CHARLIE HADEN & HANK JONES
An Exclusive Concert Event
STEAL AWAY: SPIRITUALS, HYMNS, & FOLK SONGS
Sunday, 9/30/07, 7 pm
Reynolds Industries Theater
$38 • $32 • $5*
After a combined century of creating cutting edge American jazz, Hank Jones and Charlie Haden returned to their roots and crafted a beautiful, Monk-inspired masterpiece. In 1995 the two veterans released Steal Away, a landmark album of rural hymns and spirituals that could be said to meditate on the countryside foundations of Monk’s own music.
Pianist Jones is now 89 years old, and according to Gary Giddins in the New Yorker, he has never played better. Bassist Haden is one of America’s living jazz greats, a founding member of Ornette Coleman's legendary original quartet and a pioneer in multiple genres. This concert presents a rare opportunity to hear these two masters play music from Steal Away, riffing on their musical homage to jazz’s rural roots within a framework of Monk’s life and homeland.
The sources of Monk’s own music lie in a devout religious background, cultivated in North Carolina, and in his travels with an evangelist during the heart of the Great Depression. This special concert event brings two living jazz legends together to play out their own version of that story.
As Maurice Jackson’s brilliant, Grammy-nominated liner notes
to Steal Away tell us: “This music was the product of an
enslaved African people. […] Many of the songs are from a
people yearning for equality and freedom, in this world and the
next.”
Steal Away Preconcert Talk
Sunday, 9/30/07, 5:30 pm
With Georgetown Professor Maurice Jackson
Bryan Center Meeting Room B
Free
Professor Maurice Jackson is a Georgetown University scholar with a specialty in 18th and 19th century African-American church music. Prof. Jackson wrote the Grammy-nominated liner notes for Mr. Jones & Mr. Haden's acclaimed 1995 CD release Steal Away, on which Sunday's concert is based. In his talk, Prof. Jackson will explore the links between the spirituals, hymns & folk songs that will be performed on the concert with the music of Thelonious Monk.
Hank Jones on the web:
Funded, in part, by Duke University’s Office of the President.