Welcome Letter

Eric Daniels — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 17:43:00 GMT

Dear friends:

My name is Eric K. Daniels and I am a new playwright producing my first play called The Jazz Messenger in the 11th Annual New York International Fringe Festival, August 10 to 26, 2007. Go to www.fringenyc.org for more information.

The play focuses on an African American jazz trumpeter in Europe in the middle of World War II. The story has a unique expression of the African American experience in world history. With this play, I had the opportunity to take my passion for European culture and theater (I am a graduate of The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and Pratt Institute School of Architecture), and combine it with my love of music (I played the trumpet for 20 years), to discover a creative way of telling a story. The soul of jazz music has been intertwined throughout the drama.

The inspiration for the play rests on two questions: (1) What happened to all the Colored American jazz musicians living in Paris and throughout Europe between the wars, when WWII began? and (2) Would a black jazz musician who has been in a sort of "self-imposed European exile" and, for the most part, treated as a human being by many different types of people, return to an American society quick to reject, denigrate, and segregate him for having tasted that humanity? For seven years I have researched these issues for The Jazz Messenger in order to write this play. I learned French, conducted research in the Resistance museums and Holocaust exhibits, searched the libraries and bookshops of France, London and New York, traveled the French countryside to absorb the culture, the people and the politics, viewed dozens of films and archival materials, interviewed a former German officer, several jazz musicians and along the way fell in love with a French woman from Martinique, who helped enormously with understanding the black experience in France today and during the war.

The play explores the conflicts between religious pacifism vs. French resistance; the expression of love through imprisonment and forced collaboration; and the spontaneity of jazz music vs. the interpretive expression of classical music. On stage is a live jazz combo, including piano, trumpet, bass and drums, who are a diverse group of students from The New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music.

I am confident The Jazz Messenger will introduce you to a unique African American experience, challenge your ideas of European history and create a dialogue through storytelling which employs war, drama and live jazz music. This was experienced during the play's first staged reading of The Jazz Messenger, along with the jazz combo on October 27, 2006, in the Irene Diamond Education Center & Recording Studio, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Thank you for your interest in The Jazz Messenger and I look forward to hearing your comments and experiences.
Cheers,
Eric K. Daniels