D'Zama: The Musical Vagabond - 2024 Mt. Hood Jazz Festival

Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble & Third Rail Repertory Theatre
2024 Mt. Hood Jazz Festival
May 3-5, 2024
Mt. Hood Community College
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"In 2022, Portland writer Sarah Smith and her husband, conductor Raul Gomez Rojas, were offered a dozen boxes of what they assumed were a collection of musical scores. What they discovered instead was an estate’s worth of manuscripts, photographs, and collectibles including the self-published autobiography of D’Zama Murielle (1901 - 1985), an extraordinary woman who lived an almost unbelievably extraordinary life.
Murielle was a conductor who studied under the tutelage of Toscanini. She led the Portland Women’s Symphony Orchestra at a time when women were hardly afforded the opportunity to play in professional orchestras, let alone conduct them. She once biked to Chicago. She hopped trains to apply for distant conducting jobs. She toured across the states and throughout Europe with a collection of musical instruments from around the world, teaching students music history and how to play.
She was wildly prolific and clearly ahead of her time. So why, Smith wondered, wasn’t D’zama Murielle a heralded figure? Why hadn’t she made a lasting mark or become a notable figure in Oregon history? How many other artists, who made extraordinary impacts on their era, had time simply forgotten? Smith and a team of collaborators from Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble and Third Rail Repertory Theatre - composer Owen Broder, lyricist Ben Tissell, music director Ryan Meagher, and director Isaac Lamb - set out to create a new jazz musical that would probe these questions and consider the legacies we leave, and those we lose."
Video by Paradise Meow Productions: www.paradiseme...