
Conversations: Among Friends, Paris Jazz
featuring Emmy Award-winning producer Charles Hobson and Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, MoMA
including a performance by special musical guest Terry Waldo
Harlem in Montmartre: Paris Jazz
Conversations: Among Friends, Paris Jazz featuring Emmy award-winning producer Charles Hobson and Joshua Siegel will explore the historical themes that emerged in jazz music developed in Europe during the 20’s and 30’s, and feature clips from Hobson’s upcoming PBS documentary Harlem in Montmartre; a Paris Jazz Story, scheduled to air late this summer nationwide on Great Performances. Following the Conversation, there will be a reception and performance by a special musical guest, Terry Waldo, in the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Lobby.
Charles Hobson is the executive producer of Vanguard Documentaries, which will premiere Harlem in Montmartre this August for PBS’s Great Performances series. His distinguished career spans four decades and includes Porgy and Bess: An American Voice (PBS); Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant; Jump Street: The History of Black Music (a thirteen-part PBS series); Negroes with Guns; The Africans (a nine-part series coproduced with the BBC); Global Links (a six-part series on international development, coproduced with the World Bank for PBS); Spaces (a six-part science series, funded by the Department of Education); and Like It Is (ABC-TV). His awards include an Emmy, a Fulbright (Germany), The Japan Prize (Special Citation), and CINE Golden Eagle. Hobson has been ranked among the top fifty producers in the film and television industry by Millimeter magazine. He has taught at SUNY, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Vassar, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. This summer he will be the 2009 Artist in Residence at Art Workshop International, in Assisi, Italy. Hobson and his family currently reside in Brooklyn.
Joshua Siegel, an associate curator in MoMA’s Department of Film, has organized or co-organized more than ninety exhibitions at the Museum, including The New India (2009), Jazz Score (2008), Projects 84: Josiah McElheny (2007), Tomorrowland: CalArts in Moving Pictures (2006), Killer Films (2005), and The Lodz Film School of Poland: 50 Years (1999). He has organized monographic exhibitions of Julien Duvivier, Michael Haneke, Gregory La Cava, Christopher Guest, James Wong Howe, Jem Cohen, Jean Painlevé, Errol Morris, and Paul Robeson, among others. He has also co-organized the annual exhibition To Save and Project: The MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation since 2002, and together with Kirk Varnedoe and Paola Antonelli, co-organized Open Ends, as part of MoMA2000, and co-edited the accompanying catalogue, Modern Contemporary: Art at MoMA Since 1980. Mr. Siegel has lectured at Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Warsaw; has served on grant panels for the Alpert Award in the Arts/CalArts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and The Penny McCall Foundation; and has been a jury member of the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Santiago International Film Festival, and other festivals.
Terry Waldo is considered one of America’s premier performers and presenters of ragtime and early jazz. He has played countless New York jazz clubs and concert venues worldwide, including the Grand Parade du Jazz in Venice and Jazz At Lincoln Center, and he recently appeared with the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, where he performed the world premiere of The Eubie Blake Concerto. Waldo’s TV and film credits include The Tonight Show, the PBS documentary Storyville: The Naked Dance, and Ken Burns’s Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. He has produced and arranged over forty albums, including a ragtime orchestra album for BMG, and he is currently working on albums for Chiaroscuro, GHB, and Delmark Records. His This Is Ragtime, presently being republished by Jazz at Lincoln Center, is the definitive book on the subject. Waldo has been the music director for a number of theatrical shows in New York City, including Mr. Jelly Lord (directed by Vernel Bagneris,) and Ambassador Satch (directed by André De Shields), and he has originated four one-man shows: Eubie and Me; The Naked Dance: The Music of Storyville; Shake That Thing!; and Waldo’s 1927 Revue.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
7:00 p.m. program | 8:00 p.m. performance and reception
Theater 3 (The Celeste Bartos Theater)
The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
The Museum of Modern Art
4 West 54 Street