George Avakian: A Life in Music
The producer and manager George Avakian helped redefine the recording industry of the mid-twentieth century while ushering to the world an enormous variety of popular and artistic music. Through a career lasting over six decades, he produced some of the greatest recordings ever made, including landmark albums by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, Sonny Rollins, Benny Goodman, Charles Lloyd, and Keith Jarrett. Avakian also produced the first jazz reissue program on Columbia Records, which effectively established the “jazz canon,” or the corpus of early recordings of jazz that came to be regarded as definitive; and he was at the forefront of the technical shift from 78 rpm singles to the 33⅓ long playing album, a transition that triggered a massive expansion of the recording industry. He also taught some of the first jazz history classes in American higher education.
We're excited to welcome Matt Snyder, archivist at The New York Public Library, and formerly George Avakian’s personal archivist, who will discuss Avakian’s career and present unique photographs, papers, and sound recordings from the George Avakian and Anahid Ajemian papers held by The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Matt has been processing music special collections with The New York Public Library since 2004. He is also a clarinetist and saxophonist, and has been performing in and around New York City since the mid-1990s. He received his masters degree in library and information science from Queens College in 2004, a master of music in jazz studies from the Indiana University School of Music in 1993, and a bachelor of arts in music from Rutgers College in 1990.
The roundtable runs from 7-9 PM in the Dana Room, John Cotton Dana Library, 4th floor, Rutgers University-Newark.
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Directions:http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/jazz/directions |
