Karrin Allyson at the Dakota
Benefitting the Leigh Kamman
Legacy Project
November 28, 2017 at 7:00 p.m.

Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant
1010 Nicollet Mall
Minneapolis, 612-332-1010

International Vocalist Karrin Allyson
Laura Caviani, piano
Gordy Johnson, bass
Phil Hey, drums

Hosted by Leigh Kamman’s friend and colleague, Peabody Award-winning radio host Bill McGlaughlin

Families and students are welcome. The Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant is donating all of proceeds from ticket sales to the Leigh Kamman Legacy Project.

Tickets $50
612-332-5299
http://www.dakotacooks.com/event/leigh-kamman-legacy-project-benefit-feat-karrin-allyson/

Previews

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Karrin Allyson has recorded 15 albums, earning five Grammy nominations, most recently for 2015 recording, “Many a New Day: Karrin Allyson Sings Rodgers & Hammerstein.” Christopher Loudon, Jazz Times, wrote: “At last, the Hammerstein portion of the Rodgers canon is getting serious, full-length appreciation ...There’s no room on this album for splashy solos or virtuosic grandstanding. The focus is squarely on sensitive, intelligent arrangements shaped around Allyson’s unique sound—slightly parched and gently tremulous—expressly built to exalt a spectrum of instantly familiar yet largely underappreciated gems. An exquisitely thoughtful trio album, it’s also an important one.”

Karrin lives in New York City, following a childhood in the Midwest, schooling in the Bay Area, a degree in classical piano performance and important stints in Minneapolis and Kansas City, where she began her recording career with Concord Jazz. Karrin currently spends two days out of three on tour, playing the major jazz festivals, concert venues and clubs of the U.S. and making repeated tours overseas — to Brazil, Japan, Australia and the great cities of Europe. Throughout 2014 Allyson was featured as solo vocalist in the ‘Newport —Now 60’ Tour which played in thirty cities across the US and Canada before concluding the 2014 Newport Festival.

Among musicians, Karrin is known as a great bandleader and one of the deep pleasures of the current scene is listening to her highly developed interplay with her bandmates — it sounds so effortless — but it conceals a deep musical sophistication. It’s one of Allyson’s great achievements — the result of working over the years with an ensemble of fearless and powerfully committed jazz virtuosi. Karrin has also developed a unique relationship with the multi-talented L.A. composer Chris Caswell and the two have collaborated for nearly ten years as composers and performers in a very spirited ensemble featuring Caswell on Hammond B-3 organ. In fact, Karrin has been doing a lot of writing of late and promises an album of original songs in the near future.

It’s no surprise that music lovers and critics around the world have been singing Allyson’s name from the roof tops, marveling at the range of this extraordinary musician, who moves with such ease and authority from the Great American Songbook of Gershwin and Porter to the Great American Jazz Songbook of Duke and Thelonious and Miles and Dizzy, jet-setting to Rio and Paris and swinging back home to pick up Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell and Jimmy Webb, not to mention her mean facility for singing down home Kansas City blues. What unites this wide world of music — brings it together and makes sense of it all — is Karrin’s warmth and depth. She’s not just singing a lyric; she’s telling you her story. And then that becomes your story. You hear the music from the inside out.

Karrin’s website
http://www.karrin.com/

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Bill McGlaughlin is a Peabody Award-winning radio host, but also an award-winning composer, conductor, and music educator.

Bill won the Peabody Award for the Minnesota Public Radio classical music show “Saint Paul Sunday.” He hosted the show from 1980 to 2007, with encore broadcasts airing through 2012. He currently hosts “Exploring Music,” an internationally syndicated radio program featuring classical music. Bill also conducted several orchestras, including the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Kansas City Symphony. His compositions have been performed throughout the United States.

Bill’s website
https://exploringmusic.wfmt.com/

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The mission of the Leigh Kamman Legacy Project is to preserve and share the body of work including audio, visual and written resources of Leigh Kamman, jazz broadcaster.

Leigh Kamman was an important broadcaster and advocate for jazz music.  He was helpful in integrating the "jazz world" early on by presenting and producing musicians of color and was friends with many of the giants of the industry.  Born in 1922, he became intrigued with jazz in the 1930s, and interviewed Duke Ellington for the school newspaper at a train station in Saint Paul when he was 17 years old.

He went onto working at radio stations in Minnesota and New York, including WOV in New York in the 1950s, where he interviewed some of the biggest names in jazz from the Palm Café in Harlem. He later broadcasted in Minnesota on KSTP, KQRS, and last with Minnesota Public Radio with his popular Jazz Image show. He died on October 17, 2014, aged 92.

Kamman's  legacy includes hundreds of historical interviews with musicians and thousands of hours of sophisticated and elegant radio programming. The Leigh Kamman Legacy Project has converted many of Kamman’s audio interviews, and plans to make many of these archives available for streaming from its website http://www.leighkamman.com/. The Project will create a central location for Kamman's vast collection of records, books, photos and other memorabilia, and offer a public viewing space that acts as a companion to the website.

Current activities include:

posting Leigh’s interviews with the titans of jazz on the Project website http://www.leighkamman.com/;
Larry Englund hosting on KFAI 90.3 FM Radio the Saturday morning Kamman Jazz 45 segment, where Larry’s plays recordings from Leigh’s collection;
Brad Bellows’ presentations at the Black Dog Café, including Leigh's interviews and audio collection; and
“Leigh Kamman Classic Originals” at Jazz Central, a monthly series on the last Saturday of the month featuring local groups playing one set of music of a classic jazz artist, followed by a presentation of Leigh’s interviews with the subject, ending with one more set of original music.
Production has begun for the “Jazz Image: Minnesota Edition” – a series of interviews from Leigh’s archive that are being prepared for airplay on KBEM Jazz 88 in 2018.

Donations to the Leigh Kamman Legacy Project, a 501(C3) corporation, will assist in this effort.

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For more information, visit the Leigh Kamman Legacy Project website and FaceBook page.
http://www.leighkamman.com/
https://www.facebook.com/LeighKammanProject/?fref=nf

Contact:

Brad Bellows, Leigh Kamman Legacy Project Secretary/Treasurer
leighkammanlegacyproject@gmail.com
612-203-4739

Larry McDonough, Leigh Kamman Legacy Project Board Member
mcdon056@umn.edu
651-398-8053