A closing event for “Music Was My First Love” will feature a live jazz performance with Jonathan Crayford, pianist, composer, and director, and Jay Rodriguez, Grammy-nominated saxophonist, flautist, clarinetist, film composer, and producer to benefit Time In Children’s Art Initiative and Music Is My First Language. The duo will preform musical works inspired by the artwork of Brooklyn-based artist Robert Saywitz.
The event will be held on Wednesday, Aug. 20 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. at the ShapeShifter Lab, 18 Whitwell Place (between 3rd & 4th avenues), Brooklyn, NY 11215. For more information, visit ShapeShifterLab.com.
“Music Was My First Love” — extended through Aug. 31 — is an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Robert Saywitz. Musicians and artists alike are constantly repurposing, sampling, and being inspired by previous generations of artists — even earlier generations were doing the same, building off a long line of creative ideas. At the core of any painting or song is an idea and a story. If that story can carry over multiple generations, then it contains a narrative that resonates deeply as poetry.
Just as contemporary musicians reinterpret older compositions in their own unique way as an homage to the original artist, Saywitz has created a new series of contemporary portraits of older jazz and blues musicians that are embedded with the heroic and tragic texture of each of the lives they lived.
