Cameron Art Museum presents Lenora Zenzalai Helm & Tribe Jazz Orchestra Nonet
Purchase tickets to hear Lenora at Jazz @ The CAM
Jazz@CAM
Series 2023-4
CAM Members: $35 individual ticket/$280 series package
Non-Members: $55 individual ticket/$440 series package
Jazz is the original American music art form, born here and enjoyed throughout the world. Cameron Art Museum is proud to present the 12th season of Jazz@CAM.
Hailed by Jazziz magazine as the ”voice of her generation” and a “national treasure,” Chicago-born, Durham, North Carolina-based Dr. Lenora Zenzalai Helm is a jazz vocal musician, composer, lyricist, bandleader, and a dedicated educator at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). Helm encompasses all of the inventions and dimensions of jazz and the African Diaspora on her new recording, Journeywoman, featuring her Tribe Jazz Orchestra® Nonet. Helm’s new CD, her eighth as a leader, is a compelling 65-minute, multi-movement 12-track work, where she sings about the life of an allegorical woman named Journey, and her struggles with abuse, birth, death, self-definition and her victories through self-love, perseverance, and affirmation. Recorded in 2022, on her Zenzalai Music Records label, Helm originally composed Journeywoman in 2003, for a commission for Chamber Music America's New Jazz Works grant (the first African American female vocalist recipient,) funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and for the next two decades she augmented and rearranged the work into its current form, buoyed by the perspective of time. Helm’s Tribe Jazz Orchestra®, founded in 2019, is configured into a harmonically nuanced and rhythmically nimble, nine-piece nonet consisting of several renowned NCCU educators and local musicians.
Tribe Jazz Orchestra® is an ensemble of musicians led by Lenora Zenzalai Helm with a unique approach to the music of the big band tradition. Their CD release, For the Love of Big Band, launched March 9, 2020, received critical acclaim, and despite the ravages on the music industry during the Global Pandemic, reached the JazzWeek Top 50 list of recordings for 2020. With a diverse amalgam of the top men and women performers in jazz today, the instrumentation features a combination of jazz orchestra and modern chamber ensemble to bring a swinging and soulful concert full of groove and excitement covering many styles. In certain settings, subsets of the group perform under Lenora's baton as Tribe Jazz Orchestra® Nonet, or Septet. The members have performed together in various configurations and have appeared in noted concert halls and international music festivals in The United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. Lenora and the Tribe Jazz Orchestra® Nonet are internationally acclaimed concert performers. Lenora has seven previous commercial recordings and has performed with some of the biggest names in Jazz leading her groups in renowned jazz festivals and venues worldwide, including Jazz Standard, NYC, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy Club Coca Cola Women’s Jazz Festival, Schomburg Center's Women in Jazz Festival, JVC Jazz Festivals, Clifford Brown Jazz Festival, Cape Town Jazzathon, South Africa, Fiji Jazz & Blues Festival, NCCU Jazz Festival, and the Art of Cool Jazz Festival, Durham, NC. Her creative practice includes being a performing musician while educating emerging artists in jazz as the Associate Professor & Chair of the Department of Music, Director of Graduate Programs, Jazz Studies, and Director of the NCCU Vocal Jazz Ensemble at North Carolina Central University, and being sought after internationally for workshops, clinics, and master classes. She plays a leadership role in creating communities of practice for teaching artists and producing forums where music performances and edutainment events serve families in local and regional communities. A former U.S. Jazz Ambassador, and a two-time Fulbright Senior Music Specialist, she earned dozens of music and leadership-in-music awards and international accolades, including being a MacDowell Composer Fellow and the first Black woman vocal musician selected as a Chamber Music America/New Works Doris Duke Composer
Tribe Jazz Orchestra Nonet Personnel:
Lenora Zenzalai Helm, voice
Special Guest: GRAMMY Nominee Orrin Evans, pianist
Timothy Holley, cello
Baron Tymas, guitar
Natalie Boeyink, electric and acoustic bass
Thomas Taylor, drums
Al Strong, trumpet
Robert Trowers, trombone
Salome Serena Wiley, tenor saxophone and spoken word
Dexter Moses, alto and soprano saxophone and flute
Line-up Announced and Tickets On Sale July 1
Members save $20 off individual tickets or
$160 off entire series
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Jazz at CAM is funded in part by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, and North Carolina Arts Council