New Orleans saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr. was honored as NEA Jazz Master, won $ 25K award | Music

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Donald Harrison Jr., the New Orleans jazz saxophonist, educator and Mardi Gras Indian Big Chief, was featured in the national Endowment for the Arts 2022 Jazz Masters class. Harrisons ’fellow honorees were drummer Billy Hart who accompanied him on the rehearsal performance by Cookers bassist Stanley Clarke and vocalist Cassandra Wilson.

Harrison specifically received the 2022 AB Spellman Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy, an award given to an individual who has made major contributions to the appreciation, knowledge, and advancement of the American jazz art form.

Like Wilson, Hart and Clarke, who were honored as musicians, Harrison will receive a $ 25,000 grant.

Photo by sponsor SOPHIA GERMER – Jazz musician Donald Harrison Jr. plays keyboard while at Tipitina International Program for high school students at the Fountainbleau rehearsal building in New Orleans, Monday April 18, 2016

Being selected among the famous NEA Jazz Masters list is a nonpareil honor, Harrison, 61, said in a statement released by the NEA. For me, it’s a tribute to staying on course in jazz culture, and it leaves me in great awe. I look forward to seeing myself in the future on the same path of learning our music after sharing those lessons with others.

In my estimation, the award recognizes the work against all odds that the wages of jazz artists and advocates every day. In my case, the award shows that I live on both sides of the aisle. My role is to be a musician and cultural participant who advocates for all. My heart is glad and humbled to have been selected as the 2022 AB Spellman Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy recipient. AB Spellman’s work and passion towards jazz at its best is a shining beacon that I will work with as a musician, teacher, and advocate.

Since 1982, the NEA has honored 165 jazz musicians through the Jazz Masters program. These years, the honorees will be available at a free concert March 31, 2022 at the SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco. Free tickets will be available for the public to reserve in February 2022. The concert will also be live streamed.

Avant-jazz saxophonist and educator Edward Kidd Jordan is not always paid.

Harrison is the second New Orleans jazz saxophonist to receive a prestigious, and worthwhile, national award this year. In February, United States Artists, an organization that funds the arts Foundation in Chicago, named 85-year-old saxophonist and educator Edward Kidd Jordan to its 2021 fellowship class. That fellowship included a $ 50,000 makeover.

Beyond receiving lucrative awards this year, Jordan and Harrison have a different connection: Jordan was one of the teachers who helped shape Harrisons who approached the saxophone years ago.

Harrison literally grew up as a Mardi Gras Indian. His father, Donald Harrison Sr., was a legendary Big Chief who led the Creole Wild West and White Eagles tribes before founding the Guardians of the Flame in the late 1980s.

Young Donald first covered Indian at the age of 2. He was also exposed to bebop notes his father played around the house. At age 16, he discovered the fabled saxophonist Charlie Parker; Bebop in general, and Parker in particular, has become his obsession.

While attending Francis T. Nicholls High School and the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, he studied jazz and played in brass bands and R&B. After graduation, he spent a year studying at under Alvin Batiste at Southern University in Baton Rouge, and with Jordan.

When the pandemic coronavirus hit, Headhunters winner Bill Summers drew his experience from a previous disaster.

He moved to Berklee College of Music in Boston. At a jam session in New York, he met Roy Haynes, the legendary jazz drummer and alumnus of the Parkers quintet. Haynes picked him up for his band.

At age 20, Harrison landed a gig with jazz-soul organist Jack McDuff. Soon, he joined drummer Art Blakeys Jazz Mess Messenger and left Berklee. Its ranks include New Orleans trumpeter Terence Blanchard. Blanchard and Harrison produced their own quintet, releasing five albums in the 1980s.

By the end of the decade, they had moved away from their separate methods. Back then, Harrison was firmly established. His subsequent albums wrote across the spectrum of contemporary jazz in a style he calls the nouveau swing. “

At performances, he often wore a suit and leash, but he often joined the stage of Mardi Gras Indians throughout the regalia. In the 1990s, he founded the Congo Square Nation Afro-New Orleans Cultural Group.

Donald Harrison Jr. is tired. He was tired yesterday, and he will probably be tired tomorrow. For that, he blames Miles Davis.

He has taught dozens of young musicians through the Tipitinas Internship Program. For years, he played in a trio with former Miles Davis bassist Ron Carter and drummer Billy Cobham. He also works with fellow NEA honoree Hart in Cookers, and with percussionist Bill Summers in the current, New Orleans-centric incarnation of Headhunters.

Harrison dedicated the tribute to his parents, Donald and Herreast, his wife, Mary, his daughter Victoria, and his sisters Cherice, Michele, and Cara. He also mentioned his nephews Brian, Kiel, and Chris, son -in -law Derrick, and family, friends, and everyone who uses their lives to maintain and promote jazz.

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