This benefit for the Creative Music Studio is another one of those concerts I haven’t been able to learn much about, but nonetheless it seems significant. I wanted to mark the date, January 15, 1977, and post a facsimile of the flyer. Some of the usual suspects were involved—the Jazz/Arts Ministry and the Jazz Coalition. The site was the benefit-friendly Church of the Covenant on Newbury Street.
Jazz Coalition benefit concert for Karl Berger’s Creative Music Studio, 1977
The actual Creative Music Studio was located in Woodstock, New York. It was a program run by the non-profit Creative Music Foundation, founded by Karl Berger in 1971. This Boston benefit concert featured several musicians long associated with the CMS, including Michael Gregory Jackson and Ed Blackwell. Other notables chipped in to help, including Boston-based players like Jimmy Giuffre and Baird Hersey.
For Baird Hersey, this was something different. His band, the Year of the Ear, did not include a 28-piece saxophone chorus. I can imagine him scouring the practice rooms at Berklee, rounding up all available sax players. Sort of a musical press gang.
Steven Gorn and Bob Becker (a longtime associate of Steve Reich) were deeply involved in Indian music at this time. They were not Boston-based.
If anyone can fill me in on this show, or on the artists who were involved, I’d appreciate it. In the meantime, here’s the flyer.