Bassist Lisle Atkinson Featured in the Harlem Speaks Series Thursday, March 22nd 6:30PM-8:30PM This Discussion Series is Free to the Public

Bassist Lisle Atkinson Featured in the Harlem Speaks series

Lisle Atkinson, Bassist: March 22, 2007

Time: 6:30pm-8:30pm. This discussion series is free to the public.

Lisle Atkinson, guest of Harlem Speaks on Thursday, March 22, 2007, began studying the violin at the age of four, and gave his first concert at the age of six. He continued studying and playing violin until he was introduced to the bass violin at the age of twelve. Shortly thereafter, Atkinson entered Music and Art High School in New York City, where he played in the school's orchestra.

Upon graduation, Atkinson entered Manhattan Music Conservatory, where he received a degree in Music. Since that time, he has appeared with such artists and groups as: Nina Simone, Betty Carter, Wynton Kelly, Hazel Scott, Billy Taylor, Stanley Turrentine, The New York Bass Violin Choir, Clark Terry, Thad Jones & Mel Lewis Big Band, Mary Lou Williams, the New York Jazz Quartet, Danny Mixon, Jon Hendricks and the Hendricks family, Hank Jones, Kenny Burrell and many, many other artists.

From 1970-1990 he shared his wealth of musical knowledge with youth as an instructor for Jazzmobile's Saturday Jazz Workshop, teaching bass and sight reading. In collaboration with guitarist Ted Dunbar, Atkinson taught Jazz Improvisation at Rutgers University in the late '70s. In the late '80s he taught bass at Stony Brook University.

Atkinson is the founder and lead bassist of the Neo-Bass ensemble which has had successful concerts around the tri-state area. Moreover, the group recorded their first CD, Bird Lives on the Karlisle Label in the early '90s. They have also released Hit It and Bebop Meets Bass.

To demonstrate how the bass functions outside of the rhythm section Atkinson and his Neo-Bass ensemble will perform during the evening! This session of Harlem Speaks will be held in the offices of the Jazz Museum in Harlem, located at 104 East 122nd St., 2nd floor (between Park and Lexington Avenues).

Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University since 1976, Dan Morgenstern is a jazz historian and archivist, author, editor, and educator active in the jazz field since 1958. As head of the Institute of Jazz Studies, he is responsible for the largest collection of jazz-related materials anywhere.

On March 8, 2007, an audience of friends and admirers of one of the staunchest advocates of jazz, heard this recent NEA Jazz Master discuss his life and career in jazz.

Born in Germany and reared in Austria and Denmark, Morgenstern came to the United States in 1947. After editing the periodicals Metronome and Jazz, he became the New York editor of Down Beat in 1964 and served as editor-in-chief from 1967 to 1973. Morgenstern is co-editor of the Annual Review of Jazz Studies and the monograph series Studies in Jazz, published jointly by the IJS and Scarecrow Press, and author of Jazz People (DaCapo Press).

He has been jazz critic for the New York Post, record reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times, and New York correspondent and columnist for England's Jazz Journal and Japan's Swing Journal. He has contributed to reference works including the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz and Dictionary of American Music, the African-American Almanac, and the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of th e Year; and to such anthologies as Reading Jazz, Setting the Tempo, The Louis Armstrong Companion, The Duke Ellington Reader, The Miles Davis Companion, and The Lester Young Reader.

Morgenstern has taught jazz history at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Brooklyn College (where he was also a visiting professor at the Institute for Studies in American Music), New York University, and the Schweitzer Institute of Music in Idaho. He served on the faculties of the Institutes in Jazz Criticism, jointly sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and the Music Critics Association, and is on the faculty of the Masters Program in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers University.

Morgenstern is a former vice president and trustee of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS); was a co-founder of the Jazz Institute of Chicago; served on the boards of the New York Jazz Museum and the American Jazz Orchestra; and is a director of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation and the Mary Lou Williams Foundation. He has been a member of Denmark's International JAZZPAR Prize Committee since its inception in 1989.

A prolific annotator of record albums, Morgenstern has won seven Grammy Awards for Best Album Notes (1973, 1974, 1976, 1981, 1991, 1995 and 2007). He received ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award for Jazz People in 1977 and in 2005 for Living With Jazz. Save the Date!

The Harlem Speaks series, supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, is produced by the Jazz Museum in Harlem's Executive Director, Loren Schoenberg, Co- Director Christian McBride, and Greg Thomas, host and co-producer of the web's only jazz news and entertainment television series, Jazz it Up! The Harlem Speaks series now will be housed at the Museum of the City of New York, located at 1220 Fifth Avenue (between 103rd and 104th Streets), with the exception, as mentioned above, of the Lisle Atkinson interview and performance. Time: 6:30pm-8:30pm.