Alan Blackman

About the Artist

Baltimore based pianist and award-winning composer. He and his ensembles have performed at Blues Alley, the Kennedy Center, and many festivals and venues from San Francisco to New York. He was selected to be part of the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program at the Kennedy Center as well as residencies at The Banff Centre, Millay Arts and the Avaloch Music Institute. Alan has received over 10 grants from the Maryland State Arts Council in jazz composition, jazz performance and world music as well as the Chamber Music of America’s prestigious New Jazz Works multi-year commission, The Puffin Foundation and The MAP Fund. Arrangements and performances of his music have been featured on NBC’s Parenthood, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and JazzSet, as well as the Stephen King movie, 1408. His recording Turning Point featuring Donny McCaslin was released in 2011, Alone Together: The 2 Piano Project in 2012 and The Coastal Suite, a multimedia suite in 2014. Chapter 3, released in 2018 featured guitarist Gilad Hekselman. Sacred Spaces, his latest release was recorded live at a temple during the pandemic and is being released at the end of 2022. His current practice is long-form music compositions that incorporate multimedia components and deal with social elements such as climate change and racial healing.

Artist's Statement

As a creative artist, composer, and pianist, I have become increasingly intrigued by the blending of visual imagery with the live performance of my original music. After years spent composing more traditional music for my jazz ensemble as well as for TV and Film, I felt that my ultimate results were becoming a bit two-dimensional. This led me to pair with a wonderful painter from the Shetland Islands, and compose my first long-form suite that was performed with a backdrop of projected images. This multimedia work, The Coastal Suite, was funded by a national CMA New Jazz Works grant award and culminated in coverage on NPR’s Jazz Set, an internationally syndicated program hosted by Dee Dee Bridgewater. This felt like validation for the new type of work I was doing and a stamp of approval to move forward with additional projects in this arena. ONCE UPON A PRAIRIE is a unique multimedia exploration of the loss of the American grasslands to fracking. The story is told by the musical juxtaposition of roots Americana and improvisational jazz. The siren call of the pedal steel guitar unifies this musical vision and symbolizes the beauty and the desolation of these unique lands. Just as places like North Dakota wrestle with the cost of the blighting of the land, the musical compositions of this project will seek to unify the seemingly unrelated and mostly unexplored sonic borders between country and jazz. Ultimately, this endeavor seeks to harmonize the beauty of nature and the ugliness of industrial progress in a way that supports the hopeful future and the coming together of disparate groups. The live concert will feature projected images of new photography commissioned specifically for this project by renowned photographer Jennifer Hughes. Also, a partnership with a non-profit specializing in the preservation of this landscape will be a key component to fulfilling the mission of this project. The dream is that a unique musical hybrid, aided by compelling visual imagery, can capture both the beauty and the dystopian reality of the current situation, thus making the case for change and the need for future preservation. After spending time with each set of images or video, I compose musical works that programmatically tell the story of what the viewer is seeing. During live performance, the images are projected and in some cases timed with the music. Audiences have loved the pairing of the two mediums and commented frequently on the enhancement of the emotion and moods that result. Moving away from solely performing my original music into this multimedia world has been an important step in my development as an artist and a professional. I am eager to take what I have learned and apply it to this latest concept.