The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music concert featuring esteemed philosopher and author Cornel West, acclaimed Afro Latin jazz artist Arturo O’Farrill and the legendary Mariachi Los Camperos is coming home to campus.
The free concert will now be held at Royce Hall on May 13 at 8 p.m. The RSVPs of those who have already registered for the event, which was originally scheduled to take place in downtown Los Angeles, will be honored at Royce Hall. New guests may still RSVP for the concert.
The concert features a special presentation of O’Farrill’s recent Grammy Award-winning album “Four Questions,” with narration by West, and instrumentation by the UCLA Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, directed by O’Farrill, a professor of global jazz studies and music, and UCLA Philharmonia, directed by Neal Stulberg, a professor of music.
The event also will have performances by Mariachi Los Camperos, directed by Jesús Guzmán, as well as a performance of Miguel Bernal Jiménez’s Concertino para Órgano y Orquesta featuring UCLA organist Christoph Bull.
The concert is part of West’s residency at UCLA as a University of California Regents’ Lecturer. His lecture, “The Musical Vocation in Our Bleak Times,” will be delivered on Wednesday, May 11, at 5 p.m. in UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall. It is free and open to the public.
West’s residency is sponsored by the UCLA Center for Latino Arts; the UCLA Division of Social Sciences and Dean Darnell Hunt; O’Farrill’s UCLA research funding; the Kenny Burrell Chair in Jazz Studies; the UCLA Herb Alpert Endowment Fund for Guest Lecturers; the Gary Nash Endowed Chair in American History; the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, and the department of African American studies.