of experimentation, as noted by Decorator and Furnisher in 1885 that “the prepondering styles appear to be the Greek, Moresque and Celtic, with a dash of Egyptian, the Persian and the Japanese in the appropriate places.”

A monument of late 19th-century decorative arts, the Veterans Room is the fourth period room at the Armory completed (out of 18). The revitalization of the room responds to the original exuberant vision for the room’s design, bringing into dialogue some of the most talented designers of the 19th and 21st centuries – Associated Artists with Herzog & de Meuron, Platt Byard Dovell White Architects, and a team of world-renowned artisans and experts in Tiffany glass, fine woodworking, and decorative arts.

The revitalization of the Veterans Room follows Herzog & de Meuron’s design approach for the Armory building, which seeks to highlight the distinct qualities and existing character of each individual room while interweaving contemporary elements to improve its function. Even more so than in other rooms at the Armory, Herzog & de Meuron’s approach to the Veterans Room is to amplify the beauty of the room’s original vision through adding contemporary reconstructions of lost historic material and subtle additions with the same ethos and creative passion as the original artisans to infuse a modern energy into a harmonious, holistic design.

The room’s restoration is part of an ongoing $215-million transformation, which is guided by the understanding that the Armory’s rich history and the patina of time are essential to its character, with a design process for the period rooms that emphasizes close collaboration between architect and artisan.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The restoration and renovation of the Veterans Room was made possible by The Thompson Family Foundation, Inc., Susan and Elihu Rose, Charina Endowment Fund, Lisa and Sanford B. Ehrenkranz, Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, Assemblymember Dan Quart and the New York State Assembly, Liz and Emanuel Stern, Adam R. Flatto, Olivia Tournay Flatto, Kenneth S. Kuchin, R. Mark and Wendy Adams, American Express, Rebecca Robertson and Byron Knief, Amy and Jeffrey Silverman, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Anonymous (2).

Cover photo: James Ewing