Public Conversation with Chris Pattishall, Moderated by Anthony Kelley: November 5, 2021, 1:00pm-2:00pm: Rubenstein Arts Center
GRAMMY-nominated pianist Chris Pattishall joins Duke Music professor Anthony M. Kelley for conversation about Pattishall’s decades-long exploration of Mary Lou Williams’s Zodiac Suite — a work that Patishall, along with his quintet and visual projections by Kim Alpert, will re-imagine in Duke’s von der Heyden Studio Theater that evening.
Tammy Kernodle Lecture and Book Signing: November 5, 2021, 6:00-7:30 pm.: Rubenstein Arts Center, Room 102 (CANCELED)
In this talk, Dr. Tammy Kernodle prepares us for Chris Pattishall’s performance of Zodiac Suite through a discussion of Mary Lou Williams’s pedagogy and how Williams integrated concepts of music-making attributed to enslaved African-Americans into her teaching. Her talk will be followed by a book signing of her recently re-released book, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, which details Williams’s musical life through the lens of a woman’s place in jazz and the lively arguments over the evolution of African-American music.
Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle graduated with a BM in choral music education and piano from Virginia State University and received a MA and Ph.D. in Music History from The Ohio State University. Her scholarship and teaching has been primarily in the areas of African American music (classical and popular); jazz and gender; and popular music. She served as the Scholar in Residence for the Women in Jazz Initiative at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City (1999-2001) and has worked closely with a number of educational programs including the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, Jazz@Lincoln Center, NPR, Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame Lecture series and the BBC. She is the author of the biography, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, and appears in a number of award-winning documentaries including Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band, Girls in the Band, and more recently, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool.
Chris Pattishall Performance of Zodiac Suite, November 5 and 6, 2021, 8:00 pm.: Rubenstein Arts Center, von der Heyden Studio Theater
Self-taught pianist by three, professional musician by fifteen, teacher to Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis soon thereafter, and later Duke’s first Artist in Residence and Director of the Duke Jazz Ensemble, Mary Lou Williams’s 20th-century artistic scope was stratospheric. In 1945, she turned toward the stars with the landmark Zodiac Suite, a constellation of jazz tone poems inspired by the astrological signs of her musical contemporaries. Their boundary-breaking, stylistic intertwining — tilting from blues to early swing to jagged jazz harmony — caught the ear of GRAMMY-nominated pianist Chris Pattishall, a fellow musical wunderkind, rising star in the New York jazz scene, and Durham native. Pattishall spent over a decade with Williams’s compositions, expanding and exploding their instrumentation into a full-bodied interpretive album, Zodiac. This world premiere performance, enlivened by sound design from experimental musician and composer Rafiq Bhatia and video projections by artist Kim Alpert, will bring Williams’s work home to Duke and Durham in an unprecedented way.
