IN CINEMA
Sunday, May 25th at 2PM
Made In Harlem: Cinema Blues
BILL DIXON & THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION IN JAZZ
BILL DIXON: A PERSONAL PORTRAIT
Steve Albahari, 1983, 24 min.
Presented in his centennial year, this special gathering celebrates the Harlem-raised trumpeter / educator / organizer Bill Dixon and his era-defining 1964 concert series, The October Revolution in Jazz. Scholar Ben Young's lecture on the historic summit is paired with a screening of BILL DIXON: A PERSONAL PORTRAIT (an NYC premiere) and a virtual conversation with longtime Dixon collaborator and ORJ participant, Alan Silva.
Jazz scholar and educator BEN YOUNG has spent 30 years doing first-person research into the history of jazz music, as learned through direct contact with the musicians and the artifacts of their achievements. Young was heard for nearly 25 years as a radio host on WKCR-FM in New York City, where he hosted programs dealing with the gamut of Jazz and modern improvised music, and spent a decade as the station’s first Director of Broadcasting and Operations. He has produced, annotated or researched several hundred historical jazz reissues for major interests and independent labels, and has written a small number of monographs and articles documenting essential figures of the New York’s 20th Century jazz scene—including 1998’s Dixonia: A Bio-Discography of Bill Dixon. His exhaustive biography of pianist Cecil Taylor is forthcoming in 2026. Since 2009 he has been a staff lecturer in the Swing University program at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Young presently is director of the Jazz History Database at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
About Made In Harlem: Cinema Blues:
Cinema Blues is a monthly series at the Maysles Documentary Center dedicated to the convergence of jazz and film. Rather than focus on movies soundtracked by jazz, it foregrounds documentaries that capture the many facets of the music and culture; the living history of jazz, its performance, the spiritual & political philosophies of its creators, and the racism & economic struggles they have consistently faced. In this sense, Cinema Blues = a blues cinema, a filmic accounting (in the tradition of writers like Amiri Baraka, A. B. Spellman, Val Wilmer) of the real-life stakes (and breaks) that inform the great Black American classical music. The series also features poetic and experimental films that evoke the spontaneous creativity of the music (cinema as jazz), lectures, panel discussions & musical performances.
Cinema Blues takes its title from a tune by Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and is curated by Andrew Castillo. The series is made possible by the generous support of the West Harlem Development Corporation (WHDC).
Tickets: $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price
