WestportReads: The Jazz Age

WestportREADS is an annual Library program dedicated to strengthening the community through the shared experience of a book or author.

The period from the end of World War I until the start of the Great Depression is known as the "Jazz Age."

Although older generations once considered this music immoral and threatening to cultural values, jazz overcame this initial opposition to become one of the country’s most popular musical forms.

Join writer and jazz historian Todd Bryant Weeks for a celebration of jazz, with examples and stories interwoven with his love for the music on January 17, at 7:30 pm in the Westport Library’s McManus Room. Free and open to all, the program is part of WestportREADS, which focuses this year on The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and is funded by Jerry A. Tishman.

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Weeks’ first book, Luck's in My Corner: The Life and Music of Hot Lips Page, received a 2009 Honorable Mention for Research in Recorded Jazz from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), a national scholarly association. He has also received awards from the International Labor Communications Association for his regular reporting on jazz and labor issues in Allegro, the magazine of the American Federation of Musicians, Local 802, and has been published in the Annual Review of Jazz Studies. 

Weeks has lectured on jazz and other subjects while teaching with the Bard Prison Initiative and at Rutgers University, and has given presentations and talks at the Institute of Jazz Studies, the Louis Armstrong House Museum, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the ARSC Convention in New Orleans, and the Westport Library. He is currently working on a book about baseball, jazz, and boxing. 

Enter a drawing at this or any WestportREADS 2013 event to become one of 20 people chosen to attend a talk February 2 at 2 pm at the house on South Compo Road in Westport where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived in 1920. Former Staples High School English teacher Gerry Kuroghlian will lead the talk. There will be light refreshments.