Cornell Jazz Festival 2000 highlights contributions of women artists

The Department of Music presents its ninth annual Cornell Jazz Festival, "Women in Jazz," today, Friday and Saturday, April 20-22. Directed by Karlton Hester, the Herbert Gussman Director of Jazz Studies, the festival includes two concerts and a panel discussion and features three female jazz artists.

The festival opens today, April 20, with a panel discussion about women in jazz. This free event will be in the Hoyt Fuller Lounge of the Africana Studies and Research Center, 310 Triphammer Road, from 2 to 3 p.m.

On Friday, April 21, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Hall Auditorium, the Cornell University Lab Ensembles will be joined by three guest artists -- Adela Dalto, vocals; Akua Dixon, cello; and Pamela Wise, piano. Advance tickets are $4 for students, $6 for the general public, and are available at the Willard Straight Hall ticket office, the White Hall ticket office, Hickey's Music Center and the Ithaca Guitar Works. Tickets at the door are $5 for students, $7 for the public.

Mixing sophisticated elements of Latin and Brazilian music with the most contemporary styles of American jazz, Dalto creates a compelling blend of sensuous, fiery rhythms with sultry vocals in her Latin jazz music. She has performed alongside such great Latin musicians as Jerry Gonzalez and Hilton Ruiz, jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove, Brazilian pianist Aloisio Aguiar, and with Mauricio Smith's Latin Jazz Orchestra at the Rainbow Room in New York City. Dalto toured as featured vocalist with the late Mario Bauza's Afro Cuban Jazz Orchestra at the Pori, North Sea, Umbria and Montreux jazz festivals. Her latest CD release, Papa Boco on Milestone Records, is a mix of Latin, Brazilian and jazz tunes containing several of her own lyrics. She also has three Japanese CDs on the Venus Records label titled Exotica, Peace and A Brazilian Affair.

A native of New York City, cellist-composer-conductor Dixon is a graduate of the famed High School of the Performing Arts, where she studied cello with Benar Heifetz. She performs nationally and internationally at concert halls, colleges and jazz festivals. Among the many noted artists with whom she has performed are Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Max Roach, Betty Carter, Ray Charles, Israel "Cachao" Lopez, Eubie Blake, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, the Temptations and Sammy Davis Jr. She is assistant principal cellist of the Dance Theatre of Harlem Orchestra. In 1973 Dixon founded her own string quartet, Quartette Indigo, whose repertoire includes original works and her arrangements of jazz classics. Featured in concert at the Berlin Jazz Festival and the Kool Jazz Festival, the quartet's release on Landmark Records received four stars from Downbeat.

Pianist Wise followed a path from the gospel music of her hometown church through the urban landscape of rhythm and blues to find a musical home in the world of jazz. She grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, where her father was a jazz musician and a church choir director. Wise began composing music and playing the piano by ear at the age of 5. As a teen-ager, she started an R&B group called Ohio Movement, which toured in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. After studying at Cleveland State University, she moved to Detroit, where she began a more in-depth discovery of jazz. There she hooked up with some of the city's top jazz artists, such as Marcus Belgrave, Harold McKenny and Wendell Harrison. She's recorded two CDs, Wise Tells and Songo Festividad!, and is a regular at the jazz club Bomac's in Detroit.

Jazz Festival 2000 closes Saturday, April 22, at 8 p.m. in Barnes Auditorium with "Hesterian Musicism," a term coined by Hester to represent the process through which composition and performance merge to create aesthetic environments where musicians, kinetic and visual artists, and poets can produce new art forms through imaginative effort. Participants performing original compositions by Hester include Bill Johnson (trumpet), Phil Bowler (bass), Edward Smith (percussion) and Steve Marra (drums). They are joined by guest artists Christopher Morgan Loy (piano), Ernestina Sneed (vocals) and Mamadou Diabate (kora). The event includes a dance performance by the Uhuru Kuumba Dance Ensemble.

Advance tickets for this concert are $2 for students, $4 for the general public, and are available at the locations listed above. Tickets at the door are $3 for students, $5 for the general public.