SBMA HOSTS TED NASH BASH
On Saturday afternoon, October 9, the State Street pedestrian promenade at the corner of Anapamu Street will become a prime spot for hearing what promises to be a memorable concert of contemporary jazz. Ted Nash, saxophonist for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Grammy Award–winning composer, and fearless innovator at the intersections of music and the other arts, will be on hand as a guest of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art to lead a band on the steps of the museum starting at 2:30 . Nash has been workshopping with musicians from Santa Barbara City College for the past two weeks, improvising and composing pieces based on works of art in the museum’s permanent collection. The works in progress will get their first public airing at this free performance.
The concert, titled “The Sound of Art,” will respond to many things — specific individual works of art, but also the remodel of the museum space and the various social upheavals that have affected all of us over the past two years. Nash, who has been here before to conduct this type of workshop for SBMA, is uniquely suited to this task, as he has been pushing the boundaries between music, visual art, literature, and history for decades. In 2017, he won the Grammy for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album for Presidential Suite: Eight Variations on Freedom , a project that combined great historical speeches by such figures as John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela with original music by Nash. Presidential Suite followed a successful recording of seven pieces based on the work of seven modern painters, which was called Portrait in Seven Shades .