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THE LOUIS ARMSTRONG EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION
CELEBRATES 50th ANNIVERSARY OCTOBER 16, 17 & 18
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AND THE MANHATTAN SCHOOL OF MUSIC
JOIN LAEF TO PRESENT THE ANNUAL
LOUIS ARMSTRONG CONTINUUM SYMPOSIUM AND CONCERT
NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS JAZZ MASTERS HONORED DURING THE 2019 SATCHMOTMAWARDS PRESENTATION
AT THE HISTORIC ALHAMBRA BALLROOM
NEA Jazz Master Dick Hyman to receive the 2019 SatchmoTM Award
at this 10thAnnual Presentation
LAEF President and NEA Jazz Master Stanley Crouch to be honored
New York, NY, September 25, 2019 – Today the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation (LAEF) announced three days of celebration in honor of the organization’s 50th Anniversary, includingthe Annual Louis Armstrong Continuum Symposium and Concert and the Annual SatchmoTMAward, with a special Lifetime Achievement Award to the LAEF board president.
On October 16, the Annual Louis Armstrong Continuum Symposiumwill include panel discussions with Daphne Brooks, Jon Faddis, Wycliffe Gordon, Michelle Miller andNEA Jazz Master Wynton Marsalis at the Lenfest Center for the Arts on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus. On October 17, in collaboration with the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia and the Manhattan School of Music (MSM), the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation will present the Louis Armstrong Continuum Concert, bringing to the stage The Wonderful World of Louis ArmstrongTMAll Stars and theMSM Jazz Orchestra’s Art Blakey Tribute,conducted byJon Faddis.The Celebration will close on October 18 at the historic Alhambra Ballroom with a Swing Dance Partystarring the George Gee Swing Orchestra featuring special guestDick Hyman. The evening includes the presentation of theLAEF SATCHMOTMAward to pianist and composer Dick Hyman, followed by the first Lifetime Achievement Award presented to LAEF president and NEA Jazz Master, Stanley Crouch. These events are all free and open to the public.
The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation is proud to present the2019 SATCHMO™Award to jazz pianist, organist, composer, and arranger Dick Hyman. The Satchmo™ Award represents a tribute to the life and legacy of Louis Armstrong’spassion for jazz, excellence and his commitment to sharing his music with the world. The award is presented by LAEF to an individual forhis/her important and lasting contributions in the world of jazz education.In making the announcement of the 2019 Satchmo™ Award, LAEF President Stanley Crouch and SATCHMO™Award Chairperson David Chevan released this joint statement: “At 92, Dick Hyman continues to exemplify Louis Armstrong’s commitment to jazz and jazz education on and off the bandstand, through his lessons collected in Dick Hyman’s Century of Jazz Piano; as the founder and artistic director of the Jazz in July series at the 92ndStreet Y for its first two decades; working with high school students where he lives in Sarasota County, Florida; and in his lifetime of championing the music of Armstrong’s era and Armstrong himself; and for his achievements as a performer and prolific film composer. In 1974, three years after Armstrong’s passing, Hyman orchestrated a tribute concert at Carnegie Hall, which he later took on tour to Europe and the former SovietUnion. Armstrong and his legacy have played an integral role in his career as a global jazz ambassador, and the presentation of the Satchmo™ Award recognizes Hyman’s contribution to the wonderful world that its namesake envisioned.”
In celebration of LAEF’s 50th Anniversaryand in honor of his extensive contributions to the world of jazz, as a writer, advocate, historian, and educator, Stanley Crouch will be present a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation Board of Directors. The LAEF Executive Committee stated that Mr. Crouch’s body of work, which includes columns, essays, and novels combined with his thought-provoking lectures, and provocative interviews of various leaders in the world of jazz have worked to advance the importance of this great music in academic communities and has raised the awareness of jazz as an important modern art form in the general public. He has reached audiences across the country and beyond.
On Friday, October 18, the award presentations will take place at the historic Alhambra Ball Room in Harlem, where swing dancers, big bands and jazz vocalists once reigned supreme.The Satchmo™ Award will be held from 8:00-10:00pm. The Alhambra Ballroom is located at 2116 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd. This event is also free and open to the public.
Click here for Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/louis-armstrong-educational-foundation-inc-satchmo-swing-dance-party-tickets-70127907459 Or go to www.Eventbrite.comand Search “Satchmo Swing Dance”
ABOUT …
The Louis Armstrong Continuum
Presented by Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies in conjunction with the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, this symposium honors Louis Armstrong as one of contemporary music’s founding fathers. Through this two-day series of sessions and concerts, we explore the range of his influence in music but also in literature, visual art, and social justice. Who knew that Armstrong created collages? Who knew that his name and image come up over and over again in literature and in film? Hearing from a wide range of musicians and scholars, The Armstrong Continuum will consider the continuing impact on the broad cultural scene.
Because the study of the forms and functions of jazz is required of every student in Columbia College as part of our Core Curriculum, this symposium will be addressed to the entire campus. Let us then ask these questions, too: How might the way Armstrong lived and made music provide models of forthright community action—particularly at a time of emergency? What are the most profound lessons to be learned from improvisation, from the jagged grain of the blues, from the flight and momentum of the music, from its love of dynamic coordination that musicians still call swing? What about the jazz band’s lessons about who we are, both as individuals and as members of a world-wide family in motion? At Columbia, the virtuosic Armstrong is taught along with Plato, Shakespeare, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Virginia Woolf: What special information would Pops send our way? The Armstrong Continuum is honored to present an all-star line-up of presenters and musicians….
Robert O’Meally
The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, Inc. (LAEF) was founded and funded by Louis and Lucille Armstrong in 1969 to give back to the world “some of the goodness he received.” The mission of the organization is to preserve and promote the cultural legacy of Louis Armstrong by fostering programs, lectures and other educational events to assist those interested, gifted and talented in the field of music primarily jazz. Today the Foundation is a major source of funding for programs to expose and educate adults and children in the history of American jazz, and has provided solid financial support to institutions across the nation. www.louisarmstrongfoundation.org
The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University
At the Center for Jazz Studies, jazz becomes a music without borders that provides new models for innovative teaching and scholarly inquiry in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Our themes of internationalization, technology and community encourage excellence in research, in the teaching of music and culture, and in the presentation of public events. The Center views the interdisciplinary expansion of the intellectual conversation surrounding jazz, and especially its lifeblood practice, improvisation, as tracing a path toward the development of new knowledge that illuminates the human condition.
https://jazz.columbia.edu/
The Manhattan School of Music
Manhattan School of Music was one of the first conservatories in the United States to acknowledge the importance of jazz as an art form by establishing undergraduate and graduate degree programs in jazz. The program, led by Associate Dean and Director Stefon Harris since fall 2017, is one of the richest of its kind, combining systematic and rigorous conservatory training with a myriad of performance and networking opportunities in New York City. Students have the opportunity to perform in various ensembles, including the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, Jazz Orchestra, Jazz Philharmonic, and Chamber Jazz Orchestra, as well as a variety of small combos. In addition to studies with a faculty drawn from the highest ranks of the jazz world, students are provided opportunities to play for and observe world-renowned guest artists. www.msmnyc.edu
The LAEF SATCHMO Award
This Award was created by The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation and represents a tribute to the life and legacy of Louis Armstrong's passion for jazz and excellence matched only by his joyous love of life and children. The recipients of The Satchmo™ Award are selected for their important and lasting contributions in the world of jazz education. The recipients reflect the spirit of Louis Armstrong and his inspiring belief in the power of the language of jazz music, essential in making a “wonderful world.”
DICK HYMAN
NEA Jazz Master (2017), Dick Hyman (b. Richard Hyman, March 8, 1927) in New York City is an American jazz pianist, composer and arranger whose career has spanned over 60 years. He was classically trained by his mother’s brother and later his brother Arthur introduced him to the music of Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong and Teddy Wilson— who broke the race barrier as a member of Benny Goodman’s trio. While in high school, Hyman played piano in bands throughout Westchester County, New York. In 1945, he entered Columbia College for one year before enlisting in the Navy as a radio technician and later transferred to the band department. Upon his return to Columbia College, where he graduated in 1948, he won an on-air piano competition that earned him twelve free lessons with Teddy Wilson. A few years later, Hyman occupied that same piano chair, of Wilson, in Goodman’s band.
While developing improvisation in his own piano style, Hyman also studied ragtime and earlier periods of jazz and has recorded the piano music of Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Eubie Blake and Fats Waller. In 1952, he played with Charlie Parker on the only television appearance that Parker ever made; the band included Dizzy Gillespie and they played the tune, Hot House. An in-demand pianist, some of his early club engagements in New York City included Café Society, playing with Tony Scott’s Quartet; Bop City with the Red Norvo Sextet; various 52ndStreet clubs with Sol Yaged and others. Eventually Hyman became a freelance pianist, organist, arranger, composer, music director for many radio, television and Broadway shows. In 1975, he led the New York Jazz Repertory Company in a concert of the music of Louis Armstrong at Carnegie Hall, produced by George Wein. A recording on Atlantic Records followed, as well as tours of Europe and numerous U.S. concerts.
Of his many achievements, one of his most significant was his position as founder and artistic director for the “Jazz in July” series at New York's 92nd Street Y. For twenty years (he stepped down in 2004) he made the place one of the best to celebrate jazz. He brought a unique combination of jazz paring, such as Phil Woods with Duduka Da Fonseca and Freddie Cole with an organ trio. He also brought Hank Jones, Cedar Walton, Ray Bryant and other great pianists together on one stage. His successor, Bill Charlap, said that Hyman was the “perfect person to bring this type of festival together because he has so much music in him and he loves and understands and is able to play so much music and has such a great relationship with the musicians around him. He did it his way with integrity, passion and intensity for the music.” In 1995, Hyman was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame of the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies and the New Jersey Jazz Society.
STANLEY CROUCH
Stanley Lawrence Crouch, born December 14, 1945 in Los Angeles, California, is an American poet, musical and cultural critic, syndicated columnist, novelist and biographer. He is the author of eight critically acclaimed books and of hundreds of uncollected articles, liner notes and reviews of jazz. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) chose him as one of the 2019 recipients of the coveted A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy. Currently Crouch is the president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation (elected on June 12, 2008) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science. “Each generation has a moment, or an embodiment, of hard-earned integrity and the keenest insight. Among our generation of writers, Stanley Crouch is that moment,”wrote Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Raised in a single-parent home, he immersed himself with books and old movies and taught himself to play the drums while becoming interested in jazz and poetry. From 1965 to 1967, Crouch worked as an actor and a playwright under the direction of Jayne Cortez in both Studio Watts and the Watts Repertory Theatre Company in Los Angeles. He taught at the Claremont Colleges (1968 to 1975), first as poet-in-residence at Pitzer, then as the first full-time faculty member of the Black Studies Center (BSC), and finally in a joint appointment to the BSC and the English Department of Pomona College.In 1975, Crouch moved to New York City to focus on his writing. When his freelance writing took off he gave up his performing. By 1979, Crouch became a staff writer for The Village Voicewhere he remained until 1988. He also wrote a column for the New York Daily Newsfrom 1995-2014. After his stint at the Voice,Crouch published Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989and was selected by The Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook as the best book of essays published in 1990.
He has served as Artistic Consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987 and is a founder of the jazz department, known as Jazz at Lincoln Center. Making history for JALC, Wynton Marsalis, who became artistic director in 1991, asked Crouch to write a sermon for his 1996 recording, The Majesty of the Bluesentitled “Premature Autopsies.”
Crouch has also served as visiting professor at Columbia University in New York City. He holds honorary doctorates from Hofstra University and Manhattan College, and he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), Whiting Award (1991), MacArthur Fellowship (1993), and Fletcher Foundation Fellowship (2005). In 2016, Crouch was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction from Yale University. He appeared frequently on television as a commentator, often on topics related to jazz, and in 2001 Crouch was one of the prominent jazz scholars featured in Ken Burns’ epic 10-part television documentary, Jazz. His most recent book,Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker(Harper Collins) was published in 2013.
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The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation is proud to present the2019 SATCHMO™Award to jazz pianist, organist, composer, and arranger Dick Hyman. The Satchmo™ Award represents a tribute to the life and legacy of Louis Armstrong’spassion for jazz, excellence and his commitment to sharing his music with the world. The award is presented by LAEF to an individual forhis/her important and lasting contributions in the world of jazz education.In making the announcement of the 2019 Satchmo™ Award, LAEF President Stanley Crouch and SATCHMO™Award Chairperson David Chevan released this joint statement: “At 92, Dick Hyman continues to exemplify Louis Armstrong’s commitment to jazz and jazz education on and off the bandstand, through his lessons collected in Dick Hyman’s Century of Jazz Piano; as the founder and artistic director of the Jazz in July series at the 92ndStreet Y for its first two decades; working with high school students where he lives in Sarasota County, Florida; and in his lifetime of championing the music of Armstrong’s era and Armstrong himself; and for his achievements as a performer and prolific film composer. In 1974, three years after Armstrong’s passing, Hyman orchestrated a tribute concert at Carnegie Hall, which he later took on tour to Europe and the former SovietUnion. Armstrong and his legacy have played an integral role in his career as a global jazz ambassador, and the presentation of the Satchmo™ Award recognizes Hyman’s contribution to the wonderful world that its namesake envisioned.”
In celebration of LAEF’s 50th Anniversaryand in honor of his extensive contributions to the world of jazz, as a writer, advocate, historian, and educator, Stanley Crouch will be present a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation Board of Directors. The LAEF Executive Committee stated that Mr. Crouch’s body of work, which includes columns, essays, and novels combined with his thought-provoking lectures, and provocative interviews of various leaders in the world of jazz have worked to advance the importance of this great music in academic communities and has raised the awareness of jazz as an important modern art form in the general public. He has reached audiences across the country and beyond.
On Friday, October 18, the award presentations will take place at the historic Alhambra Ball Room in Harlem, where swing dancers, big bands and jazz vocalists once reigned supreme.The Satchmo™ Award will be held from 8:00-10:00pm. The Alhambra Ballroom is located at 2116 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd. This event is also free and open to the public.
Click here for Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/louis-armstrong-educational-foundation-inc-satchmo-swing-dance-party-tickets-70127907459 Or go to www.Eventbrite.comand Search “Satchmo Swing Dance”
ABOUT …
The Louis Armstrong Continuum
Presented by Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies in conjunction with the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, this symposium honors Louis Armstrong as one of contemporary music’s founding fathers. Through this two-day series of sessions and concerts, we explore the range of his influence in music but also in literature, visual art, and social justice. Who knew that Armstrong created collages? Who knew that his name and image come up over and over again in literature and in film? Hearing from a wide range of musicians and scholars, The Armstrong Continuum will consider the continuing impact on the broad cultural scene.
Because the study of the forms and functions of jazz is required of every student in Columbia College as part of our Core Curriculum, this symposium will be addressed to the entire campus. Let us then ask these questions, too: How might the way Armstrong lived and made music provide models of forthright community action—particularly at a time of emergency? What are the most profound lessons to be learned from improvisation, from the jagged grain of the blues, from the flight and momentum of the music, from its love of dynamic coordination that musicians still call swing? What about the jazz band’s lessons about who we are, both as individuals and as members of a world-wide family in motion? At Columbia, the virtuosic Armstrong is taught along with Plato, Shakespeare, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Virginia Woolf: What special information would Pops send our way? The Armstrong Continuum is honored to present an all-star line-up of presenters and musicians….
Robert O’Meally
The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, Inc. (LAEF) was founded and funded by Louis and Lucille Armstrong in 1969 to give back to the world “some of the goodness he received.” The mission of the organization is to preserve and promote the cultural legacy of Louis Armstrong by fostering programs, lectures and other educational events to assist those interested, gifted and talented in the field of music primarily jazz. Today the Foundation is a major source of funding for programs to expose and educate adults and children in the history of American jazz, and has provided solid financial support to institutions across the nation. www.louisarmstrongfoundation.org
The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University
At the Center for Jazz Studies, jazz becomes a music without borders that provides new models for innovative teaching and scholarly inquiry in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Our themes of internationalization, technology and community encourage excellence in research, in the teaching of music and culture, and in the presentation of public events. The Center views the interdisciplinary expansion of the intellectual conversation surrounding jazz, and especially its lifeblood practice, improvisation, as tracing a path toward the development of new knowledge that illuminates the human condition.
https://jazz.columbia.edu/
The Manhattan School of Music
Manhattan School of Music was one of the first conservatories in the United States to acknowledge the importance of jazz as an art form by establishing undergraduate and graduate degree programs in jazz. The program, led by Associate Dean and Director Stefon Harris since fall 2017, is one of the richest of its kind, combining systematic and rigorous conservatory training with a myriad of performance and networking opportunities in New York City. Students have the opportunity to perform in various ensembles, including the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, Jazz Orchestra, Jazz Philharmonic, and Chamber Jazz Orchestra, as well as a variety of small combos. In addition to studies with a faculty drawn from the highest ranks of the jazz world, students are provided opportunities to play for and observe world-renowned guest artists. www.msmnyc.edu
The LAEF SATCHMO Award
This Award was created by The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation and represents a tribute to the life and legacy of Louis Armstrong's passion for jazz and excellence matched only by his joyous love of life and children. The recipients of The Satchmo™ Award are selected for their important and lasting contributions in the world of jazz education. The recipients reflect the spirit of Louis Armstrong and his inspiring belief in the power of the language of jazz music, essential in making a “wonderful world.”
DICK HYMAN
NEA Jazz Master (2017), Dick Hyman (b. Richard Hyman, March 8, 1927) in New York City is an American jazz pianist, composer and arranger whose career has spanned over 60 years. He was classically trained by his mother’s brother and later his brother Arthur introduced him to the music of Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong and Teddy Wilson— who broke the race barrier as a member of Benny Goodman’s trio. While in high school, Hyman played piano in bands throughout Westchester County, New York. In 1945, he entered Columbia College for one year before enlisting in the Navy as a radio technician and later transferred to the band department. Upon his return to Columbia College, where he graduated in 1948, he won an on-air piano competition that earned him twelve free lessons with Teddy Wilson. A few years later, Hyman occupied that same piano chair, of Wilson, in Goodman’s band.
While developing improvisation in his own piano style, Hyman also studied ragtime and earlier periods of jazz and has recorded the piano music of Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Eubie Blake and Fats Waller. In 1952, he played with Charlie Parker on the only television appearance that Parker ever made; the band included Dizzy Gillespie and they played the tune, Hot House. An in-demand pianist, some of his early club engagements in New York City included Café Society, playing with Tony Scott’s Quartet; Bop City with the Red Norvo Sextet; various 52ndStreet clubs with Sol Yaged and others. Eventually Hyman became a freelance pianist, organist, arranger, composer, music director for many radio, television and Broadway shows. In 1975, he led the New York Jazz Repertory Company in a concert of the music of Louis Armstrong at Carnegie Hall, produced by George Wein. A recording on Atlantic Records followed, as well as tours of Europe and numerous U.S. concerts.
Of his many achievements, one of his most significant was his position as founder and artistic director for the “Jazz in July” series at New York's 92nd Street Y. For twenty years (he stepped down in 2004) he made the place one of the best to celebrate jazz. He brought a unique combination of jazz paring, such as Phil Woods with Duduka Da Fonseca and Freddie Cole with an organ trio. He also brought Hank Jones, Cedar Walton, Ray Bryant and other great pianists together on one stage. His successor, Bill Charlap, said that Hyman was the “perfect person to bring this type of festival together because he has so much music in him and he loves and understands and is able to play so much music and has such a great relationship with the musicians around him. He did it his way with integrity, passion and intensity for the music.” In 1995, Hyman was inducted into the Jazz Hall of Fame of the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies and the New Jersey Jazz Society.
STANLEY CROUCH
Stanley Lawrence Crouch, born December 14, 1945 in Los Angeles, California, is an American poet, musical and cultural critic, syndicated columnist, novelist and biographer. He is the author of eight critically acclaimed books and of hundreds of uncollected articles, liner notes and reviews of jazz. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) chose him as one of the 2019 recipients of the coveted A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy. Currently Crouch is the president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation (elected on June 12, 2008) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science. “Each generation has a moment, or an embodiment, of hard-earned integrity and the keenest insight. Among our generation of writers, Stanley Crouch is that moment,”wrote Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Raised in a single-parent home, he immersed himself with books and old movies and taught himself to play the drums while becoming interested in jazz and poetry. From 1965 to 1967, Crouch worked as an actor and a playwright under the direction of Jayne Cortez in both Studio Watts and the Watts Repertory Theatre Company in Los Angeles. He taught at the Claremont Colleges (1968 to 1975), first as poet-in-residence at Pitzer, then as the first full-time faculty member of the Black Studies Center (BSC), and finally in a joint appointment to the BSC and the English Department of Pomona College.In 1975, Crouch moved to New York City to focus on his writing. When his freelance writing took off he gave up his performing. By 1979, Crouch became a staff writer for The Village Voicewhere he remained until 1988. He also wrote a column for the New York Daily Newsfrom 1995-2014. After his stint at the Voice,Crouch published Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989and was selected by The Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook as the best book of essays published in 1990.
He has served as Artistic Consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987 and is a founder of the jazz department, known as Jazz at Lincoln Center. Making history for JALC, Wynton Marsalis, who became artistic director in 1991, asked Crouch to write a sermon for his 1996 recording, The Majesty of the Bluesentitled “Premature Autopsies.”
Crouch has also served as visiting professor at Columbia University in New York City. He holds honorary doctorates from Hofstra University and Manhattan College, and he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), Whiting Award (1991), MacArthur Fellowship (1993), and Fletcher Foundation Fellowship (2005). In 2016, Crouch was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction from Yale University. He appeared frequently on television as a commentator, often on topics related to jazz, and in 2001 Crouch was one of the prominent jazz scholars featured in Ken Burns’ epic 10-part television documentary, Jazz. His most recent book,Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker(Harper Collins) was published in 2013.
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