INM is proud to announce that we are the recipient of a $5,000 2024 NYSCA Creative Learning Grant. This funding will go directly towards our most recent project called Conversations In Jazz.  It was the great composer Edward Kennedy Ellington who used to often end his theme song Take The "A" Train suspended on an unresolved pitch at the very end of the melody. When asked why he adopted this practice he shared that, "I think that ending is sort of like the discussion about Jazz, the discussion is never ending, it gives many different points of view, the discussion is never finished...it's a very important subject." 

 

Ellington went on to describe that, "When I was in Africa, in Senegal, I met papa Tal, a Senegalese artist, and I was sort of giving him a theme on Jazz because its a constant question, “what is Jazz?, what is Jazz?” and there’s so many things, and I was busy ad libbing this sort of extravagant picture of Jazz, and I said, “Jazz is a tree. And it has many many branches that reach out to many different directions: of course it goes into the far East and it picks up an exotic blossom. At the end of each branch is a twig and at the end of each twig there are many different shaped leaves and many varied colored flowers and it goes east, west, north, south, and everywhere….and everywhere it goes it picks up some certain influence. And if you go back to the trunk you’ll find that it's sort of a transparent bark- one could say maybe even made in Japan- and as it goes down into the deep roots that go way down into the earth then you’ll find out that these blue blooded black roots are deep in the soil of black Africa which of course is the foundation of everything that is with the beat. The beat of course today is the most listened to in the world. And Jazz has many licenses as I said before; the 2/4, the 3/4, the 4/4, and even the 5/4, and there are many many great people in it. And then of course it not only gets highly highly mathematical but it sometimes gets very romantic….."

 

Conversations in Jazz embraces the view that was presented by Jackie McLean who often said of Jazz that,  "It's an important tradition and you have to go back and hear this music and learn its language all the way through. How are you going to know what's new to play, if you haven't listened to everything that's old?" This project has captured in interviews three elder statesmen of Jazz: tenor saxophonist Houston Person, drummer Steve Little, and author and theologian D.B. Lockerbie. Each short documentary film captures their story, their insights, and their place within our cultural history.