Marsalis: Next thing you know, he's liable to be up there with Duke Ellington.

Narrator: Wynton Marsalis and a star-studded cast celebrate the great novelist Ralph Ellison.

Russell: This evening is dedicated to excerpts from the writings of Ralph Ellison with music that was in his record collection.

Narrator: Regina Carter explores her Alabama roots.

Carter: I knew my grandmother.

I spent my summers with my grandmother in Alabama, along with a bunch of cousins.

Narrator: Oliver Lake combines his music, poetry, and art.

And we remember the legendary pianist and composer Stanley Cowell.

Jazz masters take center stage.

"State of the Arts," on location with New Jersey's most creative people.

Announcer: The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, encouraging excellence and engagement in the arts since 1966, is proud to co-produce "State of the Arts" with Stockton University.

Additional support is provided by The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and these friends of "State of the Arts."

♪♪ Narrator: When legendary sax player Oliver Lake played a hometown gig at the Montclair Art Museum in 2018, they called it "Art Meets Jazz."

The world-famous saxophonist brought his paintings and his poetry with him as well.

[ Playing jazz music ] Oliver: That was quite a treat for me because I felt honored by my hometown, Montclair, and the art museum because we had four pieces of my artwork on the stage.

"First is the salad, then the..." I read my poetry.

"Wait, bring all my food at one time on the same plate."

And then, I performed with the trio that I've been playing with over the last 25, 30 years off and on.

In terms of improvisation and creating music spontaneously, I couldn't ask for better cohorts to take that adventure with me.

[ Saxophone solo ] People know that I'm playing from my heart.

And I'm trying to make a clear communication.

And if they are open, they will receive the message that I'm giving them.

Whether it's a squeak or a squawk, they can still hear that what I'm doing is honest and accept it even though that's not what they normally listen to.

[ Jazz music plays ] Narrator: Oliver Lake has been composing and performing innovative jazz with a variety of collaborators for over five decades.

Now in his 70s, he's still open to crossing musical categories and blending genres.

And he brings this same philosophy to his writing and visual art.

Oliver: Throughout my career, I just felt that it was very important to be open and incorporate that openness into my creativity.

Spoken word, visual arts, and music, and composition, I look at it as being one thing.

The visual arts started with me sketching.

And I ended up sketching a lot of musicians.

And I kind of continue that throughout my career doing a little bit of painting.

And I asked my friend Douglas Ewart, who was a visual artist and a saxophonist as well, I would say, "I don't have any time to paint, but I wanted -- I really want to spend some time painting."

And he looked at me and said, "Do you have 15 minutes?"

And I said, "Yeah."

He said, "Well, paint."

And I literally started painting 15 minutes a day.

But it turned out, for me, as a meditation when I started off doing it.

And then, of course, that grew.

And then, the next thing I knew, I had a show.

And it's just continued on from there over the past 15 years.

When I was a teenager, there was a guy who used to go around and put safety pins on all the kids in the block.

And I asked him, "Why are you putting these safety pins on me?"

He said, "Now you're in the 17 club."

I said, "What is it you have to do to be in the 17 club?"

He said, "Just be good."

I always remember that.

And I've been using a safety pin in a lot of my art.

"Just be good."

Narrator: Oliver moved with his family to Montclair in the late '80s for the schools, but soon discovered a supportive community of artists.

Putting down roots in Montclair included moving his wife, Marion's clothing shop from Brooklyn.

Oliver: So my wife's shop is called "Dem Two Hands."

And it's a play on words because she uses her two hands to make a lot of the women's clothing that's being sold there.

And it's been in Montclair for now 25 years.

Marion: Well, I went to FIT and I'm a textile designer.

And I was working in New York for quite a while as a textile designer.

I make a lot of things in the store.

They have the label that says, "Dem Two Hands."

Those are made by me.

I always was doing some kind of little hustle as a young person.

You know, baking cakes.

Or baking pies.

Or sewing.

Or doing something like that.

So I always kind of had a hustle.

Oliver: When we're out, people who visit my wife's shop come up and say, "Oh, you're Marion Lake's husband."

She's on the case.

Hustle.

[ Chuckles ] Marion: Well, Oliver's like one of these people who is always doing his own paperwork and always writing music and trying to think of the next thing that he can do on the next project.

Narrator: Whether he's painting, playing music, or reading poetry, all of Oliver's work benefits from a lifelong work ethic he learned from his mother while growing up in St. Louis.

Oliver: The primary thing that she influenced me with was her work ethic and her hustle.

She owned a pool room and a restaurant.

And I mention that in "Breakin' Glass," a poem that I wrote, she was very busy and an inspiration for me throughout my life.

And I hope I passed that inspiration on to my kids.

"My mama used to break glass.

I say, 'What you doing?'

She breakin' glass.

She say, 'We get 25 cent for every bushel basket of glass.

So pick up all them empties and put them in the basket.'"

"Why is she breakin' glass?

She owns the Five Sisters Restaurant with the four sisters.

She owns the pool room next door to the Five Sisters and the car wash right next door to the pool room.

And she owns my three-chair shoe shine parlor that my stepfather built for me which is next door to the car wash. She owns the house which is just next door to the shoe shine parlor."

"Why is she breakin' glass?

Every time I heard, chink, chink, chink, it was my mama, breakin' glass with a hammer.

She had a hammer early Sunday morning."

"Chink, chink, chink.

That's the morning after the Saturday all-night craps game that my dad ran.

She had all that and she still, she broke glass.

She wreck bottles in the pool room.

Cooked pig ear sandwiches in the restaurant and gave me anything I asked for.

I'm much older now.

And my mom has passed on over the white stone.

Now, I'm breakin' glass."

[ Cheers and applause ] Thank you, Montclair.

♪♪ Narrator: The great American novelist Ralph Ellison was also a serious jazz lover and trumpet player.

In 2016, Wynton Marsalis and an all-star cast celebrated the writer with performances of the music he loved.

♪♪ Marsalis: For who knew what skinny kid with his chops wrapped around a trumpet mouthpiece and a far-away look in his eyes might just become the next Armstrong.

Yes, and send you at some big dance a few years hence into an ecstasy of rhythm and memory and brassy affirmation of the goodness of being alive and part of the community.

Narrator: NJPAC -- New Jersey's premier performing arts venue, located in the heart of Newark's art's district celebrated the great American writer Ralph Ellison with an amazing evening of classic jazz and spoken word.

[ Jazz music plays ] Morton: Well, we've got Andy Farber and his band, we have Wynton Marsalis, we have Patty Austin, just to name a few.

It's just glorious.

Russell: This evening is dedicated to excerpts from the writings of Ralph Ellison mixed with music that was in his record collection.

Narrator: Loren Schoenberg is the founding director of the National Jazz Museum of Harlem, which now owns Ellison's vast record collection.

Schoenberg: Ralph Ellison was trained as a classical trumpet player when he went to Tuskegee University -- College in the 1930s.

He tried to play classical trumpet, and he studied composition.

But he grew up in Oklahoma City, and he writes so beautifully about trying to go to sleep at night and hearing the sounds of Walter Page's Blue Devils, you know, coming through the mist into his bedroom and hearing this great stuff.

[ Jazz music plays ] NARRATOR: "Jazz in the Key of Ellison" was the brainchild of writer, Newark-based entrepreneur, and founder of Audible.com, Don Katz, who studied with Ellison and considers him his most important mentor.

Katz: Being a student of Ralph's you heard references to songs and horn players all the time who he felt punctuated the deep intellectual traditions of the American vernacular and the study of the vernacular.

I didn't really understand how deeply and academically immersed in the art form he was until I read the essays in "Shadow & Act," which include some really sophisticated jazz writing.

And I just knew it was something of an obsession.

I knew he could blow the horn pretty well, but it was just one of those things that was woven into my understanding of how he viewed American culture in general.

Russell: ♪ How long ♪ ♪ How long ♪ ♪ Had that evening train... ♪ It's wonderful to hear Ralph Ellison's words leading in and out of the music.

Marsalis: "'Bout that boy blue?'

They say to the ones who were protesting.

He's got to talk baby talk on that thing before he can preach on it."

[ Laughter ] "Next thing you know, he's liable to be up there with Duke Ellington.

So plenty of Oklahoma boys up there with the big bands, Son, let's see you try those 'Trouble In My Mind' blues.

Now try to make it sound like old Lyda Cox sings it.

And I draw in my breath and do Miss Cox great violence.

[ Laughter ] "Thus, the crimes and aspirations of my youth."

[ Applause ] Narrator: Ellison scholar Robert O'Meally helped select the excerpts read at the concert.

O'Meally: I would say that if you had to pick three books or four books of the 20th century that were absolutely indispensable, it could be that two of them are by Ellison.

His book of essays and his novel "Invisible Man" are tremendously important.

He says democracy is our word for love.

How can we see one another when the problem is that indeed we've been invisible to one another?

And because of race and class and gender and other problems, we just have not seen one another properly.

Morton: "Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible.

Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time.

You're never quite on the beat.

Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind.

Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nose.

Those points where time stands still, or from which it leaps ahead.

And you slip into the breaks and look around.

That's what you hear, vaguely, in Louis' music."

O'Meally: Jazz became for him an ideal representing democracy at it's finest.

You have to be yourself in the full robustness of your individuality, but at the same time, you got to hear the people around you.

Russell: ♪ Love you gladly, right or wrong ♪ Kidjo: ♪ Sounds like a lyric of a song ♪ Austin: ♪ But since it's so, I thought you ought to know ♪ Together: ♪ I love you, love you madly ♪ Schoeberg: In "Invisible Man," his character in that book actually has a room in his fictional basement illuminated with hundreds of light bulbs to which he listens to Louis Armstrong's recording of "(What Did I Do to Be) So Black and Blue?"

[ Louis Armstrong's "Black and Blue" plays ] O'Meally: If there were no other piece that had to be in the concert, that one did.

And it did because it's a cornerstone of "Invisible Man" the novel.

The character listens to it.

He imagines himself descending, he says, like Dante, into the music.

And when he goes inside the music, he hears a whole history of the Republic sounding there.

He hears a slave woman's voice, and he hears a preacher's voice.

Somebody says, "What is freedom, what is it?"

He's hearing these sounds of American history in the middle of that song.

And the question "What did I do?"

What did I do to be mistreated just because I'm black.

Russell: ♪ I'm white inside ♪ ♪ But that don't help my case ♪ ♪ 'Cause I can't hide ♪ ♪ What is on my face ♪ Katz: This was a guy who had one of the most beautiful voices I'd ever heard.

It was the deep Oklahoma voice that was like a coal car coming out of mine.

He had smoked these big old stogies so it even deepened the voice.

But he had this kind of antique elegance and this stunning oracular way of talking, and you could hear it when he talked, and you can hear it when you read him.

Ellison: An imagery which gets into folklore and it gets into the blues.

It gets into folk song, and it gets into popular songs written by Negroes.

So you're doing something quite rich.

[ Trombone plays ] Schoenberg: As soon as I found out that they had assembled this cast of people who not only loved Ellison's work but knew him intimately and were disciples of his, like Don Katz, like Professor Robert O'Meally from Columbia, like Wynton Marsalis -- we were thrilled to be part of it -- it was probably one of the greatest tributes to a great American author that was ever done.

[ Upbeat jazz music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: In 2016, we met renowned jazz violinist Regina Carter at SOPAC, the South Orange Performing Arts Center.

While on her coast-to-coast tour playing music from her album, "Southern Comfort."

♪♪ Regina grew up in Detroit, and now lives in New Jersey, but based her album on old Appalachian song recordings from parts of Alabama, where her grandfather was once a coal miner.

Carter: I've always been really interested about my ancestry, my family.

I knew my grandmother.

I spent my summers with my grandmother in Alabama, along with a bunch of cousins.

But I'd never had an opportunity to meet my grandfather because he had died before I was born.

But I knew he was a coal miner, and I was really interested in his life.

Then something clicked.

I said, "I wonder what the music was like during his lifetime."

And so I started researching and found a lot of amazing field recordings in the Lomax collection at the Library of Congress and also the John Works III Foundation and the Alabama Folklife Association.

And I could go back to the late 1880s and find these really old recordings.

One of them is "Cornbread Crumbled in Gravy."

Woman: ♪ Go to sleepy, go to sleepy, little baby ♪ ♪ When you wake up, I'll make you up a cake ♪ ♪ Cornbread crumbled in gravy ♪ Carter: Something about it -- when I heard it, it brought back these memories of being a child and being on someone's lap and them trying to rock me to sleep.

[ Violin solo ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ "Go to sleepy, go to sleepy, go to sleepy, little baby.

When you wake up, I'll bake you a cake.

Cornbread crumbled in gravy."

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Song ends ] [ Applause ] Narrator: The world lost a jazz great in 2020.

Stanley Cowell was 79 years old.

In 2013, we met up with the legendary pianist on the campus of Rutgers University, Newark.

Stanley Cowell had just retired from teaching and was excited to return to life as a full-time musician.

♪♪ Narrator: Newark is a legendary jazz town.

And on an early spring day at Rutgers University, Newark, a legendary musician came to play.

♪♪ ♪♪ Stanley Cowell and his trio appeared as part of a music and arts series sponsored by the university.

Bell: This evening, we have one in a series of events that brings together the arts -- the performing arts and the visual arts on campus.

And so we have a concert that will be occurring in the building, and then the reception is held down in the gallery space.

And really it's to provide people with a firsthand experience of the performing arts right here on campus and, when they come into the gallery, to have a look at all the different art we have on display.

Narrator: Stanley Cowell is known as an intellectual jazz pianist.

He started playing when he was only 3 years old.

When he was 6, his father invited the great Art Tatum home to play, an event Stanley says marked him for life.

He went on to study classical music at Oberlin and the University of Michigan and then moved to New York City to play and compose the music called "Jazz."

[ Jazz music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ "Asian Art Suite" is a composition by Stanley Cowell that he's also played with orchestras.

Dr. Cowell: In the "Asian Art Suite," 12 movements, we're gonna do three of them for the concert.

And they were originally part of a commission from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

♪♪ So, I spent a lot of time in the museum, and they have complete temples there, ancient Indian temples and Chinese Buddhist temples and Japanese teahouses.

♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: Stanley Cowell is professor emeritus of jazz piano at Rutgers-New Brunswick.

It's where he met his two side men, both former students.

Dr. Cowell: I'm playing with a wonderful bassist, Tom DiCarlo, and a wonderful drummer, Chris Brown.

♪♪ And they are both Rutgers master of music in the jazz program graduates, and they are professional musicians.

♪♪ They are on my last two CDs, and I really wanted them to be a part of this because they know the music.

♪♪ Narrator: Stanley himself worked with some of the greats -- Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Abbey Lincoln, Miles Davis, and in the late 1960s and early '70s, he was part of the Max Roach Quintet.

At the Rutgers-Newark concert, the Stanley Cowell Trio played a composition by Max Roach as part of their Civil Rights medley.

Dr. Cowell: I think a lot of people don't realize that jazz musicians had some connection or at least responded to the issues of the Civil Rights era by creating compositions, especially one of my mentors, Max Roach, the great drummer and my employer back in the '70s, '60s.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ I was born and then learned music.

In other words, it's a lifelong attempt at being able to express yourself.

It makes you happy right away, I mean, because you're doing it.

But to make others -- to bring that same feeling to others involves mastery.

So I'm trying to master myself, and the piano should be an extension of me and my compositions, also.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: That's it for this special all-jazz episode of "State of the Arts."

To see more or to share a story, visit our website.

Thanks for watching.

Russell: ♪ I say that I'm satisfied ♪ ♪ No use to hide ♪ ♪ What goes on inside ♪ ♪ Is true ♪ ♪ My heart is under the spell of the blues ♪ ♪♪ Announcer: The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, encouraging excellence and engagement in the arts since 1966, is proud to co-produce "State of the Arts" with Stockton University.

Additional support is provided by The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and these friends of "State of the Arts."