#Newsflash | Free screening of documentary on local jazz great
BY QEDC It's In Queens
He’s the greatest musician that you never heard.
Flushing Town Hall presents a free screening of the documentary Night Bird Song: The Incandescent Life of Thomas Chapin on Saturday, April 1, at 7 pm. A Q&A with Emmy-winning filmmaker Stephanie J. Castillo and her co-producer/co-writer, Noel M. Izon, follows.
Chapin — a saxophone virtuoso, flute master, composer, and band leader who lived in Jackson Heights — died of leukemia at age 40 in 1998, just as his career was starting to soar.
A showman who would howl, roar, and yell during jams, Chapin was one of the few artists of his generation to flourish in both NYC’s downtown experimental jazz scene and the uptown world of traditional jazz. His early death poses the unanswerable question about how big he would have become.
This 96-minute documentary offers an intimate portrait of Chapin with emphasis on his six-year stint as Lionel Hampton’s music director and lead alto sax as well as his emergence as a musical force in the late 1980s and his meteoric rise as the head of a trio in the 1990s.
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