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OUR WOMEN NOW is the new "Jazzoperetry" ensemble conceived and developed by Earl Hazell, Bass-baritone, composer/arranger and author of THEY IS OUR WOMEN NOW: A CELEBRATION OF THE WOMEN OF THE GERSHWIN'S PORGY AND BESS. It's mission: To facilitate the global appreciation of American women of African cultural descent in opera, poetry and jazz.With Angela Owens, Lisa Lockhart, Sabrina Elayne Carten, Marlene Villafane, classical/operatic sopranos; Alteouise deVaughn, mezzo-soprano; the Oriente Lopez Jazz quartet; accompanist Joan Kreuger and Earl Hazell, their highly acclaimed debut in New York City took place in St. Peter's Episcopal Church of the Bronx, 2500 Westchester Square, on Friday March 2nd, 2007, 8PM and Sunday March 4th, 4PM.With each member having careers that have spanned the globe several times over, their combined talents in an innovative new ensemble continuously makes for a cultural event that has to be experienced to be believed.___________________________________________________ __________VISIT OUR MYSPACE MUSIC PAGE:www.myspace.com/ourwomennow2007________________________ _____________________________________***Earl Hazell: OUR WOMEN NOW, Artistic Director***_________________________________________________ ____________EARL HAZELL, bass-baritone singer, actor, poet, composer/arranger, Native New Yorker, Founder/Artistic Director of OUR WOMEN NOW and coiner of the term "Jazzoperetry" is a product of his environment. A Sagittarian born in the late sixties to sculptor, poet, Harlemite and jazz enthusiast Earl Hazell, Sr. and young student of fashion design Carolyn Hazell (sweethearts at the High School of Art & Design in New York City; best friends of Afro-Cuban dancer and "folk anthropologist" Raymond MacKethan), he was raised in the Marble Hill projects of the Bronx. In a world imbued with the politics, arts and intellectual culture of what he calls the second Harlem Renaissance (i.e., the African-American experience of Civil/post-Civil rights Harlem, 1959-1975), his "Baby-boomer" parents, soon after his birth, eschewed the Baptist religious traditions of both their "Greatest Generation" parents. This exposed Earl to their Malcolm X/John Coltrane-like spiritual quest for a more Gnostic experience of true freedom in the Transcendent, via the embrace of the Nation of Islam, the Sunni faith, African religious traditions as encoded in African-American and European Modern art, and the mystical writings of Khrishnamurti, Kahlil Gibran and Hazrat Inyat Khan. The television shows of the sixties and seventies—"The Twilight Zone", "Mission Impossible", "Laugh-In", "The Flip Wilson Show" and the soon to be legendary debut of "Sesame Street—combined with his immersion in modern Jazz to complete the incubator of his young soul._______________________________________________________ ____The loss of his father to mental illness in his early teens began his own Siddarthic adolescence via the search for his own artistic voice. His mother's fears of the life of a jazz musician for her only son led him away from the bass and piano and to the human voice, where it grew from a tenor pubescence into the bass-baritone singer he is today. After singing in every choir available in elementary and middle school and auditioning for the School of Performing Arts for acting, he accepted a position in voice at the High School of Music and Art: the acclaimed school which combined with its "Fame" sister school in 1985 to form the LaGuardia High School of the Arts at Lincoln Center—of which he is among the first graduating class.______________________________________________________ _____His high school exposure to the European classical vocal tradition led to another phase of his development. First, with Maestro Dr. John L. Motley: protégé of spirituals master Hall Johnson; director of the All-City High School Chorus; and Minister of Music of Grace Congregational Church of Harlem. Then, via Maestro Motley, Ben Matthews & Wayne Sanders: the directors of Opera Ebony, New York. Their mentoring led him to pursue the study of opera and art song en route to a career in its performance. ____________________________________________________________ _At the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College where he entered later, however, his study of voice under Dr. Robert C. White, Jr. coincided with the entrance of saxophone and composer/arranger legend Jimmy Heath as professor of Jazz, leading to the hiring of the internationally celebrated Jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd soon after. His tutelage under both masters in composition and arranging completed a circle of his artistic development that revealed the creative voice within him; a multi-lingual voice desiring to celebrate all of his influences. In so doing, he discovered an artistic vision of transcendental possibility that gave him a new sense of purpose: the merging of the Southern and Northern Black- American cultural/musical traditions (i.e. opera & spirituals/art song vs. modern jazz) and the dichotomous European traditions they partly reflected. (For example, the Italian/Germanic structural & horizontal sensibility of opera & art song within the Spirituals tradition, vs. the Spanish/French harmonic & vertical sensibility within the Blues & Jazz). All as a vehicle of reclamation: reclamation of the rhythmic, spherical and medicinal west African spirit expressed in music, hidden in philosophy and celebrated in culture globally since the dawn of man. ___________________________________________________________E arl Hazell as a professional bass-baritone singer has subsequently performed, amongst other works and artists, with Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln in Lincoln Center and the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy; Jessye Norman and Elton John in the heralded concert JESSYE NORMAN SINGS FOR THE HEALING OF AIDS in New York, nationally televised on PBS; both James Levine and Zuben Mehta, with the New York Philharmonic-most notably in performances of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony in the United Nations; the Britten WAR REQUIEM in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; the Schoenberg GURRELIEDER in Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Centennial Celebration of Carnegie Hall. He has also performed the roles of Henry Davis of Kurt Weill's STREET SCENE; Colline of LA BOHEME; Sparafucile of RIGOLETTO; Booker T. Washington of RAGTIME; Die Sprache of DIE ZAUBERFLOTE; Ferrando of Verdi's IL TROVATORE; Joe of Kern's SHOWBOAT and several others with houses and production companies throughout Europe and the continental United States. His first performance of his own poetry in 1999, selections from his book NAIMA--written in homage to John Coltrane--took place in St. Mark's Church of the Bowery in New York, where Kahlil Gibran's THE PROHPET was first read to an American audience seventy-five years earlier. ___________________________________________________________ __It was his accidental discovery of the most popular opera in American history, however, that led to the next phase of his artistic development. The jazz/folk opera PORGY AND BESS, by New Yorker, jazz/classical pianist & composer George Gershwin and his poet/lyricist brother Ira, about the arc of an unexpected love affair in the Black/African Gulla community of "Catfish Row" in 1920s South Carolina, "discovered him" in 1993. Soon after earning his bachelor's degree in voice, he first performed in the opera under the directorship of the German legend Gotz Friedrich in the Theatre Des Westens, Berlin. He has subsequently become a familiar staple in the globalized world of PORGY via performing the character roles of Crown, Jake, Jim, Robbins, the Undertaker and Lawyer Frazier with several companies and productions around the world—from the Royal Albert Hall of London, to the Lyric Theatre in Sydney; to the Centro de Belem of Lisbon; to the Teatro dell' Opera in Rome. He continues to do so throughout the continental United States, continental Europe, the United Kingdom and the Pacific Rim. ___________________________________________________________H is treasured relationships with the women performers he has come to know via performing the opera globally is celebrated in his soon to be published book of poetry THEY IS OUR WOMEN NOW: A Celebration of the Women of the Gershwins' PORGY AND BESS._______________________________________________________ _____And it is from this book of poetry that the innovative "Jazzoperetry" ensemble OUR WOMEN NOW was born. Following the guiding lights of Jon Hendricks, Bill Evans, Gil-Scott Heron, Nina Simone, Maurice White, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Jill Scott, M'shelle Ndegeocello and the Imamu Amiri Baraka, Earl Hazell, with this innovative ensemble, focuses his inter-disciplinary creative voice into one living love letter to his parents, his culture, the arts of jazz, opera & poetry, and the glorious women who have so deeply touched his life.