Golden Hour with Big Chief Donald Harrison

Jazz Saxophonist and Big Chief Donald Harrison perform Friday, June 26 for the next installment of the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park’s interactive Facebook live stream series, “Golden Hour,” hosted by Nick Spitzer of the public radio program American Routes. Spitzer will be in conversation with Harrison and his quintet between musical performances.

The hour-long performance/interview will begin at 6:30pm and will stream from the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park’s Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/NolaJazzNHP/ Matt Hampsey, supervisory park ranger of New Orleans Jazz NHP notes, “Our mission is interpretation and conservation of jazz music and the culture that created jazz in New Orleans and the region. We can do that very effectively in a live stream that also adds ‘conversation’ to the mix. American Routes extends that to national public radio audiences.”

“It just makes so much sense in dark times to bring great New Orleans and south Louisiana music and cultures to wider audiences inspiring them with hope, musical brilliance and resilience,” said folklorist and public radio host Nick Spitzer of Tulane University.

New Orleans born saxophonist Donald Harrison is a musician/composer who master musicians consider a master of every era of jazz, soul, funk, and a composer of orchestral classical music. In the HBO drama Treme, Emmy winning director David Simon created two characters to portray how Harrison innovated new styles of music. Harrison is the recognized Big Chief of Congo Square in Afro-New Orleans culture and was made a Chief in 2019 by Queen Diambi Kabatusuila in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa. He has performed with over 200 jazz masters, including Art Blakey, Eddie Palmieri, McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis and Ron Carter and he created three influential styles of jazz. At the age of nineteen, Harrison created a modern jazz take on the New Orleans second-line tradition and introduced his composition New York Second-Line to the jazz world in 1979. By the mid-’80s, he created Nouveau Swing, a distinctive sound that blended the swing beat of modern jazz with hip-hop, funk, and soul music. In the ’90s, Harrison recorded hits in the smooth jazz genre. He began exploring music through the lens of quantum physics in 2000. With quantum jazz, Harrison heard how to move music from a two-dimensional state into a four-dimensional state. He is composing orchestral classical music for upcoming premieres and adding hip-hop/jazz to his multi-genre recordings and performances.

The program will stream from Marigny Studios –created from the historically repurposed Luthjen’s 1950’s dance hall. Viewers will be invited to participate through the comments on the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park’s Facebook page. The live web-streaming program will be recorded and produced by Elephant Quilt Productions and will be edited for re-broadcast nationally on American Routes later in 2020. Prior featured artists have been Rickie Lee Jones, the Pine Leaf Boys, Kermit Ruffins & the Barbecue Swingers, Don Vappie, Tom McDermott, Meschiya Lake, Jason Marsalis and Leyla McCalla.

The Golden Hour series is underwritten by the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park and produced in collaboration with Elephant Quilt Productions.

For more information about the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park https://www.nps.gov/jazz/index.htm

For information about American Routes: www.americanroutes.org