On April 14, 2010, the Jazz Loft Project and the New York Public Library presented a program devoted to the monumental, behind-the-scenes influence of pianist, arranger, composer, teacher, and Jazz Loft veteran Hall Overton. Featuring Steve Reich, composer; Joel Sachs, conductor and pianist; Carman Moore, composer, arranger, and conductor; Ethan Iverson, composer and pianist; Sam Stephenson, Director of the Jazz Loft Project.
Signs commemorating the work of the Kitchen Sisters at the "Reality Radio" performance and book signing at the American Tobacco Campus. Photograph by Maggie Smith. July 26, 2010.
photos from the reality radio performance and book signing with the kitchen sisters July 26, 2010
Held in conjunction with the CDS summer Audio Institute, Hearing is Believing
Award winning National Public Radio producers, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva of The Kitchen Sisters, began their collaboration within documentary arts over twenty-five years ago. Their renowned partnership has been responsible for some of the most intimate, provocative, and sound-rich documentary work to date. Hidden Kitchens, their duPont Award winning radio series, reveals a world of legendary meals, curious eating habits and long forgotten tradition. Lost & Found Sound series, heard on NPR’s All Things Considered, reveals a tapestry of richly layered audio artifact. Seeking out seldom-heard voices of Americans all across the county, the Kitchen Sisters weave together a sound-score that concerns itself with how sound shapes history and how history has been shaped by sound. They are currently producing NPR series The Hidden World of Girls - Girls and the Women They Become, an in-depth exploration of coming of age rituals, hidden identities, and portraits of extraordinary ordinary women.
From left to right: The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva), Ira Glass, Joe Richman, and Gwen Macsai at the "Reality Radio" book event in Chicago. Photograph by Alix Lowrey Blair. March 2010.
reality radio book launch at third coast filmless festival
In March, the Third Coast Filmless Festival’s “Words on Sound” book launch event to celebrate the publication of Reality Radio was part of a full day of listening to sound-rich audio features made by some of the most influential producers working today. Held at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the event kicked off with an interview of coeditors John Biewen and Alexa Dilworth by Re:sounds’s Gwen Macsai, followed by performances by Reality Radio contributors Ira Glass (This American Life), the Kitchen Sisters (Hidden Kitchens, Lost & Found Sound), and Joe Richman (Radio Diaries).
Singer-songwriter Abraham Levitan’s compositions, written and performed on the spot, followed each speaker. Listen to the song he wrote after hearing Macsai’s conversation with Biewen and Dilworth - “It’s a Book About Sound”
brown bag lunch presentation of photographs by ed pincus
Ed Pincus, a filmmaker for more then 45 years, presented prints of photographs from his project — Mud Season — at the Center for Documentary Studies, April 12, 2010.
From left: John Biewen (seated) and Bob Edwards (at lectern). Photograph by Jodi Biewen.
reality radio book signing and talk at politics and prose, washington, dc
May 15, 2010
“Reality Radio is a fabulous book I wish I could have read when I started at NPR in 1974. It would have shaved 10–15 years off the learning curve in discovering how to make great radio.”—Bob Edwards, host of The Bob Edwards Show on Sirius XM Radio
between floors with director jen white
southern circuit film screening
April 16, 7 p.m. (reception at 6 p.m.) Between Floors examines the human condition through a uniquely claustrophobic lens: five stuck elevators and the people trapped inside them. Each elevator becomes an existential purgatory, forcing its occupants to not only confront their isolation, but themselves and each other in varied and unexpected ways. The film is as unusual as it is arresting, blurring lines of genre, tone, and form while its characters are stripped bare—trapped, alone, waiting—and we get to watch what happens. Awkwardly funny, numbingly tragic, anxiously crushing, and ultimately liberating, the film features a colorful variety of characters stripped of control, slowed to a halt, and forced to reflect…until the doors open. » Continue Reading…
