Jazz Studies at William Paterson University Celebrates 40th Anniversary скачать в хорошем качестве

Jazz Studies at William Paterson University Celebrates 40th Anniversary

This academic year marks two major milestones in the history of jazz education at William Paterson: the fortieth anniversary of the University's internationally renowned Jazz Studies Program, and the thirty-fifth anniversary of its related performance series, The Jazz Room. The academic program, founded in 1973 by the late music professor Martin Krivin, was among the first in the nation to focus on jazz, with a unique emphasis on small group playing and improvisation. Later that year, when the University hired the great jazz composer, arranger, and trumpet player Thad Jones as a full-time faculty member, William Paterson became the first school anywhere to bring a major league jazz star onto the tenured resident faculty. Throughout the past four decades, the program blossomed under the leadership of its four directors: Jones, from 1973 to 1979; Rufus Reid, the renowned bassist and veteran of the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Quartet, from 1980 until his retirement in 1999; James Williams, the accomplished jazz pianist, composer, and member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, from 1999 until his untimely death in 2004; and current director Mulgrew Miller, one of the most influential jazz pianists on the jazz scene, who joined the University in 2005. Jazz majors come to William Paterson from across the United States and all corners of the world to study with the program's artist/faculty of world-class, New York-area jazz professionals. The curriculum, which leads to the bachelor of music and master of music in jazz studies, includes courses in jazz ear training, improvisation, arranging, and jazz history and analysis. Through the years, students have won numerous awards in the most prestigious national and regional jazz competitions, including the Downbeat magazine Student Music Awards and the Notre Dame Collegiate Jazz Festival. In conjunction with the program, in 1978 the University launched the popular Jazz Room Series. The Sunday afternoon concert series, one of the largest and most prestigious college-sponsored jazz events in the country, has drawn a virtual who's who of the jazz world to the Shea Center stage, representing every jazz genre from practitioners of traditional jazz to avant-garde to bebop to swing to Afro-Latin jazz—as well as William Paterson's own student ensembles, who open each concert. The series has won numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and more than twenty-five years of continuous support from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts for its innovative programming.