Wadada Leo Smith Receives Hammer Museum’s 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement

Composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has received the Hammer Museum’s 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement “honoring brilliance and resilience.” The $25,000 Award was announced by the museum on August 16 and presented in conjunction with the exhibitionMade in L.A. 2016: a, the, through, only, organized by Hammer curator Adam Moshayedi and Hamza Walker, director of education and associate curator, Renaissance Society.

“The jury wants to acknowledge Wadada Leo Smith’s outstanding achievements as a musician, his influential work as a teacher and a mentor for younger artists in Los Angeles, and the decades-long expansion of an inventive, complex and layered system of notation simultaneously interrogating the pictoral and the performative,” stated Juse Luis Blondet, curator, Special Initiatives, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. More

Broadway Scam Centers Around Soprano Kathleen Battle

Soprano Kathleen Battle was the subject of a fake Broadway production used to steal $165.000 from investors. (Courtesy of CAMI)

Kathleen Battle is preparing a long-awaited return to the Metropolitan Opera this November, but a fraudulent Broadway project has her in the headlines right now. The soprano’s name is at the center of a scam that reports are comparing to another Broadway production, The Producers. Talent agent Roland Scahill raised approximately $165,000 for a one-woman show about the falling out between Battle and the Metropolitan Opera. Scahill had told his investors that he secured the rights for the story from Battle and claimed that Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o was on board to portray the beleaguered singer.  more

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Watch: ICE Members Compete in 'Stupid Musician Tricks'

International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) (Armen Elliott)

While athletes in Rio were jumping, running and swimming higher and faster than the rest of humankind, another Olympics-style competition was taking place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On Aug. 17th, musicians from the International Contemporary Ensemble strove to find out who among them possessed superlative skills. Called "Stupid Musician Tricks," or "the biggest dork fest imaginable" according to some of ICE's members,  the competition featured three categories: More