The Sixty-second Season of

THE WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL and

F. LAMMOT BELIN CONCERTS

National Gallery of Art

2467th Concert

THE STANLEY COWELL TRIO

Stanley Cowell, piano

Rufus Reid, bass Winard Harper, drums

Presented in honor ofthe exhibition

The Art ofRomare Bearden

Sunday Evening, 12 October 2003

7:00 p.m.

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
The Program

Mr. Cowell will announce the trio’s selectionsfrom the stage.

The Musicians

Stanley Cowell established his reputation as a versatile and sensitive

pianist and composer in the 1970s, when he was the featured pianist with

the Heath Brothers and toured, recorded, and performed with the great

jazz performers Sonny Rollins, Clifford Jordan, Oliver Nelson, Donald

Byrd, Roy Haynes, Richard Davis, and Art Pepper. A native of Toledo,

Ohio, Cowell received his musical training at the Oberlin College

Conservatory of Music, the University of Michigan, the Mozarteum in

Salzburg, Austria; Wichita State University, and the University of

Southern California. When he lived in Los Angeles, Cowell performed

Gershwin’s Concerto in F with the Burbank Symphony Orchestra and

played jazz with the bands of Curtis Amy and Ray Crawford.

In 1966, after completing the master of music degree at the

University of Michigan, Cowell headed for New York City, where he

worked with Max Roach, Herbie Mann, Miles Davis, and Stan Getz,

among others. In 1972 Cowell established the Piano Choir, a group of

seven esteemed New York keyboardists, and became a founding member 

of Collective Black Artists, Inc., a nonprofit company devoted to

introducing African-American music and musicians to the public. In

1974 Cowell served as a musical director of George Wein’s New York

Jazz Repertory Company at Carnegie Hall, for which the codirectors

were Gil Evans, Billy Taylor, and Sy Oliver. During the same period,

Cowell cofounded the innovative recording company, Strata-East.

Cowell’s compositions include a piano concerto in honor of Art

Tatum, which was commissioned by the Meet the Composer/Rockefeller 

Foundation/AT&T Jazz Program consortium. The work, entitled Piano

Concerto No. I, was premiered in January 1992 by the Toledo Symphony

Orchestra. Cowell was the featured piano soloist at the 1992 Colorado

Festival, where he performed Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and a

number of “third stream” works conducted by Gunther Schuller and

Larry Newland.

Stanley Cowell is a professor of music at Rutgers University’s

Mason Gross School of the Arts. He has also taught at Herbert Lehman

College of the City University of New York and the New England

Conservatory of Music.

Bassist Rufus Reid is one of the premier bassists on the

international jazz scene, with a firmly established reputation as a

performer, teacher, and composer. His career began in Chicago and,

since 1976, has continued in New York City. He has performed or

recorded with Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Mel Lewis, Dexter Gordon,

Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Farmer, Kathleen Battle, and Andre

Previn, among many others. Reid has appeared with such ensembles as

the BBC Big Band, the St. Luke’s Chamber Orchestra, and the Wayne

(New Jersey) Chamber Orchestra.

Reid composes for many media and has to his credit works for

big band, string orchestra, jazz ensembles, and double bass ensembles.

His Skies over Emilia won the Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Award.

London’s BBC Big Band has recorded three of Reid’s compositions and

three of his arrangements, and many of his works appear on jazz CDs

produced by Sunnyside Records, Evidence Music, Concord Music,

Double Time Records, Mastermix Records, and Wave Records. Much in

demand as an educator, Reid has been teaching clinics since 1971 and

was professor and director of jazz studies at William Patterson

University in Wayne, New Jersey, from 1979 to 1999. For the past three

years he has been a participant in the BMI Jazz Composers’ Workshop.

Drummer Winard Harper began his career in 1982 with Dexter

Gordon and Johnny Griffin. His skills soon caught the attention of one of

the great women ofjazz, Betty Carter, who took him on as the drummer 

for her band for four years. After working as a side man to some of the

finest jazz artists, Harper decided to form a group with his brother,

Philip, calling it the Harper Brothers Band. Formed in 1986 in

Washington, DC, the band soon made an impression both nationally and

internationally, drawing praise from the distinguished jazz commentator 

Leonard Feather. After hearing the band in Los Angeles in 1990, he

wrote: “Man for man, the Harper Brothers Quintet,
introduced Tuesday evening at Catalina’s, is the most brilliant new jazz

group ofthe new decade.”

A recognized virtuoso on the cymbals, Harper is also a pioneer in

the introduction of African drums to jazz. His penchant for coaxing

arresting colors and flavors from his instruments has attracted a broad

spectrum of fans, young and old, and elicited from Jazz Times critic Jeff

Kaliss the compliment: “as tasteful a drummer as one could ask for.”

Program Notes

The Art ofRomare Bearden is the most comprehensive retrospective of

Bearden’s work ever and explores the complexity and full scope of his

art. His powerful images represent the places where he lived and worked:

the rural South; northern cities, principally Pittsburgh and New York's

Harlem; and the Caribbean island of St. Martin. Religious subjects and

ritual practices, jazz clubs and brothels, and history and literature are

major themes in his work. Throughout his career Bearden also made

forays into abstraction, usually with musical associations.

Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, the seat of

Mecklenburg County, on 2 September 1911. About 1914, his family

joined in the Great Migration north, settling in New York City, which

remained Bearden’s home for the rest of his life. During the 1920s the

Bearden household was a meeting place for luminaries of the Harlem

Renaissance, including writer Langston Hughes, painter Aaron Douglas,

and musician Duke Ellington. The jazz Bearden heard Ellington and

others play at his home and in the Savoy Ballroom, Leroy’s, and the

Lafayette Theater in Harlem was essential to his art, both as process and

subject. His methods echo the use of “call and response” in jazz, where

each phrase is an improvised response to a phrase previously heard. For

Bearden, collage invited a similar approach. As he said, “You put down

one color, and it calls for an answer.” His practice ofreturning repeatedly

to subjects and themes he had addressed in earlier works can also be seen

as a form of call and response.

Among the works inspired by musical subjects in the exhibition 

are The Apprenticeship ofJelly Roll Morton (1971), Blues Singer (1975),

Thank You...For F.U.M.L. (Funking Up My Life) (1978, a tribute

to Donald Byrd), J Mood (c. 1985, commissioned and inspired by

Wynton Marsalis), and Ofthe Blues: Carolina Shout (1974, inspired by

the eponymous song by the famous stride pianist, James P. Johnson

[1894-1955]).

Bearden’s wife, Nanette, was a dancer and choreographer who

founded the Nanette Bearden Dance Company in 1976. Romare

Bearden’s involvement with the world of dance included designing sets,

costumes, and masks for his wife’s company as well as for the Alvin

Ailey American Dance Theater. He also wrote the libretto for Conjur: A

Masked Folk Ballet, a work inspired by the rituals of African-American 

conjurers.

Although not widely known until the last twenty years of the

artist’s life, Bearden’s works were eventually exhibited throughout the

United States and Europe. He was also a respected writer and an eloquent

spokesman on artistic and social issues of the day. His many awards and

honors include the National Medal of Arts he received from President

Ronald Reagan in 1987, one year before his death.

The Art of Romare Bearden continues in the National Gallery’s

East Building until 4 January 2004. The Gallery is open to the public

Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Sunday, 11:00

a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

The use ofcameras or recording equipment during

the performance is not allowed. Please he sure that cell

phones, pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.