Jon Jang to Deliver a Performance-Lecture in the Spring!
On Asian American Jazz and Political Activism
Location
On Campus
Date & Time
April 6, 2017, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Description
Join us for the inaugural event of UMBC’s Asian American Faculty Council
A Lecture and Performance with Musician-Activist Jon Jang
Thursday • 6 April 2017 • 6:30PM
UMBC Music Box • PAHB 151
Free and open to the public
Information: theo@umbc.edu
Lecture:
The Sounds of Struggle: Music from the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s to the Asian American Movement of the 1980s
Composer/pianist/public intellectual/political activist Jon Jang reflects on his early years from learning about the power of black music and black revolutionary politics during his high school years and at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in the 1970s to his work as a musician and activist in relationship to the Asian American Movement and other progressive political movements in the 1980s.
Performance:
How Music Got into Me and How I Got into Music
About Jon Jang:
Jon Jang (composer, pianist) became the first Chinese American to compose a symphonic work, “The Chinese American Symphony,” commissioned and performed by the Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra and the Oakland East Bay Symphony that honors the Chinese immigrant laborers who built the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. Jang and James Newton composed “When Sorrow Turns to Joy – Songlines: The Spiritual Tributary of Paul Robeson and Mei Lanfang” - commissioned by Cal Performances and has recorded with Newton, as well as with David Murray and Max Roach. Jang toured with legendary drummer Max Roach in United States and Europe including the Royal Festival Hall in London. Jang has taught at Stanford University and was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. / Cesar Chavez / Rosa Parks Visiting Professor recognition at the University of Michigan. Recently, Jang has been touring with his presentation, The Sounds of Struggle: Music from the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s to the Asian American Movement of the 1980s, at Columbia University, as well as other universities on the East Coast.
Sponsors:
- UMBC Asian American Faculty Council
- UMBC College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
- UMBC Department of American Studies
- UMBC Department of Music
- UMBC Program in Asian Studies
- UMBC Student Life's Mosaic Center
- University of Maryland at College Park, Program in Asian American Studies
