Please join us for “One Hundred Years of Recorded Jazz: A Centennial Celebration,” presented by the Music Program of the Department of Performing and Creative Arts on Tuesday Feb. 14 in the the Center for the Arts Recital Hall (Building 1P), Room 120) from 3:00pm to 4:00pm.

One hundred years ago this February, the first recordings of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band were issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company, officially launching the Jazz Age. The era took its name from the startling sounds coming out of these players’ instruments, but also from the gramophone disk spinning on the Victrola (the first commercially available audio playback device). Come join CSI Music faculty and American Studies Program Director Bill Bauer as he celebrates this important event in U.S. history. His survey of the sometimes rocky, but always passionate, marriage between jazz and the recording medium makes a fitting Valentine for the campus community.

William R. Bauer, Ph.D., is Director of the American Studies Department at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. Dr. Bauer’s internationally recognized research into jazz performance practice has advanced our understanding of vocal and instrumental improvisation in their historical and cultural contexts. Most recently, he contributed the chapter “Expressiveness in Jazz Performance: Prosody and Rhythm” to the book Expressiveness in Music Performance: Empirical Approaches across Styles and Cultures, co-edited by Dorottya Fabian, Renee Timmers, and Emery Schubert,and published by Oxford University Press in 2014. In 2002, University of Michigan Press published his book Open the Door: The Life and Music of Betty Carter to critical acclaim, and his essays on jazz singing have appeared in the following refereed journals: Jazz PerspectivesCurrent Musicology, and Annual Review of Jazz Studies.