5 Burning Questions

Share This!

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”2/3″][vc_column_text]Screen Shot 2014-12-18 at 11.23.51One of the driving forces behind The Art of Cool Project, a Durham nonprofit that promotes “jazz-influenced music” and hosted its first citywide jazz festival last April, is a statistician who can’t play an instrument. And yet Cicely Mitchell brought a convert’s zeal to the organizations’ two-fold mission of preserving and celebrating old-school jazz while finding a new audience by embracing modern permutations of the art form. She talked to Durham Magazine Editor Matt Dees about the origins and growth of The Art of Cool, why Durham is a good fit for the festival and why she was jazzed about Thundercat.

What’s your background?

I’m from Tennessee, but I moved to the area to go to grad school at UNC in ’99. I graduated with my master’s in ’01, then later got my Ph.D. My background is in statistics. I’m not a musician at all. I didn’t even know there was a jazz scene.

I met co-founder Al Strong, a trumpet professor at N.C. Central University, and started coming to his events. Then a light bulb went off. I was like, “People need to know how to get into this sort of thing.” I took over his social media and decided to tell people just about jazz, just make it a little bit more marketable.

We saw a need for places where jazz artists could present their original work and it wouldn’t be background music. There are tons of places around here that have jazz, and we’re very appreciative of that. But there aren’t that many small concert halls in Durham. So our idea was to start taking over little art galleries, and we started doing that at LabourLove. That’s how we got the name Art of Cool: We were exclusively popping up in art galleries. It just spiraled and we got too big for the art galleries.

So how did that morph into an organization putting on a festival featuring more than 40 artists?

Well, we were trying to be The Smoffice winners. We didn’t win it, but Downtown Durham Inc. liked our idea. So they invited us to Startup Stampede, and for 60 days we learned how to pitch. It was a little awkward, because everybody else were these tech companies, for-profit. But people loved our passion, loved what we could potentially do from a tourism standpoint. Tourism isn’t really our No. 1 thing – it’s about expanding the audience for jazz – but along the way our pitch tailored to become more about tourism. That’s how we ended up partnering with American Tobacco; we started doing a weekly jazz series there at The Stack.

Why is Durham a good fit for The Art of Cool and for this festival?

When we realized we had something going, I started getting a bit more organized and doing some research on why jazz is so popular here. One reason, I think, is because of our condensed area of schools that have jazz programs with accomplished professors and artists in residence. Nnenna Freelon and John Brown and Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo are all here. Duke Performances has found a way to make jazz cool, too. The National Endowment for the Arts does a survey every 10 years, and one thing that came out just last year is that jazz [popularity] has remained flat, but one of the demographics where its popularity has increased is among the African-American population. That’s promising because usually if you go to a Duke performance, it’s maybe a black artist but not a black audience – we’ve found a way to connect it back to a more diverse audience.

How have you done that?

By adding soul music into our lineup. We don’t just do traditional jazz. We will present people like Bilal, more neo-soul. But then we’ll give you someone who’s more traditional. What we’re trying to do with the festival is start a conversation about where jazz is now and how it’s kind of genre-bending.

What do you mean?

Our headliner is Maceo Parker. He played with James Brown, with The J.B.’s, as lead saxophone. Sometimes when you listen to the songs, you can barely hear what James is really saying, but he’s saying “Maceo! Maceo!” It could be argued that he’s not jazz; he’s funk. Once you get in the lineup further down, we have a guy who was on Pitchfork’s Top 50, Thundercat. He’s the bass player for Suicidal Tendencies, and he has his own instrumental album. They’re all cool, but I would say he is the coolest one. I’m very excited about presenting Thundercat at a quote unquote jazz festival.

That’s the whole point, to expand the audience for jazz. And the only way to do that is by kind of meeting people where they are. A lot of people shut down when they hear the word jazz because you don’t know where to start or it sounds old or stuffy. We’re really trying to make it accessible for people. And that’s a gift and a curse because there are some purists who look at our lineup and say, “This is not jazz.” But we just want to present fun music. There are a lot of jazz festivals. But there’s really no outlet for up-and-coming, right-on-the-edge artists. Ours is. This is more like the South by Southwest of jazz festivals.

Ed. Note: This article first appeared in the April 2014 issue.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_column_text]CICELY’S PLAYLIST

Here are a few listening selections from last year’s festival. This year’s festival takes place April 24-26.

Maceo Parker “Shake Everything You’ve Got”

Bilal “Love It”

Christian Scott “The Eraser”

Alice Smith “Fool for You”

Amel Larrieux “Afraid”

Butcher Brown “Georgia Ave.”

Cody ChesnuTT “What Kind of Cool Will We Think of Next”

Thundercat “Walkin’”

KING “In the Meantime”

The Foreign Exchange “Call It Home”

Kneebody “Lowell”

The Hot at Nights “Try This”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Share This!

Posted in

Durham Magazine

Scroll to Top