[Dixielandjazz] Marsalis to bring his New Orleans Parade Band to Harvard University

[Stephen G Barbone]

Jazz Goes to College - Deja vu.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

Marsalis plays role in Harvard's arts-in-education push
By Joel Brown
Boston Globe Correspondent  April 3, 2011

If you run into a second line procession winding through Harvard  
Square in the months to come, you might check to
see if trumpeter Wynton Marsalis is leading the way. The jazz great  
and New Orleans native will become a recurring presence on the Harvard  
University campus, as part of Harvard president Drew Faust’s  
initiative to better integrate the arts into education there.

Marsalis said he made the commitment because “I feel there’s a lot our  
music has to teach us about who we are,
and I feel Harvard is the preeminent institute of higher education in  
the United States of America, and what they
choose to do is studied and imitated by universities and colleges all  
over this country and around the world.’’
The Harvard initiative “is the wave of the future, the first true  
waking up of our country about the need to integrate
the arts into general education in a profound way,’’ Marsalis said.

Currently artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Marsalis will  
spend two or three days in Cambridge six times
during the next two years, beginning with a visit this month that  
includes an April 28 Sanders Theater
lecture/performance, “Music as Metaphor.’’ His lectures will address  
the relationship between music and the
American identity, and include performances by his own quintet, a New  
Orleans parade band, and the Jazz at
Lincoln Center Orchestra, among others.

“It’s going to be an ongoing presence and set of interactions. He will  
also be closely connected to classes and
student activities and learning, so that will be a significant part of  
it,’’ Faust said this week. Marsalis will also be an
inspiration to students, allowing them to “understand some of the  
parameters of possibility that the arts represent,’’
Faust said.

Marsalis uses words like “deplorable’’ when discussing the state of  
the arts in American education generally: “Walt
Whitman has a lot to teach us. Winslow Homer, a lot to teach us. Duke  
Ellington, a lot to teach us. And we don’t
know these people. Even more than not knowing their names, we don’t  
know what they taught us, so it’s time for us
to reap that inheritance.’’

His visit to Cambridge this month will also include a clinic at  
Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where he’ll critique
performances by small groups of Rindge and Harvard students. “He’s  
marvelous working with students,’’ said Rindge
music teacher and band director Robert Ponte. “He finds just the right  
balance between rigor and ‘Nice job, keep it
up.’ ’’

The Marsalis presence at Harvard was first discussed two years ago,  
when the university unveiled the task force’s
recommendations for elevating the role of the arts in learning. The  
panel “argued quite eloquently that [the arts] were a significant  
manner of proceeding in and understanding the world, and therefore to  
be embraced as central to a collegiate education and to what a  
university stands for,’’ Faust said.

Some of the resulting ideas have already come to fruition, she said.  
The Silk Road Project, founded by cellist Yo-Yo
Ma, recently performed on campus as part of plans to make Harvard its  
home. But other initiatives, including creating
a Master of Fine Arts program at Harvard, are still under review,  
Faust said. A committee has been “examining the
various proposals and seeing which ones we want to advance, in what  
sequence,’’ she said.