Jim Ketch lectures students" plays jazz with them directs them and performs for them.
Today he's just going to have lunch with them.
Ketch along with his colleague Stephen Anderson from the UNC Department of Music and several students" will host ""Lunch with One: One Work of Art" One Expert" One Hour"" today at the Ackland Art Museum.
It will be free for students after registering for a free membership to the museum.
The program"" ""Jazz Takes a Leap: The Breakthrough Year of 1958"" is presented in conjunction with the museum's Circa 1958 exhibition, which explores art that emerged around the time of the museum's opening.
Ketch said it was a period where jazz artists were looking for new avenues of expression.
It's an interesting time in which there's sort of a culmination of two decades of really technical and virtuous advance of the music"" he said.
It's kind of the advent of a whole new age of musical exploration.""
Artists" who had previously played music based on set forms were looking for a more relaxed method of making music in the early 1960s" allowing them to improvise with greater flexibility.
""If you think about the turbulent time of the 1960s" there was just a need to create different approaches to musical expression" Ketch said.
Ketch and an ensemble will perform pieces that display this monumental shift from set form to free expression, using John Coltrane's fast-moving chords and Miles Davis' slow, cool music as examples.
The lecture also will delve into the avant-garde movement, discussing the introduction of jazz without any rules or scales, and listening to the music of Ornette Coleman.
The mobile jazz and the free jazz allowed us to realize that we could also draw from emotional expressive pallets rather than just harmonic" melodic and rhythmic palettes that had been previously used" Ketch said.
Nic Brown, director of communications at the Ackland, said he was unsure about how many students would attend the lunch, as Fall Break officially starts a few hours later.
Hopefully not everybody will have left for Fall Break yet"" Brown said.
Despite the uncertainty of student attendance, the museum plans on hosting the lunch, using it to fulfil its duty of relating visual art to the entire campus.
‘Lunch with One' is a way for us to bring people into the museum to have a connection in the museum other than just looking at art by yourself"" Brown said. It's important for us to incorporate the visual arts into the life of the whole University.""
By getting the music department involved in the Circa 1958 series"" Brown said students are given a chance to explore more than just visual art at the Ackland.
""It's a great chance to eat lunch in an art museum and hear from some of the best experts anywhere"" Brown said.
ATTEND THE LUNCH
Time: 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. today
Location: Ackland Art Museum
Info: www.ackland.org
Contact the Arts Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.
