Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization have joined forces and put all their massive show-tune power into making the first CD created exclusively for Broadway Cares: The Richard Rodgers Centennial Jazz Piano Album. The CD is not only a good way to get a head start on celebrating the 100th anniversary of Richard Rodgers’ birth on June 28, 2002, but also to give money to AIDS-related research – everything related to this project was donated, so all the cash goes straight to people fighting the good fight against HIV.
Williamson Music was kind enough to provide the funding, and six pianists were kind enough to record their interpretations of standards from the Rodgers songbook: Bill Charlap, Benny Green, Kenny Barron, Marian McPartland, George Shearing, and album producer Fred Hersch. (This album, along with the two other albums benefiting AIDS which Hersch has produced, is available on the Broadway Cares website with his autograph.)
The Richard Rodgers Centennial Jazz Piano Album is not available in stores; you can pick it up at Broadway Cares’ Web site, www.broadwaycares.org, or by calling (212) 840-0770, ext. 250.
Related Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Kurt Elling: Man in the Air
Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time