Jazz Listening Party: The Zodiac Suite

About This Event

$20, $10 Students (25 & under w/ ID)

The Jazz Listening Party series is a new collaboration between The Nash and the Arizona State University School of Music.

Pianist, Composer, and Arranger Mary Lou Williams ranks among the most prolific and influential jazz musicians of all time. Her 1945 Zodiac Suite is a tribute to 12 of her fellow jazz musicians, one for each sign of the Zodiac. We’ll listen through this fascinating series of jazz piano miniatures and discuss the shifts in the American recording industry jazz’s cultural positioning that helped create space for such an ambitious, innovative collection of pieces.

“Christopher J. Wells is assistant professor of musicology at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute School of Music and managing editor of the Journal of Jazz Studies. They received their doctorate in 2014 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where their dissertation on drummer/bandleader Chick Webb and swing music in Harlem during the Great Depression received the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award and UNC’s Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology. A social jazz dancer for over a decade, Professor Wells is currently writing a book about the history of jazz music’s ever-shifting relationship with popular dance, and their published work appears in the journals Women & Music and Jazz & Culture and in the Oxford Handbooks of Dance and Ethnicity and of Improvisation in Dance.”