The Jazz Journalists Association was proud to present the
National Endowment for the Arts’ class of 2021 Jazz Masters Tribute Concert, from SFJazz, when it streamed live on Thursday, April 22. Here’s the program in its archived edition.
Miguel Zénon served as music director, and is heard on alto saxophone with Joe Lovano and Avishai Cohen, and the San Francisco High School All-Stars, among others. Wynton Marsalis played Eddie Durham’s “Topsy” of 1937; Dee Dee Bridgewater served as MC (with actor Delroy Lindo), and for a finale collaborated with Lizz Wright and Dianne Reeves — on three different screens from three different locations — singing “Smile,” Charlie Chaplin’s song concluding his silent film Modern Times (1936; lyrics and title added by others in 1956).
A lively chat, moderated by NEA staff, enabled an international conversation — mostly shout-outs of congratulations. SFJazz founder and executive artistic director Randall Kline conducted a post-Concert panel with all four of the Jazz Masters offering stories and thoughts.
The 2021 Jazz Masters — drummer-educator-composer-producer Terri Lyne Carrington, drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath, broadcaster and educator Phil Schaap and composer-performer Henry Threadgill — have all previously been recognized by the JJA in its annual Jazz Awards or, in Heath’s case, in 2005 as a member of the ‘A Team,’ with his late brothers Percy and Jimmy. Carrington was the JJA 2020 Musician of the Year; Threadgill was the 2016 recipient of the JJA’s Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Award, 2017 Musician of the Year, and has had several other honors all eclipsed by his 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Schaap, a founder in 1970 of WKCR-New York’s Jazz Alternatives programming strategy and daily host of a morning Charlie Parker show for many years, has been twice voted the Marian McPartland-Willis Conover Award for Excellence in Broadcasting.
Schaap stated at the start of his acceptance speech that he’s been seriously ill for the past two years, then spoke of the urgent need for jazz audience development, music appreciation and overall arts education. He described himself as teaching “listening, not ‘jazz’ or ‘music,’ and credited jazz giants such as Papa Jo Jones and Roy Eldridge whom he’d met as a young teen for being his teachers and inspiration.
Officially, Schaap received the A.B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy, named for the retired NEA administrator, poet and author of the classic book Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1966). Spellman was celebrated by the JJA as an “A Team” member in 2005; Stanley Crouch, Ira Gitler, Orrin Keepnews, George Avakian, Gunther Schuller, Dan Morgenstern, George Wein and Nat Hentoff are among other Spellman Jazz Masters. For more featuring such advocates from the NEA, see Carol Coons’ “Making a Place for Jazz.“
