A Celebration in Jazz
To celebrate 250 years of learning and living with neighbors, the Columbia 250 Community Festival presented leading jazz, Latin jazz, and blues artists in concert.

Dee Dee Bridgewater
Dee Dee Bridgewater made her New York debut in 1970 as the lead vocalist for the band led by Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, one of the premier jazz orchestras of the time. Throughout the seventies she also performed with such giants as Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach, and Roland Kirk. Bridgewater also pursued a parallel career in musical theater. She won a Tony Award for her role as Glinda the Good Witch in The Wiz in 1975. This began a long line of awards and accolades which included acting/singing roles in Sophisticated Ladies, Cosmopolitan Greetings, Black Ballad, and Carmen Jazz. She was the first black actress to star as Sally Bowles in the musical Cabaret, which furthered her reputation as a consummate entertainer.
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Taj Mahal
Legendary musician, songwriter, composer, and producer Taj Mahal continues to pursue a dynamic career after over forty years in the recording industry. A self-taught musician, Taj plays over twenty instruments, including the National Steel and Dobro guitars. To date, Taj Mahal has received nine Grammy nominations and two wins, both for Best Contemporary Blues Album, the first in 1999 for Señor Blues and again in 2001 for Shoutin' in Key. He has appeared and performed in many films throughout his career. With more than forty albums to his credit and countless collaborations, Taj continues to ask us to take a "giant step outside our mind," as we experience his musical metamorphosis, one still very much rooted in traditional blues music.
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Eddie Palmieri
The world has long admired the Harlem-born, seven-time Grammy Award winning Eddie Palmieri as one of the foremost Latin pianists of the last half century. His ability to fuse the rhythms of his Hispanic heritage with the jazz influences of Thelonius Monk and McCoy Tyner made him an immediate hit when he played New York's Palladium Ballroom in the fifties and sixties. He has continued as a stylistic innovator over the years, creating classic Tico albums and later mixing salsa with R & B, pop, rock, Spanish vocals, and jazz improvisation. In the tradition of, Eddie Palmieri is happy to consider himself a Latin jazz ambassador to the world.
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McCoy Tyner
In 1958 McCoy Tyner left his native Philadelphia to perform and record with The Jazztet, the legendary group founded by Art Farmer and Benny Golson. Two years later, John Coltrane recruited Tyner for what would become one of the most celebrated and controversial groups in modern jazz. From 1960 through the close of 1965, Tyner's name was propelled to international renown as he developed a new pianistic vocabulary that—in order to fully complement Coltrane's extended, modally based explorations—transcended the status-quo piano styles of the time. He performed on popular recordings like My Favorite Things and Africa/Brass, and in the company of the Classic Quartet—Coltrane, Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones—was integral to now-classic albums Live at the Village Vanguard, Impressions, and Coltrane's signature suite, A Love Supreme. After 1965, Tyner's recordings find him expansively exploring quartet (The Real McCoy) and big-band formats (Tender Moments) and rethinking the modally based and percussively charged lessons of his Coltrane years (Time for Tyner, Expansions).
NPR Jazz Profile