(© AJ Mast)
Jazz at Lincoln Center has announced the guest artists that will be participating in Michael Feinstein’s Jazz & Popular Song Series, to be presented in The Allen Room, May 3-June 8.
Feinstein will introduce each concert, with Tedd Firth as musical director and on piano; and TheaterMania constributor Scott Siegel as supervising producer.
Montego Glover, Darius de Haas, and Lillias White will be featured in I Got it Bad: A New Duke Ellington Revue (May 3-4), exploring the territory where jazz and American popular music came together and flourished in the masterful compositions of Duke Ellington.
Quentin Earl Darrington, Allan Harris, Christiane Noll, and Karen Ziemba will be featured in More Than a Song: The Music That Integrated America (May 17-18), which journeys through the important transition in popular music when white composers like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin brought jazz to Broadway, often introducing African American jazz performers and composers like Fats Waller and Eubie Blake to the American mainstream for the first time.
Leslie Uggams and Curtis Stiger will join Feinstein for the family matinee, I Got Rhythm: The Common Roots of Popular Song and Jazz (June 5), exploring the common roots of 20th century songwriting giants from Duke Ellington to George Gershwin, and many others.
Feinstein, Uggams, and Stiger will also star in the final concert of the series, Sweet and Low Down: How Popular Standards Became Jazz Classics (June 7-8), which will present classic songs from two viewpoints: as they were originally conceived for Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley, and then as they were re-invented by jazz performers to become classics in the jazz repertoire. There will also be special appearances by Wynton Marsalis (June 7 only) and Barbara Carroll (June 8 only).
For tickets and more information, click here.
