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Close Encounters with Music – Cafe Music, Jazz, Rap and Grand Reopening

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Paul Schoenfield’s runaway classical hit, Café Music for piano trio, sets the tone for our celebratory re-opening. Combining elements of classical, jazz, klezmer and whimsy, Café Music is caffeine-fueled and irresistible. Claude Bolling’s musings in the Suite for Cello and Jazz Trio offer up interpolations of boogie-woogie and ragtime with Baroque underpinnings. Gershwin is represented with his Three Preludes for Piano. With a benediction from Beethoven (his Romance No. 2 in F Major for Violin and Piano) and a cameo appearance by Christylez Bacon, the first Hip-Hop artist to be featured at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and with commissions by the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institute, the season is launched.