The National Jazz Museum in Harlem continues to offer a wide range of top quality free programming and affordable concerts from jazz’s most celebrated musicians, educators and historians. May was an exciting month for us with the launch of our Parallax Conversation Series and two Harlem Speaks poetry slams! We continue with fresh programming this June as we draw inspiration from the current Gordon Parks exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem to bring you a series on polymaths in the jazz world and a blowout interactive concert at the end of the month!Harlem Speaks, our flagship public program of oral histories, is honored to have a true veteran of jazz, and one of its most in-demand sideman, multi-reedman Jerry Dodgion,  who has performed and recorded with the likes of Herbie Hancock, Benny Carter, Red Norvo, Benny Goodman, Marian McPartland among many others.This month’s Jazz For Curious Listeners focuses on the Gordon Parks’s of right now, meaning polymaths who are professional jazz musicians and then some. These Renaissance men and women also split their time as scientists, photographers, and --- in addition to making great contributions to the music we love. The sessions wrap up with Hank O’Neal discussing the extra-photography work of Gordon Parks- did you know he was also a prolific composer?This May the museum launched the new Parallax Conversation Series. Parallax is defined as “the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions.” For this next installment of the Parallax Conversation series inspired by the “A Harlem Family 1967” Gordon Parks exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem, we are bringing two artists whose work centers on combatting negative portrayals of Harlem and African Americans.This month offers several opportunities for live music with our packed Harlem in the Himalayas series at the Rubin Museum of art with Romanian pianist-composer Lucian Ban and US violist Mat Maneri, bassist Gary Peacock and pianist Marilyn Crispell and Norway’s Christian Wallumrod Ensemble. Tuesday, June 4, 2013 Jazz for Curious ListenersPolymaths: ADEMOLA OLUGEBEFOLA7:00 – 8:30pm   Location: The National Jazz Museum in Harlem(104 East 126th Street, Suite 2C)Donation Suggested | For more information: 212-348-8300                                                                                 This month’s Jazz For Curious Listeners are inspired by the “A Harlem Family 1967” Gordon Parks exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem. We are presenting four polymaths who lives have a significant intersection between jazz and other interests.Ademola Olugebefola is a renowned contemporary artist whose work has set standards of innovative excellence. Widely collected and published in hundreds of books, catalogs, magazines and newspapers, his work has also been featured in major museums, universities, galleries and on television in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and Japan. His  paintings, graphics and mixed media work is shown extensively on the internet. Born in the US Virgin Islands and raised in New York City, Ademola has expanded his national exhibitions to New York State’s mid Hudson Valley over the last few years. TransArt has presented his work in Newburg, Kingston and has presented his major 5 acre environmental art as part of Jazz In The Valley. In a career that spans three decades, Ademola feels these 5 acre environmental art installations Nature Symphony and MAMBO: A Tribute to Tito Puente, in concert with the music, is a portal to new spiritual and creative frontiers.Among a spectrum of recent art, culture and special projects activity, Albany International Airport hosted his paintings and a lecture as part of a landmark exhibition in October 2000. In June 2001  Poughkeepsie’s Albert Shahinian Gallery presented Olugebefola and painter Helen Douglas in a critically acclaimed exhibition. Recent solo exhibitions and educational presentations include: IRADAC at City College; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie NY; CHI Gallery in Oakland, California; Rush Arts in Chelsea, NY; and recent group shows at Fire Patrol #5 Art and Gallery X in Harlem and Danny Simmon’s Corrider Gallery in Brooklyn. And his most recent multimedia solo shows Blues And The Abstract Truth and Goddesses and Gurus: Earth, Wind and Fire April 2005 at Savacou Gallery in the east village, are highlights of his recent work over the last few years. Having just returned from Salvador, Bahia and Rio deJaniero Brazil in February 2005 Ademola will be seen as part of a Caribbean region PBS special documentary on similarities in Brazilian culture, the British and US Virgin Islands where he was born. Friday, June 7, 2013 Harlem in the Himalayas                                                                         Lucian Ban and Mat Maneri7:00pmLocation: Rubin Museum of Art(150 West 17th Street)$20/Door $18/Advance | For more information: rmanyc.org The album Transylvanian Concert marks an ECM debut for Romanian pianist-composer Lucian Ban and a welcome return for US violist Mat Maneri, in his 9th appearance for the label. Part of the ECM CD Release Concert Mini-Series Transylvanian Concert marks an ECM debut for Romanian pianist-composer Lucian Ban and a welcome return for US violist Mat Maneri, in his 9th appearance for the label. The album documents a spontaneously organized performance in Targu Mures, in the region where Lucian Ban grew up. A large, highly-attentive audience follows Ban and Maneri through a program of their self-penned ballads, blues, hymns and abstract improvisations, plus Mat’s chilling solo performance of the spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen," the whole informed by the twin traditions of jazz and European chamber music. Rain, drumming upon the stained-glass windows of the Culture Palace, offers occasional melancholy commentary. In all, a uniquely compelling set.Tuesday, June 11, 2013 Jazz for Curious ListenersPolymaths: Tom Artin7:00 – 8:30pm   Location: The National Jazz Museum in Harlem(104 East 126th Street, Suite 2C)Donation Suggested | For more information: 212-348-8300   This month’s Jazz For Curious Listeners are inspired by the “A Harlem Family 1967” Gordon Parks exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem. We are presenting four polymaths who lives have a significant intersection between jazz and other interests.Tom Artin was born in 1938 in Bloomington, Indiana, the youngest son of a prominent mathematician.  In 1946, the family moved to Princeton, NJ, where his father joined the mathematics faculty of the University.  In the heady academic atmosphere of this family, it was expected that he would pursue a similar career path.Following graduation from Princeton High School in 1956, he did in fact enter Princeton University as a freshman, and took a B.A. degree in English in 1960.  He taught secondary school English for several years, before returning to Princeton to take a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, with a concentration in medieval literature.  His first major teaching job after graduate school was at Swarthmore College, where he was a member of the English Department for four years.  His primary field of expertise there was Chaucer, though he also taught a course in the theory of poetry.  He continued his career in college teaching until 1979, the year he was granted tenure at SUNY Rockland Community College, when he resigned to take up a career as a full-time jazz trombonist.He continued to pursue his scholarly interests, which now included the operas of Richard Wagner.  He wrote “The Wagner Complex,” which was published last year, joining several other scholarly books on his resume, along with “Earth Talk:  Independent Voices on the Environment,” a journalistic report of the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment.  He has also published a volume of poetry:  “Ephemera and Other Poems.”Tom had begun playing jazz in Junior High School in a band organized by the now celebrated American composer John Harbison.  When he was a sophomore in high school, he was recruited by an undergraduate jazz band at Princeton University, with which in the summer of 1955 he made a tour of Europe.  Since then, he has played throughout the U.S. and Europe with a number of world renowned jazz groups including the Smithsonian Jazz Repertory Ensemble (1981-84), the Louis Armstrong Alumni All-Stars, the World of Jelly Roll Morton, the World's Greatest Jazz Band, and Wild Bill Davison.  He played lead trombone in Mel Tormé's big band, recorded live at Michael's Pub in New York, and has played with Bob Wilber's Benny Goodman revival big band.  Festival credits include Kool Jazz in New York and Baltimore, the Illinois Jazz Festival, the North Carolina Jazz Festival, the Atlanta Jazz Party, the Guinness Jazz Festival in Ireland, the Floating Jazz Festival aboard the S.S. Norway, The Lugano Jazz Festival and the Ascona Jazz Festival, both in Switzerland.  For about five years he was the house trombonist at Eddie Condon's in New York, having inherited the seat of his childhood idol, Vic Dickenson. In 1994, he performed at the White House for the annual Christmas Congressional Ball.  In 1999, he appeared as guest artist at Rome's celebrated jazz club Alexanderplatz.  Beginning in 2006, he has appeared regularly as guest artist with John Harbison at the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival.  He has played on movie and television soundtracks, and appears on numerous recordings.Another childhood passion that Tom took up again professionally in later years was photography.  His subjects range from landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes to portraits, florals and still lifes.  He also does a significant amount of commercial photography for both print and the web.  Artin began taking, developing and printing images in the early 1950s.The majority of Artin’s photographs originate as medium format images shot on film with vintage Rolleiflexes and a Hasselblad, though he also works with 4"x5" and 8"x10" view cameras.  In recent years, he has added digital cameras to his toolbox.  In the digital lightroom, he processes images scanned from negatives and transparencies in Photoshop, and prints onto water-color type papers via Conetech Piezography, a Quad-tone digital black and white printing process developed for the Epson inkjet printers.In the 1950’s Artin outfitted his own dedicated dark-room at home, and devoted his high school senior chemistry project to the chemistry of photography, which included fabricating and printing on his own photographic paper. In 1956, he worked as photographic assistant to William Vandivert, staff photographer for Life and Time magazines, and one of the founders of Magnum.  Tom’s photographic career ran in parallel with a career as medieval scholar and college teacher, and then as a professional jazz musician.  He has had numerous solo exhibitions, both in the U.S. and in Germany.  Many of his images have been printed and are distrusted as posters by McGaw Graphics.  Most recently, he has published “March On!,” a book of his photographs of the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Thursday, June 13, 2013 Parallax Conversation SeriesIlene Squires (photographer) and Andre Woolery (mixed media artist)7:00 – 8:30pm   Location: The National Jazz Museum In Harlem,104 East 126th Street, Suite 2CFREE | For more information: 212-348-8300                                                                                Parallax: noun- The effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions.For this next installment of the Parallax Conversation series inspired by the “A Harlem Family 1967” Gordon Parks exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem, we are bringing two artists whose work centers on combatting negative portrayals of Harlem and African Americans. Join us as we throw these two into the ring to riff on Harlem, the visual arts, jazz, Gordon, it all fair game! Get to know the participants:Trained at the International Center of Photography, Ilene came to a career behind the lens after a studious tenure in Education Reform via Teach For America. Naturally easy around children and families, Ilene’s true niche is the photographic essay. Capturing the essence of time and place has become a huge influence on her body of work, specifically her current project on the re-gentrification of Harlem entitled, Faces of Harlem. Ilene shares her time between Harlem and Los Angeles.www.ilenesquiresphotography.comAndre Woolery was born in 1981 in New Jersey and  studied at Duke University in North Carolina. As a self-taught artist he began painting in 2009 and since 2011,  his work has been exhibited within New York City. This  has included recent participation in the eMerge: Danny  Simmons and Artists on the Cusp Group Show and Art in  Flux Show in Harlem, NY; a solo exhibition at the  FrontRunner Gallery in Manhattan, NY and BIT  Conference at SXSW in Austin, TX. His street art can be found at various locations in Harlem, NY and St. Ann’s  Bay, Jamaica. Andre Woolery lives and works in Harlem, NY.  www.andrewooleryart.com Friday, June 14, 2013 Harlem in the Himalayas                                                                         Gary Peacock and Marilyn Crispell7:00pmLocation: Rubin Museum of Art(150 West 17th Street)$20/Door $18/Advance | For more information: rmanyc.orgWith their shared sense of lyricism, their individual compositional styles and their profound background in free playing, Peacock and Crispell are exceptional musical partners. The album Azure features beautiful duets by two great improvisers whose compatibility, though undocumented until now, has been proven through an extensive history. Tuesday, June 18, 2013 Jazz for Curious ListenersPolymaths: Scott Robinson7:00 – 8:30pm   Location: The National Jazz Museum in Harlem(104 East 126th Street, Suite 2C)Donation Suggested | For more information: 212-348-8300This month’s Jazz For Curious Listeners are inspired by the “A Harlem Family 1967” Gordon Parks exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem. We are presenting four polymaths who lives have a significant intersection between jazz and other interests.One of today's most wide-ranging instrumentalists, Scott Robinson has played tenor sax with Buck Clayton's band,  trumpet with Lionel Hampton's quintet,  alto clarinet with Paquito D'Rivera's clarinet quartet, and  bass sax with the New York City Opera. On these and other instruments including theremin and ophicleide, he has been heard with a cross-section of jazz's greats representing nearly every imaginable style of the music, from Braff to Braxton. Scott has been heard numerous times on film, radio and television, and his discography now includes more than 200 recordings. His releases as a leader have garnered five-star reviews from Leonard Feather, Down Beat Magazine and other sources worldwide, and have appeared in many "Best of  Year" lists. Scott's collaborators on disc have included Frank Wess, Hank Jones, Joe Lovano, Ron Carter, and Bob Brookmeyer, and he has been a member of Maria Schneider's Orchestra for twenty years.A busy traveller, Scott has performed in some fifty nations  in such diverse and prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, the Village Vanguard, and the Vienna Opera House, and has served as Artist-In-Residence at festivals in Italy, Hungary, Germany and Denmark. His performances for dignitaries worldwide have included a U.S. Presidential Inauguration and a command performance honoring the birthday of the king of Thailand. In 2001 Scott was selected by the US State Department to be a Jazz Ambassador, completing an eight-week, eleven-country tour of West Africa performing his arrangements of the compositions of Louis Armstrong (later featured on his CD Jazz Ambassador). Scott has also written magazine articles and liner notes, and was an invited speaker at the Congressional Black Caucus Jazz Forum in Washington, D.C. Scott and his unusual instruments have been profiled in books by Nat Hentoff, Royal Stokes and others, and on CNN news, and he has been recognized with multiple fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, DownBeat, and the Jazz Journalists Association.Scott's many works as a composer cover a very wide range, from solo performance pieces, jazz tunes and songs, and chamber works such as his Immensities for Large Instruments, on up to large-scale compositions for wind band, symphony orchestra, and even combined orchestras. A recent CD featured twelve compositions based on 1930s Doc Savage pulp adventure novels.Under the auspices of his new company, ScienSonic Laboratories, Scott has constructed a studio/laboratory for sonic research, containing an astonishing assortment of instruments and devices. Five highly creative and far-reaching projects have so far been released, with many more on the way including collaborations with Roscoe Mitchell, Marshall Allen and Henry Grimes. In 2012, ScienSonic's recordings were certified by the Space Foundation as Certified Space Imagination Products, entitled to bear the Foundation's certification seal.In addition to his many musical activities such as performing, composing and educating, Scott has many outside interests which inform his work. He is a passionate collector of 1950s and 1960s science fiction cover paintings by noted artist Richard Powers, and has secured exclusive rights from the estate to use these works on his ScienSonic CD covers. He is both a collector and restorer of antique instruments, and has brought many silent treasures back to life. A devoted enthusiast of lighter-than-air flight who once travelled to Friedrichshafen, Germany to ride aboard the new Zeppelin, Scott maintains an "Airship Room" in his house which is full of artifacts including a postcard mailed on the Hindenburg in 1936, and actual remnants of the Akron, Shenandoah, and Graf Zeppelin airships. Scott also enjoys camping, fishing, gardening, skywatching, making things out of wood, and brewing beer in the basement of his Teaneck, NJ home.Thursday, June 20th, 2013 Harlem SpeaksJerry Dodgion, Saxophone6:30-8:30Location: The National Jazz Museum in Harlem(104 East 126th Street, Suite 2C)Donation Suggested | For more information: 212-348-8300                                                                               Jerry Dodgion is a musician’s musician, a multi-woodwind master who in the course of his six-decade career, has been a first-call player for hundreds of classic projects. Among the countless number of musical associations that Dodgion has had throughout the years were with Gerald Wilson, Benny Carter, Red Norvo, Benny Goodman, Oliver Nelson, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, Herbie Hancock, Duke Pearson, Count Basie, and Marian McPartland among many others. We’re thrilled to have Jerry join us for our oral history series and we hope to see you there as he gives a unique insight into the music world. Friday, June 21, 2013 Make Music New York DayWord Beyond Jazz Trio and the Lucky Chops Brass Band1:00 – 4:00pmLocation: The National Jazz Museum in Harlem(104 East 126th Street, Suite 2C)Donation Suggested | For more information: 212-348-8300Come visit the museum this Friday for live music all afternoon as part of Make Music New York Day. MMNY, “the largest music event ever to grace Gotham” (Metro New York), is a unique festival of free concerts in public spaces throughout the five boroughs of New York City, all on June 21st, the first day of summer. MMNY takes place simultaneously with similar festivities in more than 514 cities around the world — a global celebration of music making and this year we have the Words Beyond trio and the Lucky Chops Brass Band bringing their bright sounds to the Visitors Center. We might even spill on to the streets- come by to find out! Friday, June 21, 2013 Harlem in the Himalayas                                                                         Christian Wallumrød Ensemble7:00pmLocation: Rubin Museum of Art(150 West 17th Street)$20/Door $18/Advance | For more information: rmanyc.org Part of the ECM CD Release Concert Mini-Series The ensemble of Christian Wallumrød continues to evolve in its own idiosyncratic way on the new album Outstairs. By now, Wallumrød’s compositional signature is instantly recognizable. Nobody else writes pieces like this – multi-dimensional chamber music inspired by the sonorities of Norwegian folk and church music, influenced by early music and the post-Cage avant-garde, and liberated by jazz’s freedom of thought. This time around, the ensemble members share the arranging credits between them, making the music still more organic and flexible as new sound combinations emerge.With Christian Wallumrød on piano, harmonium, and toy piano, Eivind Lønning on trumpet, Gjermund Larsen on violin, hardanger fiddle, and viola, Espen Reinertsen on tenor saxophone, Tove Törngren on cello, Per Oddvar Johansen on drums and vibraphone. Tuesday, June 25, 2013 Jazz for Curious ListenersPolymaths: Hank O’Neal on Gordon Parks7:00 – 8:30pm   Location: The National Jazz Museum in Harlem(104 East 126th Street, Suite 2C)Donation Suggested | For more information: 212-348-8300  This month’s Jazz For Curious Listeners are inspired by the “A Harlem Family 1967” Gordon Parks exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem. We are presenting four polymaths who lives have a significant intersection between jazz and other interests. As a child in Texas, Hank O’Neal first experienced photography when he watched his father print his World War II photographs and family portraits in a kitchen darkroom. A few years later, in 1952, he won a Brownie Hawkeye in a drawing at a small grocery store and began taking and processing his own pictures. Child in Spacesuit, 1953, is a product of those times.Twenty years later, in 1973, O’Neal had a better camera, his first book, The Eddie Condon Scrapbook of Jazz, was published, and he had his first modest photography show, Winona, Texas, at The Open Mind Gallery, an appropriately modest establishment in the soon to blossom Soho district of New York City. By then, photography had become a serious avocation, and during that period O’Neal formed lasting friendships and working relationships with such noted photographers as Berenice Abbott, Andre Kertesz, all the living Farm Security Administration photographers and many others. Additionally, he came to know many dealers, critics, and curators interested in the art of photography, particularly Lee Witkin and those associated with his gallery, as well as Harry Lunn. His relationship with The Witkin Gallery continued until it ceased operation in 1999, and with Harry Lunn until his death in 1998. More recently he has been associated with Howard Greenberg.In 1972, O’Neal met Berenice Abbott and began a working relationship with her that lasted nineteen years. It was Abbott who convinced him of the merits of a large format view camera, suggesting that if he’d buy one, she’d teach him how to work it. He did and she did, in an abbreviated thirty-minute session. About the same time, Bert Stern suggested there was equal merit in medium format cameras and gave O’Neal a spare Rolleiflex to prove the point. No lesson was involved.Now, equipped with a Leica, Nikon, Rolleiflex, and Deardorff, O’Neal began to take serious photographs. His visual boundary was provided by a conversation with John Vachon, who told him, "I knew I would only photograph what pleased or astonished my eye, and in the way I wanted to see it," and this sounded like a fine philosophy. Abbott provided the intellectual boundary, when she admonished O’Neal, saying, "Don’t take photographs willy-nilly, you have to have a project."Walker Evans added another point, when he told O’Neal, "It doesn’t count unless you find it yourself." He paid attention to all three of these fine artists and for the next four decades followed their advice, accumulating a large body of work in the process. O’Neal has constantly discovered subjects he feels to be visually astonishing, and has integrated them into various projects. Except for those photographs taken for a specific assignment or publication, until his major one-man show at The Witkin Gallery, he elected to keep most of his work private. Since the Witkin retrospective, he has shown and published his work with increasing regularity.Many of O’Neal’s photographs are often work-related, portraits for LP jackets and CD booklets, documenting recording sessions, illustrating books or producing booklets for his music festivals. Since 1971, he has produced over 200 LPs or CDs for his companies, Chiaroscuro Records and Hammond Music Enterprises. Since 1983, he and his partner, Shelley Shier have produced over one hundred music festivals, through their New York City-based production company, HOSS, Inc. Along the way, O’Neal has also published a number of books and monographs, including the now classic work on the Farm Security Administration, A Vision Shared – A Portrait of America and Its People 1935 – 1943 and the landmark study of his friend, Berenice Abbott – American Photographer. His own photographs appeared in a variety of books and publications, the award-winning book, The Ghosts of Harlem in 1997, to be reissued in 2008), Hank O’Neal Portraits 1971 – 2000, and in 2006, Gay Day – The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade. One of his more unusual accomplishments was producing a series of photographs that accompanied a special Limited Editions Club edition of Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men. A special portfolio of these gravure prints was issued along with the book.O’Neal has produced a wide ranging body of work, portraits of friends and associates, ironic images fromany parts of the world, and continually added to projects that have lasted two or three decades. Examples of his work may be seen in the photo section of hankoneal.com. The many illustrated books can be seen in the book section of hankoneal.com.In addition to the musical and photographic interests, O’Neal’s other activities are as varied as the subject matter of his photographs. He received a BA from Syracuse University in 1962, and was well on his way to an MA, when, in 1963, he was snared by the Central Intelligence Agency, with whom he was associated until 1976. While he was with this organization, he also served on active duty in the US Army, rising to the rank of Captain. O’Neal came to New York City from Washington, D.C. in 1967 and still resides in Greenwich Village. He joined the faculty of The New School University in 1970 and remains affiliated with that school as a member of the Board of Advisors of the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program. For the decade of the 1970s, he was associated with the modern dance company, Choreographer’s Theater, for whom he not only created sound and visual collages, but also, on occasion, danced. In the same decade, he built and operated two recording studios in Greenwich Village. During the years 1983 through 1995, he was an advisor to the Justice Department and is currently on the Board of Directors of various arts organizations, galleries and corporations, most prominently the Jazz Foundation of America/Jazz Musician’s Emergency Fund, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and The Jazz Gallery. Thursday, June 27th, 2013 Special EventThe National Jazz Museum in Harlem and the Studio Museum in Harlem Present: The NJMH Allstars play Gordon Parks7:00-9:00pmLocation: The Studio Museum in Harlem144 West 125th Street (Btwn Lenox and 7th Ave)General Admission $20, Studio Museum Members $15 | For more information: 212-348-8300 June’s Gordon Parks-inspired programming culminates in an evening of exciting improvisation on his “A Harlem Family 1967” exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Join the National Jazz Museum in Harlem All-Stars band for an interactive concert as they perform a selection of photographs from the collection. Come see if you can identify the sound of a sleeping child, a busy Harlem street corner, a family at their kitchen table and more! Tickets will be on sale through the Studio Museum website at www.studiomuseum.org.