Charleston: A Cradle of Jazz

New orders will be available in June

From Gullah-Geechee rhythms to Freddie Green’s “Corner Pocket,” and Julian Dash’s tenor saxophone career, Charleston, South Carolina has a rich jazz history but it is not well known.  Charleston:  A Cradle of Jazz – CJI’s first publication chronicles this little known legacy of Charleston’s ensemble musicians who helped create American jazz with Duke Ellington, Count Basie and other big bands of the era.

Charleston’s Jenkins Orphanage and its widely-acclaimed bands, and the Avery Normal Institute, were institutions that helped develop the skills of these early jazz musicians.

Charleston:  A Cradle of Jazz acknowledges that New Orleans could not have been the only crucible for American swing…players at Jenkins and Avery were swinging melodies five years before Louis Armstrong was born!

These proceedings from CJI’s official launch in 2005 feature the writing of internationally-recognized jazz historians, musicians and critic as well as Jenkins family members, former residents, and musicians.  Included are:

• Jack McCray, Co-Principal of CJI; jazz and features writer, book reviewer and copy editor for Charleston’s Post and Courier
• Scott Shanklin-Peterson, Director and Associate Professor, Arts Management Program, College of Charleston
• A.B. Spellman, poet, critic and author; former Deputy Chairman of the Office of Guidelines and Panel Operations, National Endowment for the Arts
• Dan Morgenstern, Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University
• Jeffrey Green, British historian; biographer of Edmund Thornton Jenkins:  The Life and Times of An American Black Composer, 1894-1926
• Wolfram Knauer, musicologist; Director of the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt (Germany)
• Alvin Batiste, clarinetist, composer and educator; New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts
• Larry Ridley, bassist; Executive Director of the African American Jazz Caucus, Inc., an affiliate of the International Association for Jazz Education; Jazz Artist in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

Plus “Conversations in Jazz” with the late Elizabeth Carter Prioleau, Rollins Edwards, Stanley White, Barbara Braithwaite, Jomo Zimbabwe and Rachel Dowling.