Like Miles, Mingus and Monk, drummer Michael Carvin is a leader who
knows when and how to mix veteran musicians with emerging jazz stars. Such a tasteful mixture of the tried and true with a fresh brood was
fully evident recently at Dizzy’s Club in midtown Manhattan.
Many young girls start doll collecting with their first Barbie but there
are some people who continue into adulthood. Debbie Behan Garrett, author of The Doll
Blogs: When Dolls Speak, I Listen and creator of the Black Doll
Collecting website, provides some insight on collecting Black dolls.
On Monday, March 25, 2013, Evidence, A Dance Company, held its 9th Annual Gala at The Plaza Hotel. Highlights from the star-studded, black-tie affair hosted by actress Lynn Whitfield and chaired by Tonya Lewis Lee and Spike Lee were the Community Activist Award that went to the late Beth Young and the 2013 Corporate Philanthropy Award given to Valentino D. Carlotti on behalf of Goldman, Sachs & Company.
In Eslanda—the
Labor and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (Yale University
Press, New Haven & London, 2013), author Barbara Ransby, a professor in the
department of African American Studies, Gender, and Women Studies
Program, University of Illinois, Chicago, extricates Eslanda Goode
Robeson from the enormous shadow cast by her indomitable husband and
provides her a platform to express her own considerable bona fides.
On Tuesday, February 26, the Dance Theater of Harlem held its Vision
Gala at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York City. Entertainment industry
veteran Vanessa Williams was honored for her extraordinary career
accomplishments in film, television, music and the Broadway stage.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, who arose from the world of graffiti to become an
internationally acclaimed artist, has been dead since 1988, but his life
and work is expansively invoked at the Gagosian Gallery in lower
Manhattan.
Surrounded by a montage of vintage photographs, more than a dozen from
his vast collection, Chuck Stewart is in a comfortable cove to relate
bits and pieces of his remarkable life. “I guess if I hadn’t been a
photographer, I might have been an economist since I did pretty well in
those classes in college,” he said without a trace of regret. And at 85, with an archive of photos of notables to his credit,
including a veritable pantheon of jazz greats, Stewart appears quite
content to rest on his considerable laurels.
