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To Our Friends and Supporters,
We are happy to announce a new project: the Jazz Foundation has created an Indiegogo campaign. With your help, we can produce the next historic documentation of jazz and blues in America.
Join
us as we go deep inside American music, creating intimate portraits of
50 artists who have helped shape jazz and blues scenes throughout the
U.S. this past century. Together, we will invite them to tell their
stories, capturing on film and video the unique corners of history in
which they lived and which they continue to represent. In this way, we
will help to ensure the history of jazz and blues is kept alive.
We have included a detailed description of the The Last Note below.
Our goal is to raise $67,500 or more to fund this project in the next 45 days.
Please spread the word. Support on Indiegogo in any denomination is appreciated. Check out the perks!
Yours in service,
Wendy Atlas Oxenhorn
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The Last Note: A Film Project to Document 50 Great Figures in Jazz and Blues
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Very often, great musicians devote themselves to their music for a lifetime but find acclaim only after they have passed. That is a loss for our culture and for our record of history.
My name is Wendy Oxenhorn.
As Executive Director of the Jazz Foundation of America, I have fought
for 15 years to make sure professionals in jazz and blues have the
resources they need to survive and continue their work. In that time,
I've had the honor to know many extraordinary souls. When I see these
souls pass away, I am saddened and afraid that all evidence of their
lives and their works will be lost.
Last year, I met someone capable of spotlighting legendary artists for historic preservation.
Richard Corman is a New York-based photographer who has traveled the
globe for more than three decades capturing the essence of the human
spirit. He has created definitive portraits of icons like Nelson
Mandela, Bill Clinton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammad Ali, Robert De
Niro, Paul Newman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Madonna.
With your support, Richard wants to hit the road with videographer Alan
Gastelum to meet with accomplished jazz and blues musicians in their
homes across the U.S. Their conversations will be filmed and
photographed to produce intimate profiles documenting many of the
individuals responsible for jazz and blues in the last century. From the
Jazz Foundation headquarters, I will coordinate over one month of
appointments with fifty of the most incredible artists I have known. In
March of 2016, these portraits will become available at no cost on our
website.
For every big star in music, there are also hundreds more people who made up the scene that gave that star a voice. In
jazz and blues, those scenes continue to dot the country, thriving in
lesser-known clubs and boisterous, invitation-only jams, in
extraordinary bonds between artists, and in tireless devotion to music.
With
your support, Richard and Alan will travel to Memphis, New York City,
New Orleans, Detroit, and more beginning January 2016. We will meet these artists in their homes and record this oral and visual history directly from the people who lived it.
Preserve the memory of the New Orleans jazz and blues musicians displaced by Katrina.
In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, the Jazz Foundation worked to
rehouse and create work for over 1,000 New Orleans musicians and their
families. These artists live far from their New Orleans roots, but this
project will ensure many of them do not fade from its history.
It rarely happens that people capable of documenting these rich dimensions of American history have the resources to do so.
- Between
1937 and 1942, folklore scholar Alan Lomax traveled the country to meet
with and record foundational artists like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and
Jelly Roll Morton on behalf of the Library of Congress. Before him,
this music was considered by many to be vulgar and primitive. Lomax
fought to preserve it and give it a place in our history such as it has
now.
- In
1960, photographer William Claxton and musicologist Joachim-Ernst
Berendt journeyed across America to document jazz and blues, leaving
behind an invaluable trove of American culture.
Join
us on this journey and please make this work possible with a
contribution. Spread the word to those who share our belief: the living
history of jazz and blues should not be lost.
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