Dwight Andrews: Philadelphia, PA/Camden, NJ

Dwight Andrews Photo courtesy Shuman Associates

In New Residencies Round VII, composer Dwight Andrews will work in partnership with the Prince Music Theater, the Walt Whitman Cultural Arts Center in Camden, and the Camden Creative Arts High School in the Philadelphia/Camden area, in manifold ways. Among the residency goals are to cement the organizations' relationships with African-American artists and scholars in the region, attract larger minority audiences to the arts, and help to forge new alliances between Philadelphia and South Jersey audiences and schools. Of equal importance is the development of new work reflective of the communities' needs. To that end, Mr. Andrews will participate in the Rainbow Connection, the Prince Music Theater's outreach program for 11- to 14-year-olds, in which their own stories and lyrics are set to music. Many of Mr. Andrews's activities within the community will revolve around his new music/theater work, HAITI, HARLEM AND HAVANA, which will be accompanied by workshops, study guides, and post-performance discussions with the composer.

Dwight Andrews is uniquely qualified for this residency. Not only he is a composer, performer, and teacher, but also an ordained minister who sees his work in communities as part of his public ministry. Mr. Andrews has achieved national prominence for his music scholarship in jazz history, popular culture, music and race, and for his contributions to contemporary music both as a composer and performer. For more than a decade he has provided music direction for the plays of Pulitzer Prize-winner August Wilson, the first time in 1984 for Mr. Wilson's first play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at Yale Repertory Theatre. Their collaboration has continued through the Broadway productions of several of Mr. Wilson's plays, namely Ma Rainey, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Seven Guitars. Mr. Andrews has also recorded and performed with such diverse artists as Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, and Geri Allen and arranged music for saxophonist Branford Marsalis's 1992 album, I Heard You Twice the First Time. Mr. Andrews is a music professor at Emory University in Atlanta. He was appointed artistic director for the 1998 Atlanta-based National Black Arts Festival, the same year that he served as the first Quincy Jones Visiting Professor of African-American Music at Harvard University.