On Saturday, November 13 at 12:00pm, Between the Ropes will feature jazz musicians as they duel in friendly musician battles for an afternoon in Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, a 140-seat jazz club with down-home yet sophisticated atmosphere, against a backdrop of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. Special guest artists including Walter Blanding (saxophone), Sherman Irby (saxophone), Carlos Henriquez (bass), Eric Lewis (piano) and Ali Jackson (drums) will showcase skill and talent during these exclusive one-on-one battles. This event is free and open to the public.
In Unforgivable Blackness, his latest work, Mr. Burns tells the story of the first black heavyweight champion of the world, who challenged the prejudices of his day. During the seven years (1908-15) he reigned supreme, the boxing establishment agitated to find a Great White Hope who might unseat him (the era’s openly racist expressions are shocking today). Unforgivable Blackness is a fascinating, complex study of a magnificently gifted athlete who loved to read, party and “womanize,” and whose independence and dignity collided both with a racist society and his own large, self-defeating appetites.
Ken Burns has been making documentary films for more than thirty years. Since the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, he has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed documentaries ever made including Huey Long, Statue of Liberty, Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mark Twain. Ken was the director, producer, co-writer, chief cinematographer, music director and executive producer of the landmark television series The Civil War. This film was the highest rated series in the history of American Public Television and attracted an audience of 40 million during its premiere in September 1990. The series was honored with more than forty major film and television awards, including two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, Producer of the Year Award from the Producer's Guild, People's Choice Award, Peabody Award, DuPont-Columbia Award, D.W. Griffiths Award, and the $50,000 Lincoln Prize, among dozens of others. Ken Burns was also the director, producer, co-writer, chief cinematographer, music director and executive producer of the Public Television series Baseball. Four and a half years in the making and eighteen and a half hours in length, this film covers the history of baseball from the 1840s to the present. It became the most watched series in PBS history, attracting more than 45 million viewers. Baseball received numerous awards, including an Emmy, the CINE Golden Eagle Award, the Clarion Award, and the Television Critics Award for Outstanding Achievement in Sports and Special Programming. In January 2001, Jazz, the third in Ken’s trilogy of epic documentaries, was broadcast on PBS. This 19-hour, ten-part film explores in detail the culture, politics and dreams that gave birth to jazz music, and follows this most American of art forms from its origins in blues and ragtime through swing, bebop and fusion. Jazz received the Television Critics Award for Outstanding Achievement in News & Information, as well as the Christopher Award, the CINE Golden Eagle Award and the ASCAP President's Award for Outstanding Television Documentary. The film was also nominated for five Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Non-Fiction Series. The historian Stephen Ambrose has said of Ken’s films, “More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source.”
