ABOUT JOHN DAVIS
Through his imaginative presentations of the life and music of the slave pianist/composer, Blind Tom, and an inventive and wide-ranging repertoire that has as its cornerstone piano works rooted in African-American music of the Deep South, pianist John Davis has emerged as one of today’s most respected and unique performing artists. Initially, Mr. Davis’ work with Blind Tom caught the public’s attention via runs of his one-man, multi-media theatrical concert, Will the Real Thomas Wiggins Please Stand Up! at the Culture Project in New York and at Brown University’s Rites & Reason Theater, and an appearance at The Martin Luther King Festival 2000 sponsored by National Public Radio, the Atlanta Symphony, the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and Morehouse-Spelman College. Soon thereafter, an extensive front page article in the “Arts and Leisure” section of The New York Times about the release of John Davis Plays Blind Tom on Newport Classic catapulted the CD into a top-ten classical seller at Tower Records and Amazon.com, and led to stories about Mr. Davis’ pursuit of Blind Tom on CNN, CNN-International, the BBC World News, and NPR’s Performance Today. Subsequent acknowledgments of Mr. Davis’ contributions were made in The New Yorker, The Independent (London), Time Out New York, Scientific American, and the magazine of African-American culture, American Legacy. Since then, Will the Real Thomas Wiggins Please Stand Up! inaugurated the 2003-2004 season at The Symphony Space in New York, another performance of the show (at the Springer Opera House, the State Theater of Georgia) was filmed for an extended story about Mr. Davis and Blind Tom on PBS’s Life 360, and a program-long interview of Mr. Davis was aired on ABC’s Nightline Up-Close, later featured in a special “Best of Up-Close” edition.
John Davis Plays Blind Tom has even resonated beyond the world of classical music. It was adopted by Lorna Simpson as the soundtrack to Corridor (2003), the esteemed artist’s film installation commissioned by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoca) and is featured in the mid-career retrospective of Simpson’s work traveling in 2006 and 2007 to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Miami Art Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York. Mr. Davis’ recording also inspired Terry Clarke, to write and record the song, “Blind Tom in Hoboken,” for the British Rockabilly artist’s just-released CD, Night Ride to Birmingham. And a cut from John Davis Plays Blind Tom (alongside those of Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, Loretta Lynn, Al Green, Buddy Holly, Erykah Badu, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Ricky Skaggs, Zora Neale Hurston, Joe Tex, The Pilgrim Travelers, and Johnny Winter, among others) was the only classical performance selected for the accompanying CD to the “7th Annual Southern Music Issue” of the Oxford American, the magazine of Southern culture founded by writer John Grisham and long prized by “roots music” aficionados.
Mr. Davis has also added extensively to the literature on Blind Tom. In addition to Will the Real Thomas Wiggins Please Stand Up! and his own liner note to John Davis Plays Blind Tom, the supplementary essays in the CD booklet by the actor, sleight-of-hand artist, and scholar of eccentric performers, Ricky Jay, the neurologist and eminent writer, Oliver Sacks, and the poet, music critic and political activist, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), constitute significant contributions to Blind Tom scholarship by major literary figures. Mr. Davis has also written the entry on Blind Tom in the one-volume African American Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and published in 2004 by Oxford University Press in conjunction with the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, that will again appear with several other entries by Mr. Davis in the landmark, multi-volume African American National Biography, slated for publication in 2008. He has also co-authored a substantial chapter on Blind Tom for the book, Stress and Coping in Autism, published by Oxford University Press in July, 2006.
Prior to his work with Blind Tom, Mr. Davis had already earned the public’s attention via critically-acclaimed recital debuts at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and Wigmore Hall in London, and his regular collaborations with many of the world’s most respected young chamber musicians. After solo recitals in San Francisco, Chicago, and St. Louis, he was invited by the U.S. State Department for several tours of Asia and Eastern Europe, during which he became the first American artist in over a half-century to perform in long-isolated Albania. More recently, Mr. Davis appeared with the Rousse Philharmonic in Bulgaria and the Bombay Chamber Orchestra as part of a nationwide tour of India, and was profiled, as well as in countless foreign and domestic print publications, on The Today Show on NBC, ABC’s Good Morning America, and King Biscuit Time, “Sunshine” Sonny Payne’s legendary blues program on KFFA-Radio in Helena, Arkansas, that launched the careers of Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Jr. Lockwood. On the heels of his success with Will the Real Thomas Wiggins Please Stand Up!, Mr. Davis charted new territory in Rome and Los Angeles with The John Davis Caravan: Standing At the Crossroads, his Chitlin’ Circuit-inspired nightclub show of black music-influenced piano works.
A graduate of The Phillips Exeter Academy, Mr. Davis was a pupil of Beveridge Webster at The Juilliard School, where he earned a master’s degree, and Herbert Stessin. Previously, while completing a double-major in History and Russian Language and Literature at Brown University, he studied piano with Aube Tzerko, Gabriel Chodos, and Seth Carlin.
John Davis is a Steinway Artist.
John Davis Plays Blind Tom has even resonated beyond the world of classical music. It was adopted by Lorna Simpson as the soundtrack to Corridor (2003), the esteemed artist’s film installation commissioned by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoca) and is featured in the mid-career retrospective of Simpson’s work traveling in 2006 and 2007 to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Miami Art Museum and the Whitney Museum in New York. Mr. Davis’ recording also inspired Terry Clarke, to write and record the song, “Blind Tom in Hoboken,” for the British Rockabilly artist’s just-released CD, Night Ride to Birmingham. And a cut from John Davis Plays Blind Tom (alongside those of Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, Loretta Lynn, Al Green, Buddy Holly, Erykah Badu, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Ricky Skaggs, Zora Neale Hurston, Joe Tex, The Pilgrim Travelers, and Johnny Winter, among others) was the only classical performance selected for the accompanying CD to the “7th Annual Southern Music Issue” of the Oxford American, the magazine of Southern culture founded by writer John Grisham and long prized by “roots music” aficionados.
Mr. Davis has also added extensively to the literature on Blind Tom. In addition to Will the Real Thomas Wiggins Please Stand Up! and his own liner note to John Davis Plays Blind Tom, the supplementary essays in the CD booklet by the actor, sleight-of-hand artist, and scholar of eccentric performers, Ricky Jay, the neurologist and eminent writer, Oliver Sacks, and the poet, music critic and political activist, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), constitute significant contributions to Blind Tom scholarship by major literary figures. Mr. Davis has also written the entry on Blind Tom in the one-volume African American Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and published in 2004 by Oxford University Press in conjunction with the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, that will again appear with several other entries by Mr. Davis in the landmark, multi-volume African American National Biography, slated for publication in 2008. He has also co-authored a substantial chapter on Blind Tom for the book, Stress and Coping in Autism, published by Oxford University Press in July, 2006.
Prior to his work with Blind Tom, Mr. Davis had already earned the public’s attention via critically-acclaimed recital debuts at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and Wigmore Hall in London, and his regular collaborations with many of the world’s most respected young chamber musicians. After solo recitals in San Francisco, Chicago, and St. Louis, he was invited by the U.S. State Department for several tours of Asia and Eastern Europe, during which he became the first American artist in over a half-century to perform in long-isolated Albania. More recently, Mr. Davis appeared with the Rousse Philharmonic in Bulgaria and the Bombay Chamber Orchestra as part of a nationwide tour of India, and was profiled, as well as in countless foreign and domestic print publications, on The Today Show on NBC, ABC’s Good Morning America, and King Biscuit Time, “Sunshine” Sonny Payne’s legendary blues program on KFFA-Radio in Helena, Arkansas, that launched the careers of Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Jr. Lockwood. On the heels of his success with Will the Real Thomas Wiggins Please Stand Up!, Mr. Davis charted new territory in Rome and Los Angeles with The John Davis Caravan: Standing At the Crossroads, his Chitlin’ Circuit-inspired nightclub show of black music-influenced piano works.
A graduate of The Phillips Exeter Academy, Mr. Davis was a pupil of Beveridge Webster at The Juilliard School, where he earned a master’s degree, and Herbert Stessin. Previously, while completing a double-major in History and Russian Language and Literature at Brown University, he studied piano with Aube Tzerko, Gabriel Chodos, and Seth Carlin.
John Davis is a Steinway Artist.
posted by John Davis at 4:36 AM
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