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Sunday, July 31, 2pm Sponsored by Eisbach Facial Plastic Surgery, PC
Hallelujah!, is a documentary by award winning ethnomusicologist and film maker Steven Feld, about the legendary Ghanaian drummer Ghanaba (aka Guy Warren), famous for the LPs he made with jazz musicians in the US and UK in the 1950s and 60s and whose composition “Love, the Mystery of...” was recorded by Randy Weston and has been Mr. Weston’s theme song for almost 40 years. Hallelujah! presents an African talking drums version of Georg Friedrich Händel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” as performed in 2005 by the Winneba Youth Choir with Ghanaba. Ghanaba’s unique staging of Händel mixes elements of African, Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist ritual with formal European concert performance, Ghanaian ceremony, and jazz improvisation. The performance is followed by a 2007 conversation with Ghanaba, also revealing many photographs from his unique archive. The film was released by Accra’s Goethe Institut in Ghanaba’s presence on his 85th birthday, May, 4, 2008. When he passed away six months later, the film was repeatedly screened on television in Ghana and elsewhere in West Africa in his honor. The film is part of the 2009 DVD trilogy Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra to accompany Feld’s book by the same title, to appear with Duke University Press in 2012. The Screening will be followed by a discussion with Randy Weston and Feld about Ghanaba and about the relationship of African music to Jazz over the years.
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