A Jazz Legend Coming To Madison, CT

The First Congregational Church of Madison is once again hosting a Jazz Legend in concert.  The Music at the Meetinghouse series will welcome 20-time Grammy Award winner, National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and DownBeat Hall of Famer, Chick Corea in a solo piano performance on Sunday, May 12 at 4pm.  Seats are still available!  For seating chart and tickets, clickhere.

A keyboard virtuoso and a prolific composer Chick Corea has had an unparalleled career of creative artistic output that is staggering.  He is one of the most significant jazzmen since the 1960s.  Always looking for new opportunities he has been involved in important music projects over the years, everything from rock to symphonic, and is one of the few electric keyboardists to be quite unique with a recognizable style on synthesizers.

He began playing piano at age four and was influenced in those early years by his father, a jazz trumpeter, Horace Silver and Bud Powell.  In the early to mid 1960s he played with the bands of Mongo Santamaria, Willie Bobo, Blue Mitchell, Herbie Mann and Stan Getz.  He made his professional debut with Cab Calloway and his recording debut with Tones for Joan’s Bones, and in 1968 released the classic Now He Sings, Now He Sobs.  Following a short stint with Sarah Vaughn, Corea joined Miles Davis where he began playing electric piano, recording albums Filles de Kilimanjaro, In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew and Miles Davis at the Filmore.  With new opportunities to pursue and the need for self-exploration he left Miles Davis to begin playing avant-garde acoustic jazz.

To paraphrase Duke Ellington, Corea is a musician and composer beyond category — his music may fit within the boundaries of avant garde, fusion, classical, jazz, Latin and more, but he's really not boxed into genres.  Corea cites Dustin Hoffman as a model, "because of how good he is at being such different characters," Corea said in a 1999 interview. "That's how I see myself as a performer” (NY Times, January2011). 

In 2010 Chick Corea joined an elite roster of jazz masters as he was inducted into the DownBeat Magazine Hall of Fame, an honor that he shares with Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk. The award, one of jazz’s most coveted distinctions, is rarely accorded to living artists.  Corea swept four of the top honors in the 2010 DownBeat Readers’ Poll, which also named him Artist of the Year and Electric Keyboardist of the Year. Corea’s Five Peace Band Live, recorded with John McLaughlin, was named Beyond Album of the Year. This is his third year in a row topping the Electric Keyboardist category.  When asked by Down Beat about this award, he said “I simply feel honored and encouraged to keep on creating.  I admire everyone on that list. Many are mentors and musical heroes of mine. . .  I spent my youth and growing years learning from them.”

To learn more about Chick Corea visit www.chickcorea.com.

Information for this article provided by www.chickcoreacom and Wikipedia.

Contributed by: Donita Aruny

Celebrating 30 Years: Singing by the Sea

The Shoreline’s Own Shoreline Chorale will celebrate its 30 year anniversary with an exciting concert program, “Singing by the Sea: 30 Years of the Shoreline Chorale”.   The performance is scheduled for Sunday, May 5 at 4pm at the First Congregational Church of Madison, 26 Meetinghouse Lane.  Suggested donation for the concert is $15 -$20.  A reception will follow the concert. For information visit www.shorelinechorale.org or call 203-245-2887.

Favorite selections from past years include Cantique de Jean Racine by Gabriel Faure and i thank you God by Elliot Z. Levine on poetry by e.e. cummings.  Additional sets include pieces about the sea and on singing.   Composers include Vecchi, Schubert, Vaughn Williams, Paulus, Chilcott, and Moses Hogan.  The audience will participate in singing Jeremy Bankston’s How Can I Keep from Singing, which includes trumpets and handchimes.

The Shoreliners Quintet will perform A-Rovin, a traditional sea chanty arranged by chorale member Charles Houlihan.  Featured instrumentalist, trumpeter Eric Gerhardt, will perform in Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Trumpets.  Mr. Gerhardt also serves as band director at Westbrook High School.

The chorale’s Music Director Rachael Allen also serves as director of choral music at Westbrook High School, and accompanist Joyce Baxter also serves as music director at the Clinton Congregational Church.

Contributed by: Donita Aruny

A Tribute to Dwike Mitchell

Shoreline Arts Alliance just learned of the death of jazz pianist Dwike Mitchell, one-half of the Mitchell/Ruff Duo.  Dwike passed away on April 7 in Jacksonville, FL.  We extend our heartfelt sympathies to Willie Ruff, his jazz partner for more than 55 years and to the jazz community.

The Mitchell-Ruff Duo performed on several occasions for Shoreline Arts Alliance, the last time in January of 2008 in celebration and recognition of 50 years as the longest, continually performing jazz duo in the world.  I can still remember the fascinating conversations I had with Dwike while chauffering him to and from Union Station (New Haven).  He was a humble man with an amazing gift.  In that performance in 2005, he needed assistance crossing the sanctuary at the First Congregational Church in Branford to reach the piano but once he sat down and his fingers touched the keys there was no stopping him.  He Willie Ruff , French horn and bass, delighted that audience with a stroll down memory lane – not only musically but with a plethora of anecdotes and stories that they shared. 

What set the Mitchell-Ruff Duo apart was their missionary zeal. From 1955 to 2011, their thousands of concerts at schools and colleges and in foreign countries where jazz was taboo doubled as music appreciation classes for the young and uninitiated, and came to define the duo at least as much as their professional work, which was formidable. Both Dwike and Willy were classically trained.  They met in the Army in the late 1940s, went their separate ways in pursuit of education under the G.I. Bill — Mr. Mitchell to a Philadelphia conservatory, Mr. Ruff to the Yale School of Music — and reunited in 1954 as members of Lionel Hampton’s band. The two struck out on their own in 1955, opening for major acts like Ellington and Count Basie.

They were never embraced by jazz critics. Some viewed their classical training as detrimental to their credibility as jazz artists. But their academic backgrounds propelled the introspective Mr. Mitchell and the kinetic Mr. Ruff to world fame in 1959, when Mr. Ruff, who had a part-time teaching job at the Yale School of Music, arranged for them to accompany the Yale Russian Chorus on a summer visit to the Soviet Union.  

The duo performed an impromptu jazz concert at Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow during the trip, in defiance of state injunctions against the bourgeois decadence of jazz. Time magazine called it the first unofficial concert by American jazz musicians in the Soviet Union. (Benny Goodman and his orchestra gave the first official one three years later, in a deal between the State Department and the Soviet Ministry of Culture.)

They reprised the feat in the People’s Republic of China in 1981, demonstrating jazz techniques at conservatories in Shanghai and Beijing — openly this time. Headlines called it another first: the first jazz performance in China after the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Ruff, now a professor at Yale and curator of the Duke Ellington Fellowship, which he helped create in 1972 to bring well-known jazz musicians there to teach, said in a recent phone interview that Mr. Mitchell was “my main musical inspiration.”

Knowing and working with these two legendary musicians is a gift that I will always treasure.

Information for article New York Times Obituary April 18

Contributed by: Donita Aruny