Despite Venue Shortcomings, Capital Jazz Fest Draws a Loyal Crowd

Despite Venue Shortcomings, Capital Jazz Fest Draws a Loyal Crowd

Published in the Arts Desk section of The City Paper’s website:  The fans lined up as early as 3 a.m. to secure prime real estate in the tent cities or on the sloping main lawn. It looked as if they were leaving for a month-long vacation, towing food and creature comforts on dollies, customized wagons, and platform trucks that contractors use to haul lumber. They brought air mattresses, inflatable chaise lounges, camping beds, and even landscape lights to mark their territory. All this for just a day at the Capital Jazz Fest at Merriweather Post Pavilion. For two decades, many area music lovers have made it a ritual to kick off the summer with some of their favorite jazz, R&B, and hip-hop artists at the festival. The venue was packed to near-capacity on Friday night and sold out Saturday and Sunday, with roughly 20,000 people swarming the 40 acres of Symphony Woods each day to hear artists ranging from Les Nubians to Michael Franks. Adrienne Braswell of Alexandria, Va., sold 233 of those tickets to a group of enthusiasts she calls Braswell’s Circle, which stretches from Georgia to New York. Reconnecting with old friends was one of the best parts of the weekend, said members of the Charlotte, N.C., Jazz Fest Crew. “We’ve been coming every year since 2001,” said Jeannine Chandler, who traveled to Columbia, Md., from Atlanta with her husband. Many fans were hard-pressed to pinpoint the highlight of their highlights. For some, it was hearing Erykah Badu (below) on Friday, Rick Braun on Saturday, or Keiko Matsui on Sunday. Others singled out Kem, Jeff Lorber, the O’Jays, and local favorite Marcus Johnson of Silver Spring, Md. Faith Evans invited some attendees to dance onstage, while Joe and Dwele wandered into the crowd...
Black Women on Power

Black Women on Power

Linda Johnson Rice, chairwoman of Johnson Publishing Company, and Desiree Rogers, president and CEO of Johnson Publishing, joined moderator Yanick Rice Lamb to speak about what it takes to take charge of your career and personal brand. More than 200 women executives, managers and students attended the panel held July 10, 2012, at Target Field in...

From Trivia to Treasure

“From Trivia to Treasure” is a video of the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse in Oakland, Calif. It was shot by Yanick Rice Lamb, an associate professor at Howard University, and Rick Jurgens, both fellows of  the Knight Digital Media Center at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California at Berkeley. Fellows in KDMC workshops often create integrated multimedia projects as part of their training. Lamb produced and edited this video as a part of KDMC’s January 2012 Digital Storytelling Workshop. During the six-day workshop, KDMC fellows spotlight local businesses in the UC Berkeley...

Stepping Up The Social Media Teaching Strategies Thanks To AEJMC Magazine Panel

Excerpt from George Daniels, University of Alabama at AEJCM Southeast Colloquium at Virginia Tech in 2012. BLACKSBURG, Va– The notion of “save the best for last,” definitely applies to a trio of presentations scheduled for the tail end of  the AEJMC Southeast Colloquium last weekend here on the Virginia Tech campus. Representing the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Magazine Division, Yanick Rice Lamb, Erin Coyle, and Susan Sivek delivered a set of recommendations for “Going Digital: Preparing Students to Succeed as Magazines Move from Paper to Pixels.” … “Change is the cost of doing business,” said Yanick Rice Lamb, who teaches several courses in the journalism department at Howard University’s School of Communications. (Full disclosure: I am a proud 1992 graduate of this program– Go Bison!) Lamb’s research focuses on the innovative way national magazines are changing in the age of iPod and e-Reader platforms. Among the findings from her study was the realization that many magazines are expecting  those new hires in the magazine design arena to not just have traditional skills in pagination programs such as Quark X Press and Adobe InDesign. Increasingly, those designers may be called upon to design contact for a mobile APP and thus must arrive at the publication with some familiarity with HTML5 and...