Arts Festival Japanese Potters, U.S. Jazz Group For City

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30499, 22 July 1964, Page 1

Arts Festival Japanese Potters, U.S. Jazz Group For City

(From Our Own Reporter) WELLINGTON, July 21. The United States State Department will send a university jazz group to the Pan-Pacific Arts Festival in Christchurch next February. The department hopes that it will be a group from Denver University.

The Japanese Government proposes to send two potters and two flower arrangers to the festival.

The potters will be Mr Shoji Hamada and his son. who will help him with demonstrations and the exhibition of perhaps 50 or more examples of pottery which they will bring from Japan.

The Government has not yet chosen the two women to demonstrate flower arrangement in Christchurch.

The chairman of the organising committee of the festival (Mr J. G. Collins) announced recently that negotiations had been completed with the two Governments for contributions to the twoweek festival.

The Denver University Band won the 1963 collegiate jazz festival at the University of Notre Dame. Roy

Pritts won the prize at the festival for the most promising arranger.

Reviews said the band beat its competitors simply because it played with greater power and precision. The band also competed at the Oread jazz festival near Kansas City a few months ago where one of its members, the trumpeter, Lynn Zorric, won a scholarship to the Berkelee School of Music in Boston. The Oread festival Is named after Mount Oread on which the University of Kansas is built. Denver is among those American universities which have promoted jazz as both part of their study courses and incorporate it in well supported extra-curricula programmes. The courses ininclude the study of jazz theory, improvisation, arranging and the history of jazz. Indiana University and North

Texas State University are among the leading colleges in this field.

" Other universities sponsor jazz groups and stage bands and have jazz workshops where students can experiment with the medium and enjoy considerable freedom for developing avant-garde music.

In 1951, in "A Potter’s Portfolio,” the British potter, Bernard Leach, said that, in his opinion, Mr Hamada was the best potter alive. “For such is the depth of his intention as an individual, as a modern Japanese, and as a human being facing the meeting of East and West, that his pots are worthy of comparison with the finest from the past,” said Mr Leach. Mr Hamada, now 70, is among the foremost Japanese potters who use folkcraft in their work.