In addition to the two-day symposium celebrating the legacy of Alan Lomax, a public lecture, film and concert were held.
On Jan. 18 Lomax biographer John Szwed presented a lecture on Jelly Roll Morton in the Library's Coolidge Auditorium, on the same stage where Lomax had interviewed and recorded the great jazz pianist in 1938. Composer and pianist Dave Burrell played examples of Morton's work, as well as one of his own.
In the evening filmmaker John Bishop presented "'Oss 'Oss, Wee 'Oss," a film made in 1951 by folklorist Peter Kennedy about the annual May Day celebration in Padstow, England. Written and directed by Alan Lomax, the film features cinematography by George Pickow. Bishop also showed a film he made of the same event in the same Cornish town, 50 years later.
On Jan. 19 the National Chorus of the Church of God and Saints of Christ, a traditional African-American a cappella choir from Belleville, Va., performed in an evening concert at the Coolidge Auditorium. Alan Lomax had recorded the choir in 1960, while making a film in Colonial Williamsburg. Among the choir members Lomax recorded was Solomon Carey, whose children Solomon Carey Jr., Aaron Carey and Sabrina Johnson participated in the concert and presented several songs in honor of their father. Also on the program, singing songs from the Luso-Hispanic tradition collected during her fieldwork in rural Spain and Portugal, was Judith R. Cohen, ethnomusicologist, performer and professor at York University in Toronto. Cohen's work in Spain today parallels that of Lomax's in the 1950s.
