Contact: Golda Solomon: 877-529-9528 or gs@goldajazz.com

Cornelia Street Café: 212-989-9319 or corneliastreetcafe@earthlink.net

For immediate release

From Page to Performance Visits

Po’Jazz at The Cornelia Street Cafe

Poetry in Partnership with Jazz

Thursday, June 16th, 2005 6 - 8 p.m.

June is bustin’ out all over with From Page to Performance at Po’Jazz, the one-of-a-kind jazz and poetry series at The Cornelia Street Café, with young, emerging poets and musicians sharing the stage with their more established counterparts on Thursday, June 16th from 6 to 8 pm. The performance will take place Downstairs at the Café in Po’Jazz’s third Thursday evening of the month slot. The downstairs room opens at 5:30 for early dining and imbibing (serving the same fine food as upstairs.) Admission is $13 ($11 students/seniors), which includes one drink.

Poet Golda Solomon, “The Medicine Woman of Jazz,” welcomes featured poet Lynne Procope and vocalist/musician Stephanie Lee. Procope’s poems explore the inherent jeopardy of human existence, and chronicle alternate possibilities to our understanding of modern and historic threat and adversity. Sarah Meadows of the Santa Fe Reporter said of Stephanie Lee “(she) is not one to mince words. She’s unapologetically a feminist, but above all, she’s assertively human. Her music blends elements of folk, fragmented, honest folk, with luscious jazz and funk.”

Also on the schedule are first-time Po’Jazz poets Elizabeth Phaire and Deborah Maier, and returnees Tamara Magnitsky and Denise Utt. Bassist Adam Chilenski will front a trio of seasoned Po’Jazz musicians. Young, emerging poets Danya Birnbaum and Marie Giustino and poet/musicians Emily Caccia and Emily Drucker will take the stage to demonstrate the talent and promise of the next generation of Po’Jazz performers.

Golda Solomon’s unique brand of jazz-flavored poetry has been described as having “a rhythm and spontaneity that goes right to the heart… (She) has found her perfect accompaniment in jazz” (Madeline Peters, President and founder of Poet’s Corner). Last year, Golda was featured at the 92nd Street Y’s Makor Marathon and Mamapalooza at the Bowery Poetry Club, she headlined a pair of performances in Denver, Colorado, and she was a finalist in the Jazz Poetry Slam at Nuyorican Café hosted by WBGO’s Gary Walker.

Po’Jazz is increasingly becoming “the place to be” every third Thursday. Gladys Serrano of Mutable Music says, “Po’Jazz at Cornelia Street is one big friendly party of good words, good sounds, and good food.” Performances are currently being recorded live for a new CD (expected release summer 2005).

This performance is part of a third Thursday of the month poetry and jazz series at The Cornelia Street Café programmed by ICAAN co-founder Golda Solomon in association with JazzJaunts (www.jazzjaunts.com/). Dedicated to the belief that the arts are vital for tapping into processes needed for individual healing and community building, ICAAN (Interactive Communication and Arts Network) provides on-site arts programming to workplaces, schools and other organizations. For more information about ICAAN, call 877-529-9528 or visit www.icaan.biz.

The Café is located at 29 Cornelia Street, Greenwich Village, NYC. Po’Jazz events take place in the café’s downstairs performance space. By subway, take the A, C, E, F or V train to West 4th Street, or the 1 or 9 train to Christopher Street - Sheridan Square (walk 2.5 blocks east on West 4th and make a right onto Cornelia Street.) By car, take 7th Avenue south to Bleecker; left on Bleecker; left onto Cornelia. For more information, visit www.corneliastreetcafe.com, or call 212-989-9319.

The Cornelia Street Café poetry series is curated by Angelo Verga. Po’Jazz will spend the summer fishing for poets, returning to its 6 to 8 pm time slot on Thursday, September 15^th. Poet Alana Lowe fills in for Po’Jazz on July 21^st, and the musicians of Center Search Quest will take the August 18^th opening.

About the Artists
( e-mail info@icaan.biz for photos)

Danya Birnbaum is a ten year old fourth grader who attends P.S. 116 in Murray Hill. She enjoys art such as collage and decoupage, creating fashions, making portraits, and sketching landscapes. Danya also enjoys acting and writing poetry. She is here at the Cornelia St. Cafe at the invitation of Golda Solomon, who met her last year at Mamapalooza. Danya dedicates her poetry to her cousin Max, who passed away in early April.

Emily Caccia, poet and vocalist, is a 9^th grader who loves writing poetry and says it relaxes her. She is always trying new ways of writing, and gets her ideas from things that have happened to her and to others. Emily enjoys sports, loves animals and English class, and is thinking of becoming a teacher.

Adam Chilenski, bass, is excited to be living in NYC. Having recently moved here from Portland, Maine he already considers it his home. Adam has been making a living as a musician since high school, and says he has no plans to do anything else.

Emily Drucker turned twelve years old in May. She loves animals, and is presently raising money to help save the tigers. She has a sister named Amanda and a cat named Goldy, a gerbil named Scout, two hamsters named Applesauce and Latke, a fish named Jewel and two frogs named Rocky and Lilly. Emily loves to draw and write poetry. She also plays violin and is now learning the soundtrack to Phantom of the Opera. Emily is in the 6th grade at the South Woods Middle School, Syosset, New York.

Marie Giustino lives in Congers, New York (Rockland County). She is 11 years old and has been writing poetry for one year. She attends Congers Elementary school. In addition to poetry, her hobbies include Jujitsu, reading, and just hanging out with her friends. Marie lives with her older and younger sister, one older brother, and her parents. This is her Po’Jazz debut.

Stephanie Lee, piano and vocals, works in the singer-songwriter-performer tradition. Strongly influenced by current events, her songs include stories of real people and socio-political satire. She was a runaway kid who became a mother while still a teenager, and the experience of being a poor, single mother politicized her immensely. In 1977, she moved to Taos, New Mexico, where she spent years writing songs, performing her music, and developing a small regional following. A modest grant by the Sumacil Foundation in 1999 gave her the boost needed to begin recording her first CD, Bliss is the Aftermath, which garnered great local reviews and airplay in New Mexico and Colorado. In 2001, she received an offer to produce her second CD, The Old Man’s Stories, which was recorded in Toronto, Canada in 2002 with Juno Award-winning producer Norman Barker. Stephanie runs New Goddess Records, Spread the Bread Publishing, and the online independent artist label marketing site www.vigilantemusesociety.com.

Tamara Magnitsky, poet, was born in San Francisco and grew up there on the California coast as well as a small town in the Wyoming mountains.  Of her poetry she states: “My mother was my original influence (I wrote my first poem to her at age 9) and remains a deep source of inspiration to this day.  She herself wrote poetry as did her mother and grandmother. She offered me a way of considering the world in which poetry is a natural expression.”

Deborah Maier, poet, continues to find ways to synthesize language and visual arts. Lifelong passions for both have found expression in language learning (with a focus on Middle Eastern languages) and teaching; monoprint (several series of personal, narrative, sometimes language-informed, subtractive works); animation, from traditional shorts for Iranian Educational Television, to independent, painterly ‘monomation’', and more recently teaching its joys to groups of various ages; short fiction; and graphic novel, a marriage of fiction and sequential pictures, ‘pocket movies’ that enable the intimate, anytime sharing of life’s beauties, seen and unseen. Deborah loves the expansion of those solitary pursuits into performance, and relishes the way spoken words can link a group.

Elizabeth Phaire, poet, is a versatile artist. She recently performed as a dancer and actor in “HerStory – Founding Mothers”. She produces and hosts a monthly series, “The Art of Healthy Living”, which airs on LMC-TV. In addition to her poetry, she is currently writing a play, and enjoys reading her latest works at open mics. She has been writing poetry, plays and short stories since the age of 14. The very first entry in her journal, written at the age of 8, was: “Today I met my true love, Joey.”

Lynne Procope is a poet and teaching artist from Trinidad and Tobago as well as co-founder and executive director of the louderARTS Project. In 1998, she was a member of the ground breaking Nuyorican Poets’ Café team which won the championship spot at the National Poetry Slam in Austin, Texas. The following year, she co-authored the Soft Skull Press poetry collection, Burning Down the House. Lynne is a poet in residence with VisionIntoArt, a multimedia/multidiscipline performance collaborative which seeks to marry prose, film, poetry, dance and music in organic collaborations engaging in socio-political and artistic discourse. Her writing and performances were commissioned by the New York State Council on the Arts in 2003-04. Lynne’s work appears in several anthologies and reviews and she has appeared as a featured poet at colleges and universities and festivals across the United States. She currently tours with various groups including VisionIntoArt, Locks & Vinegar and Damage and is available for readings & performances thru Global Talent Associates.

Golda Solomon, “the medicine woman of jazz,” is a professor of communications, speech, and theater arts; a poet, performer, producer, and docent; a supporter of women musicians as well as young musicians, poets, and performers. She was project director of Po’Jazz at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center for four years, and co-founded the brooklyn poetry choir. Golda has pioneered several unique businesses including JazzJaunts, a personalized jazz service, and, with Barbara Sfraga, ICAAN (Interactive Communication and Arts Network), which provides innovative, on-site, organization-specific arts programming to workplaces, schools, and other organizations. She and poet Monique Avakian are currently conducting “From Page to Performance” workshops for emerging poets and “ready to come out of the closet” writers. Golda has a collection of poetry, Flatbush Cowgirl, published in 1999, for which she co-produced a companion CD, First Set. She also co-produced the CD Po’Jazz: Takin’ It To The Hollow, which includes over 20 poets and musicians. In 2002, Golda’s poetry won first prize at the Writer’s Workshop in Asheville, North Carolina. Several of her poems are currently featured on the poetry page of www.jerryjazzmusician.com. Her book and CDs are available on www.amazon.com, www.cdbaby.com and www.jazzjaunts.com.

Denise Utt is a poet-lyricist. She has published poetry in Confrontations magazine and wrote the lyrics to the Angela Bofill hit, “What I Wouldn’t Do (For the Love of You)”. She also wrote the lyrics to the Hank Crawford song, “I Don’t Want No Happy Songs” and has had a song she co-wrote appear on a CBS TV movie of the week.