The use of cameras or recording equipment during the 

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phones, 

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Please note that late entry or reentry of

the East Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, dc

www.nga.gov

cover: Stuart Davis, Unfinished Business, 1962,

National Gallery ofArt, Collection of Deborah and Ed Shein

The Sixty-ninth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,806th Concert

Terry Waldo’s Gotham City Band

November 7, 2010

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

East Building Auditorium

Admissionfree
T Ain’t No Sin

A Ragtime and Jazz Concert

Terry Waldo’s Gotham City Band

Colleen Hawks, vocals

Kevin Dorn, drums and percussion

Peter Ecklund, comet

Mike Hashim, saxophone and vocals

Dan Levinson, clarinet, sax, and vocals

Brian Nalepka, string bass, tuba, and vocals

Terry Waldo, music director, piano, and vocals

Producer/Director: Janice Ann Lee

The musicians will announce the program from the stage

The Musicians

COLLEEN HAWKS

Colleen Hawks first sang with Terry Waldo in 1999 in the off-Broadway production Shake That Thing! in which she played The Girl. She has been on

Broadway in Shrek, the Musical (Fairy Godmother & Voice ofthe Bluebird); 

The Boyfrom Oz; and Smokey Joe’s Cafe. Other credits include mtc’s Wild

Party, Papermill’s Anything Goes!, A Chorus Line (Val), Crazyfor You (Polly),

and Oklahoma! (Laurey). Recently Hawks performed at Westchester Broadway Theater in the title role of Sugar (The Some Like It Hot Musical) and

Vicki in The Full Monty at West Virginia Public Theatre. She has been seen

on television in Law and Order and As the World Turns. A performer ofwideranging talents, Hawks has been a Disney Princess, raised a baby lion, spun

from her ankle by a rope in the air, and sung at Lincoln Center and Carnegie

Hall in New York City. More information is available at www.ColleenHawks.com.

KEVIN DORN

One ofthe busiest drummers on the traditional jazz circuit, Kevin Dorn

performs regularly with Banu Gibson and the New Orleans Hot Jazz, David

Ostwald’s Gully Low Jazz Band, The Flying Neutrinos, the Loren Schoenberg Big Band, the Manhattan Rhythm Kings, and Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks. From 2002 to 2004 he was the drummer for the Jim Cullum Jazz

Band, appearing on their weekly public radio show, Riverwalk: Livefrom the

Landing. A founding member ofthe Traditional Jazz Collective (Tjc), Dorn

has played at jazz festivals and jazz parties around the world, including the

Atlanta Jazz Party, the Colorado Springs Jazz Party, the Los Angeles Sweet 

and Hot Festival, and the Nairn Jazz Festival in Scotland. Dorn appears with

Tony Award-winning actor John Lithgow in many venues, including several 

concerts at the Kennedy Center and an upcoming hbo Special filmed at the

New Victory Theater in New York City.

3
PETER ECKLUND

Cornetist Peter Ecklund has recorded with Gregg Allman, Maria Muldaur,

Bonnie Raitt, Leon Redbone, Livingston Taylor, and Terry Waldo, among

many others. Ecklund formed the Galvanized Jazz Band and worked with

pop and rock bands in the 1970s and 1980s. A founding member ofthe

Orphan Newsboys, he has played with David Bromberg’s Big Band, the Lindy

Hop Heaven, Swingology, and Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks. Ecklund was

the solo trumpet player on Ken Burns’ pbs features Baseball and The Civil

War. He can be heard on the soundtracks ofthe films Eight Men Out, Fried

Green Tomatoes, and King ofthe Gypsies. He is the editor of Louis Armstrong:

Great Trumpet Solos, a book oftranscriptions of Louis Armstrong’s most celebrated recorded solos, as well as Bix Beiderbecke: Great Comet Solos. Although

he works primarily within the early jazz canon, Ecklund’s newest CD, Blue

Suitcase, contains many original tunes that reflect the sounds ofthe past

forty years.

MIKE HASHIM

Performer, composer, band leader, teacher, and writer Mike Hashim has

been an integral part ofthe New York City music scene for more than thirty

years. His career has taken him to China, Europe, Japan, the Middle East,

and South America. He has recorded on various jazz and pop labels as well

as for television, animated cartoons, and films. The band leaders with whom

he has worked include Danny Aiello, Gatemouth Brown, Judy Carmichael,

Dizzy Gillespie, Madeline Kahn, Muddy Waters, Joe Williams, and Nancy 

Wilson. Current projects include the Microscopic Septet, the avant-garde

Swingsters, and Hahsim’s own fifteen-piece band devoted to music of Billy

Strayhorn. Hashim is featured on the new Microscopic Septet disc: Friday

the 13th: The Micros Play Monk.

4

DAN LEVINSON

Equally at home as both leader and sideman on all ofthe single-reed instruments, Dan Levinson’s roster ofmusical associates includes Dick Hyman,

Wynton Marsalis, and Mel Torme, as well as reed legend “Rosy” McHargue,

with whom Levinson worked for fifteen years. His busy schedule has

recently taken him to Brazil—with filmmaker Woody Allen s band as well

as to Iceland, Japan, and eighteen European countries. From 1990 to 2002

Levinson toured with singer and guitarist Leon Redbone. As a member of

Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks since 1993, he has appeared at Carnegie Hall 

and on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home

Companion and recorded the soundtracks to the films Ghost World and The

Aviator. Levinson has recorded more than sixty cds, the most recent of

which, Dan Levinson and his Canary Cottage Dance Orchestra: Steppin' Around,

was released earlier this year on the Stomp Offlabel.

BRIAN NALEPKA

A founding member ofThe Manhattan Rhythm Kings, Brian Nalepka plays

both the string bass and the tuba. With the Kings, he has played the Tony

Award-winning Broadway production of Crazyfor You as well as concerts in

Carnegie Hall and shows at Radio City Music Hall. Nalepka has performed

with more than eighty orchestras, including the Boston Pops and The

National Symphony Orchestra. He has collaborated with conductor Michael

Tilson Thomas in the Emmy-Award winning show Celebrating Gershwin, as

well as with Leonard Bernstein, George Burns, Judy Collins, Gregory Hines,

Bob Hope, and Bette Midler.

5
TERRY WALDO

A protege ofthe late Eubie Blake, virtuoso ragtime, stride, and blues pianist

Terry Waldo is a vocalist and leader of many critically-acclaimed musical

groups. He has composed and arranged music for national commercials, 

television shows, and films, including the Ken Burns documentaries Baseball and Unforgiveable Blackness: The Rise and Fall ofJack Johnson. Waldo’s

book This is Ragtime was recently republished by Jazz at Lincoln Center 

Library Editions, with a new introduction by Wynton Marsalis. His twentysix part radio series with the same title, produced for National Public Radio,

is credited with having fueled the 1970s ragtime revival. Waldo’s one-man

shows include The Naked Dance: The Music ofStoryville; Eubie K Me; and This

Is Ragtime. He directed the 1999 off-Broadway musical, Shake That Thing!

and was the music director ofAmbassador Batch (based on the life of Louis

Armstrong); Down Hearted Blues: Bessie Smith; Heliotrope Bouquet (based on 

the life of Scott Joplin); and Mr. Jelly Lord (based on the life ofJelly Roll

Morton). Waldo has performed with many ofthe jazz greats, including Louis

Black, Eubie Blake, Dick Hyman, Turk Murphy, Odetta, and Leon Redbone.

He has produced more than forty albums under his own name and is a

veteran of hundreds oftelevision programs, most recently a pbs concert and 

documentary on ragtime with Janice Ann Lee and veteran producer Charles

Hobson.

JANICE ANN LEE

Cofounder ofWaldo/Lee Music Productions, Inc., Janice Ann Lee has 

developed and produced many ofits projects, including the shows 100 Years

ofRagtime, Eubie Me, Shake That Thing!, T Ain't No Sin, and Waldo’s 1927

Revue. Among the Terry Waldo recordings she has produced are Classic

Waldo, Footlight Varieties, Jas K Blues, Kinky e[ Sweet, and Let It Shine. Waldo/

Lee Productions is currently developing new television productions including a pbs special on ragtime.

6

Program Notes

Among the artists represented in the exhibition American Modernism: The

Shein Collection are two whose fondness for jazz was part and parcel oftheir

creative impulse. Stuart Davis (1892-1964) once told Esquire magazine that

his “objective was to make paintings that could be looked at, while listening

to a record at the same time, without incongruity of mood.” Arthur Dove

(1880-1946) was not as loyal a jazz fan, but, in a remarkable experiment, 

he made at least six paintings while listening to jazz records.

Davis’ parents encouraged their child’s artistic interests and took him

to “Negro revues and shows” around Philadelphia, sparking a passion for

Black music and culture that lasted his whole life. One writer who knew 

Davis dates his love ofragtime to 1910. In the nineteen-teens, Davis and

fellow students of Robert Henri at the Art Students League of New York

visited saloons in New Jersey and Harlem to listen to live music. A reporter

who accompanied one ofthe trips to Newark wrote up the experience for

New York Sunday Call Magazine. Several drawings Davis made from the 

visits appeared in The Masses, an influential journal, between 1913 and 1915. In

1918 Davis sketched Scott Joplin at the piano, and pianists and dancers also

appear in the watercolors that Davis made on his trip to Havana the following year. But Davis’ great jazz epiphany came during his 1928-1929 stay

in Paris, when he heard his first record by pianist Earl “Latha” Hines (after

whom he would name his son). In an autobiographical statement from 1945,

Davis wrote that seeing the paintings of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse at

the Armory Show in 1913 “gave me the same kind of excitement I got from 

the numerical precisions ofthe Negro piano players... and I resolved that I

would quite definitely have to become a ‘modern’ artist.”

Davis’ quintessential jazz-related painting was made in 1938, when the

swing-band era was at its height. Swing Landscape, a huge frieze-like painting acquired in 1942 by the Indiana University Art Museum, announces a

relation to jazz in its title and reflects the bright coloration, jagged rhythms, 

and dazzling contrasts ofmature swing music. It also marks the beginning

of an intense period ofjazz-painting interaction among other painters,

7
including Piet Mondrian, who emigrated from Paris to New York in 1940

and was inspired at once by the boogie-woogie music he heard there, and

Jackson Pollock, whose fondness for New Orleans jazz with its simultaneous

improvisation among different instruments must have influenced his own

densely woven compositions.

An earlier declaration of Davis’ interest in jazz was American Painting

(1932), which he painted for the Whitney Biennial. It includes the artist’s

first use ofthe thick, twisting script that would become his trademark in the 

1950s: the words “It don’t mean a thing ifit ain’t got that swing,” painted up

the left edge, refer to Duke Ellington’s hit record ofthat name, just recorded,

with vocals by Ivie Anderson. The Davis painting from the Shein Collection

on the cover ofthis program, Unfinished Business (1962), makes great use of

a variety ofletter forms, both cursive and printed, some legible and some

abstract. Arguably, this reflects scat singing, the jazz vocal tradition pioneered by Louis Armstrong involving the improvisation ofsemi-nonsense

lyrics that mixed vocal and instrumental sounds. Davis’ painting, with all its

playful ambiguities, can be considered a kind ofvisual scat.

Arthur Dove was also captivated by swing-era jazz. In the early 1940s

he made a number ofsketches (now lost) after recordings by Ellington, Bing

Crosby, and George Gershwin, and his diaries from the time contain reflections on rhythm in music and art. Perhaps his painting Primitive Music

(1943 or 1944) at the Phillips Collection pursues these interests. Dove’s first

recorded encounter with jazz occurred in December 1925, when he attended

a concert by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. By that time Whiteman’s ensemble was famous for having premiered George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue

the previous year at Aeolian Hall in New York in a concert titled “An Experiment in Modern Music.” This was the public unveiling of a style that came 

to be known as symphonic jazz, a fusion ofjazz rhythms and melodies with

classical orchestration and structure. The concert that Dove heard inspired

him to buy several records the next summer.

The six pictures that he started to make from the recordings in 1925 are

remarkable because few other modern paintings have so directly referenced

specific jazz compositions, let alone particular performances or recordings. 

Rhapsody in Blue has three movements, but Dove made two paintings from

it, labeled Part 1 and Part 11 in dutiful response to the fact that the piece

required both sides ofthe 78 rpm record he owned. This reflects the rule

that Dove reportedly set himselfin these works: to paint only while the record

was playing, and pausing periodically to put the needle back to the beginning ofthe disc. The other paintings in the group are I’ll Build a Stairway

to Paradise (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), An Orange Grove in California,

Rhythm Rag (lost) and Improvisation. In these works, careful effects of

texture and pattern are punctuated by broken lines and dramatic spirals.

Modem painters have usually avoided such literal, one-to-one connections 

to works in another medium for fear of having their art seen as dependent

or illustrative. Dove was well aware ofthis fate, as a letter to his dealer Alfred

Stieglitz indicates, but he seems to have welcomed it: “They [two friends]

have waxed enthusiastic over a ‘thing’ ofmine being done from Gershwin’s

Rhapsody in Blue not as yet completed, but I feel it will make people see that

the so-called ‘abstractions’ are not abstract at all.... It is illustration.”

This comment has puzzled scholars. With the possible exception ofAn

Orange Grove in California, whose dominant orange color is a giveaway, it is

impossible to guess which ofthe jazz paintings illustrates which recording. 

(Since a painting, unlike a musical score, has no prescribed direction ofreading, it has trouble conveying the fundamentally temporal experience of

music.) I take the comment as evidence of an anxiety on Dove’s part, not just

about public acceptance of abstract art but about abstraction itself and about

the jazz paintings in particular. These six paintings are unusual, even anomalous, in his career, for their linear freedom verging on automatism, their

refusal of normal figure-ground relationships, and their independence of any

motifin the visible world. To mitigate the threat ofthese abstractions, he 

bent over backwards, all the way to a rhetorical endorsement of “illustration.”

9
What in the musical sources for these paintings might have inspired

Dove to push closer to abstraction than ever? Perhaps it was not so much the

melodies by Gershwin or Berlin as the Whiteman sound itself, distinguished

among jazz orchestras for its tight and polished nature and its closed acoustic

surface. This effect was achieved by top-to-bottom, tuba-to-piccolo orchestration, by famously exact instrumental execution, and by filling any empty

spaces with oom-pahing tubas, plunking banjos, or call-and-response between

sections ofthe orchestra. One answer to the question would be that a music

without background yielded a painting without figures.

Another answer would point to the very project of painting to music.

Given the brevity ofthe recordings, we should imagine these paintings being

made under time pressure, even iftheir execution required multiple listenings. Such pressure would require the artist not only to keep his ears open

but to close his eyes, so to speak, to everything except the painting in front

of him. Of course, aspects ofthe visible world might slip in nonetheless—

the color of orange groves or the rhythm ofstairways—but these would be

mere footholds in the visible, token defenses against an abstraction induced

as much by the concentration oflistening as by the music to which the artist

was listening.

American Modernism: The Shein Collection remains on view in the East 

Building until January 2, 2011.

Program Notes by Harry Cooper, Curator ofModem and Contemporary Art and

Head ofthe Department, National Gallery ofArt

10

Next Week at the National Gallery ofArt

Kate Egan, soprano

Marlene Batemen, mezzo-soprano

Juliana Osinchuk, pianist

With visual projections by Petra Lisiecki

Music by Beethoven, Schumann,

and other composers

November 10, 2010

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

East Building Auditorium

National Gallery ofArt Orchestra

Stephen Simon, guest conductor

Sara Daneshpour, pianist

Music by Cannabich, Mozart, and Stamitz

Presented in honor of

German Drawingsfrom the

Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, 1580-1900

November 14, 2010

Sunday Evening, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court