Celebrate International Jazz Day by joining our Music Curator David Kunian for a series of talks with artists and authors focusing on the history and evolution of jazz and New Orleans culture!
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Bentley Brown is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and doctoral candidate at The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU and is based in the Bronx, NY and Phoenix, AZ. His research at the Institute explores the pioneering role of Black artists and Black creative spaces within New York City’s contemporary art movements of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. In his artistic practice, inspired by African American cultural production, abstract and figurative expressionist approaches to the artistic process and the desert landscape of his native Phoenix, Brown uses the mediums of canvas, found objects, photo-collage and film to to explore themes of Black identity, cosmology, and American interculturalism.
David Kunian is the Music Curator for the New Orleans Jazz Museum and Louisiana State Museum. Kunian's career began as a freelance musicologist, producing award-winning documentaries on legendary musicians such as James Booker, Earl King, James Black, and the Dew Drop Inn, as well as writing and producing radio shows on a variety of musical genres.
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Gwen Thompkins is a New Orleans-born journalist, writer and first-year PhD student in History at Tulane University. Dr. Randy Sparks is her faculty advisor.
Since 2012, Thompkins has been the executive producer and host of the public radio program Music Inside Out with Gwen Thompkins, which showcases the unusually varied musical landscape of Louisiana. Thompkins was the longtime senior editor of NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon and later NPR’s East Africa bureau chief, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Following a fellowship at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, she returned to New Orleans full-time. Her interviews and stories have been featured in The New Yorker online, The Oxford American, NPR Music, WXPN’s World Café, The Strangers Guide, Tulanian Magazine, and The Massachusetts Review. She earned an undergraduate degree at Newcomb College/ Tulane University. Currently, she’s writing a book based on the Music Inside Out interviews. Find the full archive at: musicinsideout.org.
Robert H. Cataliotti is a music critic and historian who teaches at Coppin State University in Baltimore. A contributing writer for Living Blues magazine, he has also published two books, The Music in African American Fiction and The Songs Became the Stories: The Music in African-American Fiction, 1970–2005. He is the producer and annotator of Classic Sounds of New Orleans from Smithsonian Folkways (2010). He is the author of the book “Drumsville!: The Evolution of the New Orleans Beat”, a companion to the exhibit currently on display at the New Orleans Jazz Museum.
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Jennifer Odell has covered New Orleans music, street culture and jazz education for nearly two decades. Her work has appeared in JazzTimes, DownBeat, Rolling Stone, Offbeat, the Gambit and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ magazine, 64 Parishes, as well as books including, What Can’t Be Lost: 88 Stories and Traditions from the Sacred City and 300 Songs For 300 Years.
T. R. Johnson has taught at universities in Louisville and Boston and is now a Professor of English and Weiss Presidential Fellow at Tulane University. He has written books on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the teaching of writing, and prose style and is the editor of New Orleans: A Literary History.
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Alison Fensterstock is a former arts reporter and critic for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Gambit, and a columnist for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities' magazine 64 Parishes. She is at work on a biography of cartoonist Bunny Matthews for the Historic New Orleans Collection, as well as a book based on NPR Music's ongoing women-in-music series Turning the Tables.
Dan Sharp is an Associate Professor and Chair of Music at Tulane University. He has written books and articles about musicians from Northeast Brazil. His most recent book, published by Bloomsbury press as part of their longstanding 33 1/3 series, is titled Naná Vasconcelos's Saudades.
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With over 150 albums to his credit, including three Grammy winners and thirteen Grammy nominees, record producer Scott Billington is also known for his work in the music industry as a writer, graphic designer, musician, and educator. Among the artists he has produced are Bobby Rush (whose album Porcupine Meat won the 2017 Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album) Charlie Rich, Irma Thomas, Buckwheat Zydeco, Ruth Brown, Johnny Adams, Beau Jocque, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, while his writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Oxford American and other publications. Making Tracks, his first book, traces the arc of his career through stories of his relationships with many of these musicians, as well offering insight into the challenges and triumphs of making a great recording. He lives in New Orleans with his wife, the children’s musician and author Johnette Downing, with whom he performs regularly.
Robert H. Cataliotti is a music critic and historian who teaches at Coppin State University in Baltimore. A contributing writer for Living Blues magazine, he has also published two books, The Music in African American Fiction and The Songs Became the Stories: The Music in African-American Fiction, 1970–2005. He is the producer and annotator of Classic Sounds of New Orleans from Smithsonian Folkways (2010). He is the author of the book “Drumsville!: The Evolution of the New Orleans Beat”, a companion to the exhibit currently on display at the New Orleans Jazz Museum.
All talks will take place in the 3rd floor Performance Venue.
The event is free and open to the public.