Po'Jazz
...at the Center

TOM AALFS, violinist, composer and arranger, is a featured soloist on Etta Jones' and Houston Person's two recent CDs and has performed at many New York City venues including the Blue Note, Sweet Basil, Birdland, and the Museum of Modern Art. He has been with Po' Jazz at the Center since the series' inception, and is its Music Director. His latest CD, Group 15, all Thelonius Monk compositions, was recorded with Jay Leonhart on bass and Peter Bernstein on guitar.

GHA'IL RHODES BENJAMIN, poet, actress, singer, and storyteller, writes and performs her one-woman show "Spiritual Eclipse" in the New York tri-state area, Detroit, and Chicago. She has graced the stages of nightclubs, theatres, schools, churches, and homeless shelters with her homegrown lyrics, infused with survival, dignity and humor. She was a winner in the 1998 Famous Poets Society international competition, and a recipient of the Outstanding Young Woman of America Award in 1997 for her writing of plays for children and conducting of theatre and poetry workshops. A native of Detroit, Gha'il currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

BROOKLYN POETRY CHOIR was conceived during a concert in Prospect Park Bandshell by co-founders Tyrone Henderson and Golda Solomon. Its members include writers, performers, educators, and musicians who share the common thread of Brooklyn, the "mother borough." The choir, conducted by Tyrone Henderson, performs original material composed both individually and collaboratively. The poetry speaks from the members' unique voices and varied backgrounds, fused with jazz and blues and the camaraderie of creativity.

EMILIE CACCIA is a fifth-grade student at Ardsley Middle School who enjoys singing. She likes to spend some of her free time with her dog, Buddy and guinea pig, Sly.

ANNIE CHU has been locked away on the fourth floor of a dilapidated building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her only connection to the world is via her writings in poetry and prose, featured in such places as Barnes and Noble, Cornelia Street Cafe, and Excess Compassion. One of her poetry anthologies, A Flower's Way, has managed to escape her prison, and is selectively available to the public. While confined, she has found much time to nurture the birth of a second poetry anthology. She thanks Golda profusely for the invitation to briefly taste the world of freedom.

BILLY COLLINS, a resident of Somers, New York, is the author of six books of poetry include Picnic, Lightning, The Art of Drowning, Questions About Angels (a National Poetry Series selection by Edward Hirsch), The Apple That Astonished Paris, Video Poems (1980), and Pokerface. A volume of his new and selected poems, Sailing Alone Around the Room, will be published in September 2001 by Random House. In June of this year, he was named the next U.S. Poet Laureate and will assume that role in October. Other honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Collins' poetry has appeared in anthologies, textbooks, and a variety of periodicals including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, Harper's, The Paris Review and The New Yorker. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York, where he has taught for the past 30 years, and is a writer-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College. www.billycollins.com

ELIZABETH CONRAD DISPENZA has worked as a producer and writer in theatre and television, including projects with PBS and the launch of the Arts & Entertainment channel. Her recent return to writing poetry as craft has found her studying with Donald Justice, Carl Phillips, Carol Frost, Dave Smith, and the editors of Kenyon and American Poetry Review. She is a program assistant with William Paterson University's Jazz Studies program and has worked with Rufus Reid, Don Braden, Stanley Turrentine, and other influential members of the jazz community.

RANDALL ENG is a pianist, music director, and composer whose recent credits include Amistad, Running Man, and The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin. He is currently working on two large works, a music-theatre piece entitled Florida (Finalist, 2000 Richard Rodgers Award), and an opera enttled Henry's Wife. He has received degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, and NYU, has studied with Anthony Davis, Wadada Leo Smith, and Robin Holloway, and has been awarded resident fellowships at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony for the arts.

JOE EXLEY, tubist, has been recorded on television news themes, albums of rock and jazz, and has performed with many orchestras and bands in just about every type of music imaginable. Some of his credits include performing with William Russo and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble, the Chicago Jazz Orchestra and the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Bravo! Colorado Vail Valley Music Festival and the Birch Creek Performance Center. Joe is Music Director for brooklyn poetry project.

HATTIE GOSSETT, writer and spoken word artist, is the author of the prose-poetry collection presenting sister noblues, and her work has been published in many anthologies and periodicals. She has taught writing and literature in jails, colleges, living rooms, women's centers, public schools, art centers, bars, and on the phone. A veteran of New York's East Village and Harlem spoken word and literary scenes, she tours nationally as a solo artist and with her PoetryJazz Band to festivals, theatres, bars, colleges, and community centers.

TYRONE HENDERSON is a spoken-word performer and multimedia artist who has performed in numerous venues in the United States and Europe, including the Nuyorican Poets Café, Knitting Factory, and Prince Edward's Hall in Winchester, UK. His new CD, Not So Unusual Blues, was recently released. He has taught poetry workshops for adults and young people, and was co-writer and performer in the cyber performance, The Technophobe and the Madman, performed live on the Internet in February 2001. Tyrone is a native of Harlem, now residing in Brooklyn.

RON JACKSON, guitarist, composer, arranger and winner of the first annual 1996 Heritage Guitars International Jazz Guitar Competition, has established himself on the international scene. He has two CDs under his own name: A Guitar Thing and Thinking of You as well as the recently released CD Concrete Jungle, co-led with bassist Nicki Parrott. He is a faculty member at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and WBGO Jazz for Teens program. He has appeared at the New Orleans Heritage and Jazz Festival and performs regularly in New York City. Rufus Reid calls him "a swinging and witty guitarist.

JAMES LANDRUM is an eighth grade student at Sleepy Hollow Middle School and is currently studying flute with Charlie Lagond. He has also sung on stage as Amahl in "Amahl and the Night Visitors" and in "The Music Man" and "Damn Yankees."

KINNY LANDRUM is a composer, arranger, studio musician and musical director. Much of his current work is for film, TV and commercials, including the TV series Twin Peaks and Saturday Night Live, the film Wild At Heart, and the award-winning PBS special, Alamance. He has worked with any number of performers, including Carly Simon, Robert Palmer, Herbie Mann, Neil Sedaka, and Natalie Cole, and has played in the pit for Broadway shows such as Metro. Kinny has also been a member of the Irish trad/rock band, Kips Bay, and his jazz-flavored tune "Clear Blue Sky" was recently recorded by Celtic uilleann piper Jerry O'Sullivan.

ISHLE YI PARK is a Korean American woman who has taught poetry in prisons, high schools, and community centers throughout New York. A NYFA fiction grant recipient (Spring 2000), her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Beacon Best 2001, The Cream City Review, and New American Writing. She has a chapbook and a CD, FeedBack Poets Collective, and her first book of poems will be published with Kaya Press in the Fall of 2002.

JD PARRAN has recently released his first CD as a leader, JD Parran & Spirit Stage. His studio credits include recordings with Stevie Wonder and John Lennon. For fifteen years, he was a member of New Winds with Robert Dick and Ned Rothenberg, and is a longtime member of Anthony Davis' Episteme ensemble. In recent years he has worked with Shirley LeFlore, producing works such as Proclivity, which was written for and premiered by Don Byron's chamber ensemble Semaphore. He currently performs and records with Anthony Braxton's ensembles.

NICKI PARROTT came to New York from Australia in 1994 to study with acclaimed bassist, Rufus Reid. She has performed at major festivals including the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival. Downbeat said of her in a review of her Bern, Switzerland festival appearance: "Nicki Parrott's lead on "A Man I Love" …transformed a conservative audience into an enthusiastic mob demanding double encores." She has appeared in the pit of Broadway shows such as "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown," "Jekyll and Hyde," and "The Lion King." Nicki co-leads with guitarist Ron Jackson on the recently released CD, Concrete Jungle.

QUIMETTA PERLE is a multimedia artist whose passion since childhood has been creating images and writing poems. Most recently, she has performed her poetry at BAM Café and Musica Against Drugs in Brooklyn. Her paintings, drawings, and digital prints have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries throughout the United States. Her projects include Things, a narrative work in CD-ROM form with spoken text, music and animated image, and Demon Slayer, an artist's book and performance with spoken narration, dance, and percussion. She was a co-writer of The Technophobe and the Madman, performed live on the Internet in February 2001. Quimetta teaches in the Computer Graphics and Interactive Media Department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

RICK PERNOD is the founder and director of Exoterica, a Bronx-based literary organization that produces workshops, literary events, and the Exoterica Reading Series, an award-winning poetry series now in its tenth year. Most recently, he was chosen by the National Arts Club and Con Edison to administer their High School Writing Scholarship Program. His work with Exoterica has won him fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and the Bronx Council on the Arts. Rick's poetry has won awards from The Academy of American Poets, and the 1999 BRIO for poetry from The Bronx Council on the Arts. His work has appeared in New Voices: The Academy of American Poets Anthology, The American Book Review, and other publications. He is the leader and vocalist of the spoken word band, The House of Pernod, which recently released a CD, and currently teaches creative writing at City College in New York.

MINNIE BRUCE PRATT is an award-winning writer and teacher who has long been active in the women's movement. She has published four books of poetry, The Sound of One Fork, We Say We Love Each Other, Crime Against Nature, and Walking Back Up Depot Street, and has been granted a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts. Crime Against Nature, on Pratt's relationship to her two sons as a lesbian mother, was chosen as the 1989 Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets, and in 1991 was given the American Library Association Gay and Lesbian Book Award for Literature. That same year she was chosen to receive a Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett award given by the Fund for Free Expression to writers "who have been victimized by political persecution." Her prose writings include Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991 and a 1995 volume of short stories titled S/HE, which was one of three finalists for the Firecracker Award in Non-Fiction. Together with Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith, she co-authored Yours In Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives On Anti-Semitism and Racism, which has been adopted for classroom use in hundreds of college courses. She is currently a member of the Graduate Faculty of The Union Institute, a non-residential alternative Ph.D.-granting university. www.mbpratt.org

BERNARD "PRETTY" PURDIE, the world's most recorded drummer, has been on the music scene for 40+ years and is included on more than 4,000 recordings. The eleventh of fifteen children, Purdie began as a six-year-old to bang out rhythms on improvised equipment. At 14 years of age he purchased his first real drum set and became the most important provider for the family - earning his pay with country and carnival bands. This "schooling" enabled Purdie to "feel my way into nearly every kind of music, 'cause I had to know all styles and was never afraid to try something new." He moved to New York in 1960 after finishing high school and played with (among others), Lonnie Youngblood before landing his first hit with King Curtis. This led to his engagement with Aretha Franklin in 1970 - the beginning of an unparalleled career. Since then, Purdie has been a regular guest in the studios of the stars of Jazz, Soul, and Rock, as well as regularly producing his own solo albums under his own name. Some of his favorite recordings are Nina Simone's The Blues, James Brown's Cold Sweat, B.B. King's The Thrill Is Gone, Steely Dan's Aja, and Aretha Franklin's & King Curtis' Live At Fillmore West. He recently performed in The New York City Center Encores Series' revival of Hair, and is producer of a 3-volume educational video set, The Most Educational Function. His most recently released CD is Masters of Groove Meet Dr. No. www.bernardpurdie.com

LARRY RIDLEY, bassist, is known as an excellent accompanist and a thoughtful soloist. He studied at Indiana University and the Lenox School of Jazz. After gigging in his hometown with Freddie Hubbard, James Spaulding and Wes Montgomery, Ridley relocated to New York, where he has been active ever since. Among his more significant musical associations in the 1960s were with Slide Hampton, Max Roach, Red Garland, Art Farmer, Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan and George Wein's Newport All-Stars (1969). Thelonious Monk's regular bassist during 1970-73, Ridley became involved in jazz education, heading the jazz program and music department at Rutgers University. He has been leader, bassist, and artistic director of the Jazz Legacy Ensemble since 1985, and this year became Executive Director of the African American Jazz Caucus of the International Association of Jazz Educators.

PATRICK ROSAL is a New Jersey native and the son of Ilokano immigrants. He is the author of the chapbook Uncommon Denominators (winner of the University of South Carolina, Aiken Palanquin Poetry Series Award in 2000). His poetry has appeared in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Literary Review, The Sarah Lawrence Review, Footwork: The Paterson Literary Review, and several anthologies. His poems have been honored by the annual Allen Ginsberg Awards and will be included in a forthcoming volume of The Beacon Best 2001: Great Writings by Women and Men of Color. He has been a featured reader at many east coast venues, including the Cornelia Street Cafe, and he is currently the Emerging Writer in Residence at Penn State University, Altoona.

BARBARA SFRAGA, vocalist and lyricist, was in college studying classical voice when she found that her inspiration came from absorbing the works of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Johnny Hartman, and Anita O'Day. Listening to a jazz radio show out of New Haven, CT in the early 80's, her passion for jazz ignited, and she went on to further her jazz education. She is founder of the organization In Concert With Our Community, which generates time and talent to raise funds for various children's organizations. Her debut CD, Oh What A Thrill, was released last year.

GOLDA SOLOMON, Po'Jazz project director, is a professor of communications, poet, jazz enthusiast and producer. She is both a docent to jazz venues through her business JazzJaunts and a supporter to women musicians. She has performed with Tom Aalfs at the Poetry Project and other tri-state venues. Po'Jazz combines her two passions - poetry and jazz - and she selects musicians with an ear to the poetry they will be improvising behind. Her chapbook, Flatbush Cowgirl, was published last year, and she has just produced a companion CD of her poems, First Set.

MELVIN SPARKS melvinsparks.com

RAY TURULL is a self-taught, born-to-play percussionist who has appeared with such notables as Gene Hernandez y Novedades, Charlie Palmieri, Johnny Colon, and Dave Valentin, and played in venues such as Lincoln Center, Madison Square Garden, Nell's, Roseland, and The Palladium. He leads his own six-piece Latin jazz group known as "LJ5" and is a member of Andrea Brachfeld's "Phoenix Rising," a Latin jazz-fusion group. Ray recently added the conga tracks for a new CD, Irresistible, by Jesse Herrero's SonSublime.

ANGELO VERGA's poems have appeared in scores of journals, including The Village Voice, Graffiti Rag, Rattle, Hanging Loose, The Massachusetts Review, Pearl, The New Orleans Poetry Forum, Mudfish, and Paterson Literary Review, and have been translated into Spanish & Japanese. He has 2 collections of poems: Across The Street From Lincoln Hospital and The Six O'clock News. Verga has read at St Mark's Church, The Knitting Factory, Grolier Poetry Book Shop, and on radio and cable TV. He won a Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO award, is on the exec board of The NYC Poetry Calendar, and curates poetry & performance at The Cornelia Street Cafe. His work has been described as direct and surreal.

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