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February 4, 2016

Faculty member gets Grammy nomination

When the curtain rises on this year’s Grammy Awards, Pitt jazz studies director Geri Allen will be

Geri Allen, director of Pitt’s jazz studies program, has been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Historical Album category for coproducing a digitally remastered and expanded version of Erroll Garner’s 1956 live album.

Geri Allen, director of Pitt’s jazz studies program, has been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Historical Album category for coproducing a digitally remastered and expanded version of Erroll Garner’s 1956 live album.

there. Allen is a nominee in the Best Historical Album category for her role coproducing “The Complete Concert by the Sea,” a digitally remastered and expanded version of jazz pianist Erroll Garner’s 1956 live album “Concert by the Sea.”

Allen’s work has been part of Grammy-winning music in the past, but this nomination is a first for her role in producing, she said.

While Allen plans to attend the Feb. 15 Grammys in Los Angeles, Robin D.G. Kelley, whose liner notes accompany the three-CD box set, will be attending the NAACP Image Award ceremonies tomorrow, Feb.5, in Pasadena. The recording is nominated in the Outstanding Jazz Album category.

Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in United States History at UCLA, will visit the University later this month to present “The Provocative Erroll Garner.”

His free public lecture will examine Garner’s political fights with the music industry and the important role of his manager Martha Glaser in defending artists’ rights at a time when black jazz musicians regularly were exploited by the entertainment industry. The event is set for 7 p.m. Feb. 17 in University Club ballroom A.

Garner, who was born in Pittsburgh in 1921, is the focus of several other Black History Month events on campus:

• A reception is set for 4 p.m. today, Feb. 4, in the William Pitt Union lobby to celebrate the opening of an exhibition of materials from the Erroll Garner Archive, which was donated to the University Library System (ULS) last year.

Memorabilia — including the score from his best-known composition, “Misty,” and one of the trademark phone books the short-statured Garner perched on at the piano — are on display in the WPU lobby International Academy of Jazz Hall of Fame showcase through the spring term, and possibly longer, said Julie Seavy of Institutional Advancement.

• Garner’s legacy will be celebrated on Feb. 11 at the University’s annual K. Leroy Irvis Black History Month Program with an invitation-only concert and celebration hosted by Chancellor Patrick Gallagher.

The Garner archive includes correspondence, publicity materials, sheet music, legal papers, photos, recordings and memorabilia, plus materials related to Glaser, who shepherded Garner’s career until his death in 1977.

Following Glaser’s death in 2014, the Garner materials she had accumulated were donated to the University through her estate.

“People in the academy are excited to see this,” said Allen. “There’s a lot we are looking forward to mining from this treasure we have at Pitt.”

The ULS guide to the Garner collection is posted at http://pitt.libguides.com/ErrollGarner.
Allen said the collection offers an excellent opportunity to look at artists’ rights, “particularly African-American artists and their relation to the music industry, at a time when being outspoken as an artist was unusual.”

Students in music faculty member Michael Heller’s “Music, Media, and the Archive: Jazz Collections of Pittsburgh” seminar worked with the archive, curating the WPU exhibit and blogging on selections from the Garner collection over the course of the term. Their posts are linked on the ULS Garner collection page.

In addition to the academic resource housed in Pitt’s Archives Service Center, the collection’s performance wing, the Erroll Garner Jazz Project (www.errollgarner.com), is dedicated to new renditions and ongoing performances of Garner’s music.

—Kimberly K. Barlow


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