75TH SEASON 

OF CONCERTS

DECEMBER 4, 2016 • NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
PROGRAM

3:30 • West Building, West Garden Court

Fox Wolf Duo

Donal Fox, piano

Warren Wolf, vibraphone and marimba

Virtuosos in Dialogue

75th Season * 3

Warren Wolf. Photo by Anna Webber Donal Fox. Phoi
The Musicians

Donal Fox

Internationally acclaimed composer, pianist, and improviser, Donal Fox expertly fuses jazz,

Afro-Latin, and classical idioms into intricate new works and electrifying performances.

Praised by the Boston Globe as "unique and utterly commanding," Fox deconstructs and

reconstructs Bach, Piazzolla, Schumann, Monk, Schoenberg, and more, adding propulsive

grooves and using composed themes as springboards for glorious improvisational flights

that blend baroque with bebop and twelve-tone techniques with twelve-bar blues.

Fox premiered his Monk and Bach Project at Jazz at Lincoln Center, his Scarlatti Jazz

Suite Project at Tanglewood, and his piano concerto Peace Out for Improvised Piano and

Orchestra at Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra. He was recently

featured at the Skaneateles Festival with his Inventions Trio and special guest Hilary Hahn.

Fox's Hear De Lambs A-Cryin' for baritone and orchestra saw its New York premiere at

Carnegie Hall with the Albany Symphony Orchestra, and his Piazzolla to Bach Project

premiered at Tanglewood Jazz Festival with special guest Maya Beiser. Fox's fluency across

genres has led to collaborations with the likes of Oliver Lake, David Murray, Regina Carter,

George Mraz, John Stubblefield, Elliott Sharp, Al Foster, Stefon Harris, Christian Scott, Terri

Lyne Carrington, and Quincy Troupe.

In April 2013, Fox made a special appearance, along with Imani Winds and Roy Eaton,

on WQXR's Emancipation 150 series for an evening honoring the African American experience in classical music. In December 2012, he joined Paul Elie, author of Reinventing Bach, on

WBUR's Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon in a conversation about the music and

influence of J.S. Bach.

Among his many accolades, Fox has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bogliasco

Fellowship, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as

the first African American composer-in-residence with the St. Louis Symphony, and was

appointed Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009-20H. He has also been composer-in-residence at Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus

(Germany), Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Djerassi Resident Artists Program (California),

Liguria Study Center (Italy), and Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival (Massachusetts). A Steinway Artist, Fox has recorded for New World Records, Evidence Records,

Music & Arts, Passin' Thru Records, Yamaha's Original Artist Series, and WERGO Records.

His works are published by Margun Music, G. Schirmer, and Leonelli Music.

4 • National Gallery of Art

Warren Wolf

Warren Wolf is a multi-instrumentalist who lives in Baltimore. Beginning at age three, he has

trained on the vibraphone, marimba, drums, and piano/keyboards. Under the guidance of 

his father Warren Wolf Sr., Warren was given a rich background in all genres of music. As a

youth, he attended the Peabody Institute of the John Hopkins University, where he studied

with former Baltimore Symphony Orchestra member Leo LePage.

After graduating from the Baltimore School for the Arts in 1997, Wolf attended

Berklee College of Music and studied with Caribbean Jazz Project vibist Dave Samuels. He

also began experimenting with different music styles, such as hip-hop, R&B, drum-n-bass,

funk, rock, gospel, world music, and Latin.

Wolf has played and recorded with many of the world's most talented musicians, 

including Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Nicholas Payton, David

Sanborn, Tia Fuller, Aaron Diehl, Bobby Hutcherson, Joey DeFrancesco, Mulgrew Miller,

Lewis Nash, Christian McBride, Terri Lyne Carrington, Donal Fox, and Bobby Watson.

Wolf is a member of the Christian McBride group Inside Straight and is featured on

its recordings Kind of Brown and People Music. He is also a member of the all-star jazz group

SFJazz Collective, the David Sanborn/Joey DeFrancesco Group, and the Aaron Diehl Quartet.

Wolf also leads the band Warren Wolf & WOLFPACK, and has released six albums under

such labels as M & I and Mack Avenue Records.

75th Season • 5
The Exhibition

The painter Stuart Davis (1892-1964) was an amateur pianist and a great fan of jazz music. 

He traced his jazz interest to the vaudeville performances of Bert Williams and George

Walker that he attended as a young child with his father. As a student at Robert Henri's art 

academy in New York City from 1909 to 1912, Davis made frequent trips with friends to

Harlem, Hoboken, and Newark to hear live music in the rough barrelhouses, saloons, and

gin joints of the day. "In all of these places," he recalled, "you could hear the blues or tin-pan

alley tunes turned into real music for the cost of a five-cent beer."

In 1913, Davis saw the New York City Armory Show with its revelation of expressive 

color and abstract form in the works of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse. He wrote, "It gave

me the same excitement I got from the numerical precision of the Negro piano players in

the Newark saloons. I resolved that I would quite definitely have to become a 'modern'

artist." During a year-long stay in Paris in 1928-1929, Davis heard his first recording by Earl

"Fatha" Hines, and the pianist immediately became one of his favorites. (Thirty years later

Davis named his son Earl after the musician.)

Davis's paintings of the 1930s and 1940s make explicit reference to jazz, especially

the swing music then dominant. He named his most ambitious work, a mural intended for

a housing project in Brooklyn, Swing Landscape (1938). In his American Painting (first state

1932), he included the words of a new Duke Ellington hit, "It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't

Got That Swing.” His Mural for Studio B, WNYC, Municipal Broadcasting Company (1939)

includes parts of a tenor saxophone and a clarinet. By 1943, Davis's love of jazz was well

known; the opening of his show at The Downtown Gallery was attended by Ellington and

W. C. Handy, and the singer Mildred Bailey provided entertainment. Jazz drummer George

Wettling also became a close friend of Davis's and studied painting with him. Davis adopted

the hip talk of jazz musicians and often included their words and phrases in his paintings,

for example The Mellow Pad (1945-1951).

The question of what Davis got from jazz and how it influenced his painting is not 

easy to answer. Davis's own statements suggest that he saw jazz as a quintessential

instance of the transformation of everyday materials (tin-pan alley songs and blues, in his

view) into art, analogous to his own transformation of the modern urban scene, with its

machines, billboards, and packages, into semi-abstract form. In addition, his practice of

returning to earlier works as the basis for new compositions —which accounts for some 

80 percent of his output from 1935 until his death in 1964 —can be compared to the way

that improvisers return again and again to standard songs and familiar chord progressions 

as the basis for invention. Finally, there is the indefinable sense of joyful rhythm and swing

that pulses through Davis's paintings from his very first works to his final painting, left

unfinished at his death in 1964.

All of the paintings mentioned above are included in the exhibition Stuart Davis:

In Full Swing, now on view in the West Building.

Program notes by Harry Cooper, Head Curator of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art

6 * National Gallery of Art

Upcoming Events of the SeventyFifth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot

Belin Concerts

Washington Performing Arts,

Children of the Gospel Choir

Holiday Caroling

December 10,1:30 and 2:30

Rotunda

Georgetown Day School

Holiday Caroling

December 11,1:30 and 2:30

Rotunda

Tempesta di Mare

Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra

Baroque Holiday Concert

December 11, 4:00

West Building, West Garden Court

Xaverian High School

Holiday Caroling

December 17,1:30 and 2:30

Rotunda

Danu

A Christmas Gathering: Feile Na Nollag

December 18, 2:00 and 4:00

West Building, West Garden Court

Curtis on Tour

Complete Violin Concertos of Mozart

January 8,12:30 and 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

General Information

Admission to the National Gallery of Art

and all of its programs is free of charge,

except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording equipment

during the performance is not allowed.

Please be sure that all portable electronic

devices are turned off.

Concerts are made possible in part

through the generosity of donors to the

National Gallery of Art through The Circle. 

Reserved seating is available in recognition

of their support. Please contact the

development office at (202) 842-6450 or

circle@nga.gov for more information.

www.nga.gov

www.instagram.com/ngadc

www.twitter.com/ngadc

www.facebook.com/nationalgalleryofart

The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2016 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery ofArt, Washington

Cover Stuart Davis, Study for "Swing Landscape"

(detail), 1937-1938, National Gallery of Art,

Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum

Purchase and exchange through a gift given in

memory of Edith Gregor Halpert by the Halpert

Foundation and the William A. Clark Fund)

Back cover West Building, Constitution

Avenue entrance, viewed from Sixth Street NW,

1941, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Gallery Archives