Fort Worth Library schedules lecture on I.M. Terrell and music history
As part of the Fort Worth Library’s Community History Workshops, presented in conjunction with the TCU Center for Texas Studies, the library is offering a lecture on I.M. Terrell: How a Handful of Graduates from One Black High School Changed Music History.
The lecture, presented by Fort Worth musician Tom Reynolds, will take place at 10:30 a.m., Feb. 2, in the Tandy Lecture Hall at the Central Library, 500 W. Third St., Fort Worth 76102-7305 Starts at 1030 am in the Tandy Lecture Hall at Central Library. Admission is free.
Learn about the outstanding musical legacy of Fort Worth’s I.M. Terrell High School. Now an academy for STEM and Visual Performing Arts education, I.M. Terrell opened in 1882 as the city’s first black school during the era of formal racial segregation.
Under the leadership of director G. A. Baxter, the music program trained many students who would become influential jazz and rhythm and blues performers of the 20th century including Ornette Coleman, King Curtis, Dewey Redman, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Cornell Dupree and others.
For many years speaker Tom Reynolds, a fellow musician, has studied and preserved the musical history of I. M. Terrell through documents, musical recordings, oral interviews.
Reynolds took up guitar at age 12 and electric bass at 15.
He studied with the great jazz guitarist Jim Hall as a teen and went on to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston and Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
After returning to Fort Worth, Reynolds played in the house band at the famous Blue Bird Night Club in Como backing blues singer Robert Ealey. He has since performed with numerous singers and musicians primarily in Texas and California including John Raitt, Smokey Robinson, Steve Miller, Wilford Brimley, and Doyle Bramhall.
Reynolds can be heard regularly at the Kimbell Art Museum, the Modern Art Museum, and other Fort Worth venues.
http://fortworthtexas.gov/library/programs/community-history/