From Cape Town to Beantown: The Sax as the Sound of South African Jazz
The Cape Ann Forum will host internationally known sax player, author and music professor Mike Rossi for a free lecture and performance on the history of jazz in South Africa at Gloucester City Hall on Sunday, Oct. 23, from 3 to 5 p.m. The event will honor the late Mitch Cohen, a Forum founder, with a free, catered reception afterward.
Rossi will take a break from touring with the Dave Brubeck Jazz Quartet to appear in Gloucester for the afternoon lecture and performance, which is cosponsored by the North Shore Jazz Project and underwritten by the Cape Ann Area Therapists with whom Cohen worked prior to his death in 2010.
The therapists’ group collected donations from its members to salute Cohen—a highly respected therapist and a founding board member of the Cape Ann Forum—for his many contributions to the community, according to Bea Reardon, one of the initiative’s organizers.
Rossi’s presentation— “From Cape Town to Beantown: The saxophone as the sound of South African jazz”—will cover the evolution of jazz in South Africa during and after the era of racial domination known as “apartheid” that ended in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first black president, according to Forum chair Dan Connell. Rossi will illustrate his talk with riffs on his sax.
“Jazz played a highly controversial role in South Africa by bringing people of all races together despite official bans multiracial gatherings,” says Connell, who teaches journalism and African politics at Simmons College and takes students to South Africa every two years.
Rossi, who has performed with Clark Terry, Tony Bennett, Anthony Weller, Lou Rawls, Aretha Franklin, Rosemary Clooney, and the Artie Shaw Orchestra, teaches jazz and woodwinds at the University of Cape Town and is the president of the South African Association for Jazz Education. He is also the author of Contrast and Continuity in Jazz Improvisation (2006) and Uncommon Etudes from Common Scales (2007). His latest book, out this year, is Beyond the Common Practice: Uncommon Bebop from Common Bebop Practices.
The Connecticut-born jazz musician and composer, who has lived and worked in South Africa since the early 1990s, was the first recipient of a Doctor of Music Arts degree in jazz studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Today, Rossi performs at jazz festivals and conducts workshops and master-classes throughout Africa, Europe and the United States.
Rossi’s recording credits include the 2007 U.S. release of “Common Ground” with Israeli pianist Micu Narunsky and the German release of “Ein Traum von wunderbarem Leben” with Ulrich Suesse and Patrick Bebelaar. His CD of original jazz compositions, Beauty and the Blues, featured jazz greats Rufus Reid, Tom McKinley and Billy Hart.
“We are fortunate to have him,” says Connell, who was approached by the Cape Ann Area Therapists with an offer to underwrite a special event in Cohen’s name. When Rossi agreed to take a break from his tour to perform here, the therapists’ group jumped on the opportunity, offering to sponsor a reception after the event, for which the Alchemy Restaurant is providing refreshments.
The Cape Ann Forum marked its 10th anniversary last month with a presentation on the Middle East 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, the spark for the establishment of the lecture series. The organization will join the Gloucester Lyceum in cosponsoring a reading and book signing at City Hall on Friday, Nov. 4, with author/journalist Simon Winchester whose best-selling book Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories is coming out in paperback that week.
The next regularly scheduled Cape Ann Forum is “After Afghanistan: The U.S., Pakistan and the Imperiled Future of South Asia” with Princeton-based author and commentator Zia Mian. Upcoming forums will feature Woman’s World founder Meredith Tax on “Challenging global fundamentalism: Building a secular, feminist alternative” (March 18) and Harvard international relations expert Steven Walt on “The Twilight of the American Era” (May 13).
The North Shore Jazz Project, which joins the Cape Ann Forum in sponsoring the October 23 event, was founded in 2009 “to help revive the North Shore of Boston as a jazz oasis,” according to its website (www.northshorejazzprojest.org). Its next concert will feature the award-winning Three Cohens jazz trio at the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport on November 11.