Hot jazz to warm up a cool spring.
The sixth annual Cornell Jazz Festival, featuring special guest artists Steve Turre and Akua Dixon, will take place in three locations this weekend.
The festival gets under way Friday, April 25, at 7 p.m. in Barnes Hall with a performance by three Cornell jazz ensembles -- the Serious Vanguard Ensemble, the 7 PM Rehearsal Ensemble and Jazz 239 -- and the Ithaca College Jazz Combo. The performance is free and open to the public. Then, at 10 p.m., the ensembles will move from Barnes Hall to Collegetown Bagels on College Avenue and have a "jam session," open to all interested jazz musicians.
Turre will appear in concert with the Cornell University Lab Ensembles on Saturday, April 26, at 8:15 p.m. in Statler Auditorium. Turre began his music career playing the trombone in his grammar school band in Lafayette, Calif. He was playing professionally by age 13 in jazz clubs around the San Francisco Bay area. He has toured with Ray Charles and was recruited by drummer Art Blakey for his influential group the Jazz Messengers. Turre has performed with other jazz giants, including Woody Shaw, McCoy Tyner, Lester Bowie and Dizzy Gillespie. He is a fan favorite, having placed first in readers' polls in the jazz publications Downbeat, Jazziz and Jazztimes. As a composer, Turre has written for Ray Charles, Max Roach, Slide Hampton, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, Gillespie and Tyner.
Advance sale tickets for Turre's performance are $6; $4 for students and are available at Willard Straight Hall ticket office and Rebop Records, 409 College Ave. Tickets at the door are $7; $5 for students.
The festival closes with the "Hesterian Musicism," with Karlton Hester and friends, Sunday, April 27, at 8:15 p.m. Hesterian Musicism is a term coined by Hester -- the Herbert Gussman Director of Jazz Studies at Cornell and the driving force behind the Cornell Jazz Festival -- to represent the creative process by which musicians, visual artists and poets, through the merging of composition and performance, produce new art forms.
Headlining Sunday's performance is Akua Dixon, a New York City native and graduate of the High School of the Performing Arts, where she studied cello with Benar Heifetz. She has performed with Lionel Hampton, Max Roach, Betty Carter, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross and is the assistant principal cellist with the Dance Theatre of Harlem Orchestra. Dixon's own string quartet, Quartette Indigo, has performed at the Berlin and Kool jazz festivals.
Participants in the Hesterian Musicism also will include Hester (flute, sax), Charles Tolliver (trumpet), Phil Bowler (bass), Samite (vocals, flute, sax), Sera Smolen (cello), Bill Johnson (trumpet), Edward Smith (percussion) and others. New compositions by Hester also will be performed, and the Uhuru Kuumba Dance Company will appear.
Tickets for the Hesterian Musicism are $3, $2 for students, and are only available at the door.
Turre and Dixon's appearances are supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Chase Manhattan Bank and the New York State Council on the Arts. Financial assistance also has been provided by the Student Assembly Finance Commission.