The Long-Time Supporter Of The Performing Arts Community Provides $6.3M In Grants To Support Artists

(May 1, 2025 – New York) Today, May Day, the Doris Duke Foundation (DDF) announced the six recipients of the 2025 Doris Duke Artist Awards – the largest prize in the United States that is dedicated to individual performing artists – and the launch of Creative Labor, Creative Conditions, a campaign and national network celebrating artists as creative laborers that includes $3M in grants towards building the financial and social conditions to help sustain professional artists.

This year’s Doris Duke Artist Awards honorees are:

• Trajal Harrell: Trajal is an American dancer and choreographer best known for a series entitled Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church. He is considered to be one of the most important choreographers working in contemporary dance today.
• Raja Feather Kelly: Raja is a Brooklyn-based choreographer known for his surrealist productions. He’s worked on shows like Fairview and A Strange Loop, and he serves as artistic director for The Feath3r Theory and the New Brooklyn Theatre.
• Aya Ogawa: Aya is an award-winning Brooklyn-based playwright, director, performer and translator. Their work explores cultural identity and the immigrant experience, challenging traditional notions of American aesthetics. They use a collaborative process and incorporate diverse perspectives and languages into their performances.
• Kassa Overall: Kassa is a Grammy-nominated musician, emcee, singer, producer and drummer who melds avant-garde experimentation with hip-hop production techniques to tilt the nexus of jazz and rap in unmapped directions. He previously released four critically acclaimed projects: I THINK I’M GOOD, Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz, Shades of Flu and Shades of Flu 2.
• Kaneza Schaal: Kaneza Schaal is a New York City–based artist working in theater, opera and film. Her notable work Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now was The Met’s first live performance as an integral part of a major exhibition.
• Brandee Younger: Brandee is an American harpist who blends classical, jazz, soul and funk influences into her music. In 2022, she became the first Black woman nominated for a Grammy® Award for Best Instrumental Composition and won the 2024 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album for Brand New Life.

“The Doris Duke Artist Awards are more than an award—they are an emblem of the role of artists in protecting a free and open society. These artists exemplify our commitment to the essential investments our society must make in sustaining creative labor,” said Sam Gill, CEO of the Doris Duke Foundation.

Each artist is awarded $525,000 in unrestricted funds allocated over seven years and an incentive of up to $25,000 to save for retirement. Including the 2025 recipients, the foundation to date has provided nearly 150 artists with more than $40 million through the Doris Duke Artist Awards program.

Kaneza Schaal, one of the 2025 Doris Duke Artist Award recipients said, “The world is on fire right now—with big changes, fears and dangers, problems. When it comes to the work of imagining new worlds, new answers, new possibilities… we who work in performance—what we make is always a conversation, in a world so desperately in need of conversations, real exchanges. At its best, our work is a model of participatory society. The Doris Duke Foundation’s support of our work, the work of democracy, of art, conversation and community, is an investment in building the world.”

This year, the Doris Duke Foundation intentionally announced the Artist Awards recipients on May Day—a day honoring the struggles and achievements of the international labor movement—to affirm that artists are workers. By celebrating artists as creative laborers, DDF underscores how society thrives when artists have resources, compensation and the support they need to live and work. With a $6.3M investment, DDF is reaffirming its commitment to the performing arts through the national Creative Labor, Creative Conditions campaign, which includes:

• $1.5M to the United States Artists for their national policy alliance and financial literacy trainings for artists
• A $1.5M partnership with the Center for Cultural Innovation on a national policy initiative that ensures artists are included in labor protections
• Arts policy convenings in Washington, D.C. with DCJazz (summer 2025) and in Colorado with Aspen Art Museum as part of their 2025 Investing In Artists As Leaders initiative
• A growing network of national partners dedicated to advancing equitable wages for artists, growing healthy communities with thriving cultural sectors and creating affordable spaces for performing artists to develop and produce work

United States Artists (USA) and the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) are nonprofits that help individual artists build sustainable careers and, more broadly, work to improve the social and financial infrastructure that allows artists and other freelancers to be creatively and financially successful in the long term. Through expanded technical assistance, financial services and direct support via USA programs and the National Arts Policy Alliance, DDF is equipping the organization’s member artists with tools to navigate a shifting policy landscape and preserve their long-term financial health.

“The independence and freedom necessary for an artist to roam, to imagine and to create visionary work, can leave those very artists vulnerable to being excluded from the protections and benefits awarded to those in stable and consistent environments of care,” said Judilee Reed, CEO of United States Artists. “As cultural laborers, we want to understand these challenges and create systems to accommodate resources for artists, not just because they’ve created beauty in the world but because this care is inalienable to all people.”

“A healthy democracy needs artists, yet artists are silenced when they struggle financially, are encumbered by debt or are losing housing. Everyone should be freely expressive, yet these kinds of struggles hold back too many people. We are excited to be working together on solutions for unharnessing artists’ potential in ways that benefit everyone in society.” — Angie Kim, President & CEO, Center for Cultural Innovation and Founding Director of its Research to Impact Lab.

The campaign kicks off on May 1 in Times Square with a multidisciplinary performance and large-scale choral activation, alongside partners. In addition to USA and CCI, partners include One Nation, One Project, Creatives Rebuild NY, and IndieSpace. As part of the effort, DDF will host two additional convenings with cross-sector leaders and artists between May Day and Labor Day in Aspen, Colorado and Washington, DC.

Established in 2012, the Doris Duke Artist Awards aim to create conditions for individual artists so they can thrive. In addition to providing a cash prize, the foundation also gives the award winners support including professional development, financial planning and management services, enhanced networking and performance opportunities. The unrestricted nature of the award allows artists to use the funds for either personal or professional needs and enjoy the freedom to pursue projects of their choosing. In 2023, the foundation doubled the amount of the award to signal the power of sustained support for individual performing artists.

For more information about the Doris Duke Artist Awards, visit ddaa.dorisduke.org.

ABOUT THE DORIS DUKE FOUNDATION
The mission of the Doris Duke Foundation (DDF) is to build a more creative, equitable and sustainable future. The foundation works across three areas: arts & culture, nature and health & well-being. DDF focuses its support to the performing arts on contemporary dance, jazz and theater artists, and the organizations that nurture, present and produce them. The Doris Duke Foundation is one of only two foundations in history to have received the National Medal of the Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts, presented by President Barack Obama, in special recognition of DDF’s support of creative expression across the United States and bold commitment to artistic risk, helping artists, musicians, dancers and actors share their talents and enrich the cultural life of the nation.

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Brandee Younger on TKA

The Rolling Stones, Lucinda Williams, Taj Mahal and Steve Earle are among the guest musicians who recorded songs for a new tribute album to zydeco legend Clifton Chenier. “A Tribute to the King of Zydeco” features those musicians along with a number of South Louisiana greats covering classic Chenier songs in celebration of what would have been the pioneer’s 100th birthday.

“A Tribute to the King of Zydeco” will be released June 27 on Joel Savoy’s Valcour Records, and the label has released the album’s first single, “Release Me,” featuring Williams, swamp pop icon Tommy McClain and accordion master Keith Frank. Take a listen to the song below.

“It’s pretty incredible when you start a project like this, how word gets out and people come to you wanting to be a part of it,” says Savoy, a Cajun musician whose parents are Marc and Ann Savoy. “Everybody loved Clifton and his music, and so many people were touched by it.”

Chenier was born in Opelousas on June 25, 1925, and his father, Joseph, taught a young Clifton to play the accordion. As he grew into his own as a regular musician at South Louisiana house parties and dances, Chenier developed a style that blended French Creole La La music with R&B and blues and Cajun influences. And his 1954 recordings of “Louisiana Stomp” and “Clifton’s Blues” are seen as some of the earliest recorded examples of what would become known as zydeco.

Chenier won a Grammy Award in 1983 for his album “I’m Here!,” and the next year the National Endowment for the Arts named him a National heritage Fellow.

Chenier died in December 1987 at the age of 62.

After Clifton’s passing, his son C.J. Chenier took over leadership of Clifton’s band. The accordionist and vocalist often pays tribute to his father on stage, and he appears on two tracks on “Tribute to the King of Zydeco,” performing on “I’m Coming Home” with blues guitarist Sonny Landreth and “Hot Rod” with David Hidalgo of the band Los Lobos.

The Rolling Stones and Cajun musician Steve Riley open “A Tribute to the King of Zydeco” with Chenier’s genre-naming song “Zydeco Sont Pas Sale” — and yes, Mick Jagger sings in French Creole. The Stones have rarely, if ever, contributed to this kind of tribute album, which demonstrates Chenier’s importance and the interest the band has had in American blues and folk music, says swamp rocker C.C. Adcock, who brought British giants onboard and produced the tracks “Zydeco Sont Pas Sales” and “Release Me.”

“We all got into a lot of cool music through the backdoor of The Rolling Stones and rock ‘n’ roll. And there’s another moment to do that here,” Adcock says. “The Stones being involved and them crowing about it is a way for some kid in Brazil to learn about zydeco and learn about Clifton.”

“A Tribute to the King of Zydeco” also includes Taj Mahal and Keith Frank performing on Chenier’s 1955 hit “Hey, ’tite Fille”; country musician Charley Crockett and Zydeco Cha Chas leader Nathan Williams Sr. playing “Easy Easy Baby”; and pianist Marcia Ball and accordionist Geno Delafose on “I May Be Wrong.”

The 14-track album was produced by Savoy and Steve Berlin, a longtime member of Los Lobos. John Leopold, the former managing director of the Arhoolie Foundation — the Arhoolie record label importantly released many of Chenier’s recordings — executive produced the album. Adcock produced “Zydeco Sont Pas Sales” and “Release Me.”

Savoy and Berlin brought together musicians Roddie Romero, Eric Adcock, Derek Huston, Lee Allen Zeno, Jermaine Prejean and Sherelle Chenier Mouton as the house band to back the guest artists on most of the tribute album. They’ve been dubbed the Dockside Allstars in a nod to their time recording the album at the studio out in Maurice.

“I immediately realized how important [this project] would be as a record and how I had to make sure that the correct people were involved in this,” Savoy says. “Because it wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about Steve. It wasn’t about Arhoolie. Instantly the weight on my shoulders was figuring out how to do this right. And I felt like there was one right way, and it was to bring as many of these zydeco legacy families onto the project as possible and get support from the zydeco community. I feel like we did a great job in accomplishing that.”

On Friday, May 2, the Dockside Allstars will back C.J. Chenier, Sonny Landreth, Marcia Ball, Curley Taylor and surprise guests during a Clifton Chenier centennial show at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. They play at 5:50 p.m. on the Fais Do-Do Stage.

There also will be an exhibit about Chenier in the Grandstand during Jazz Fest organized by the New Orleans Jazz Museum. “The King at 100” includes rare photos, archival materials and personal items, including Chenier’s accordion, stage outfits and his King of Zydeco crown.

In a couple of months, Valcour Records and Smithsonian Folkways will mark Chenier’s birthday with a 7-inch single release pairing The Rolling Stones’ version of “Zydeco Son Pas Sales” with Chenier’s original recording. There also are plans for Smithsonian Folkways, which now controls the Arhoolie catalog, to release a historical boxset later this year.

Proceeds from the sale of “A Tribute to the King of Zydeco” will benefit the Clifton Chenier Memorial Scholarship at the University of Louisiana Lafayette. The new scholarship fund will support ULL students studying traditional music, specifically zydeco accordion.

“These artists on this project were personally inspired and influenced by Clifton,” Savoy says. “I hope the participation of these artists will introduce their fanbase to not only to discover Clifton’s music, but I’d love for them also to dive deeper into the soulful origins of this music.”

Pre-orders for “A Tribute to the King of Zydeco” and a link to support the Clifton Chenier Memorial Scholarship are now open. Find more at linktr.ee/valcourrecords.

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CJ Chenier on TKA

via University of Miami Frost School of Music News and Events

Dean Shelton G. “Shelly” Berg, who has led the Phillip and Patricia Frost School of Music at the University of Miami since 2007, will step down from his position in the spring of 2026, it was announced last week. His departure marks the end of an era in which Berg transformed the Frost School into a groundbreaking exemplar of a new model of music education for the 21^st century and one of the best music schools in the country.

After 46 dizzying years balancing his work in academia with an active musical career Berg, an acclaimed pianist, composer, arranger and bandleader who is a six-time Grammy nominee, plans to focus on his art. He can do so because he leaves the Frost School in the talented and passionate hands of the faculty and leadership that has worked with him during his tenure.

“I started with ideas and a vision but the faculty built it,” Berg said. “It’s not my school – it’s their school. I’m so proud of what we accomplished together. I can feel good about handing the baton to someone else.”

Berg spoke from California on Friday morning. On Tuesday evening he led an epic concert featuring famous Frost School alumni artists to mark the Frost School and University of Miami’s centennial, an event that was months in the making. The next day he flew to San Francisco to play a jazz club there on Thursday night, flying back to Miami over the weekend to play in a Frost Wind Ensemble concert on Sunday.

“I’ve thrown myself into my academic career,” said Berg, who turns 70 this summer. “While I have the vitality and health it’s important for me to turn my attention towards making music and sharing it with audiences. That has come second for an awfully long time. It feels important to make some time for that in the next chapter.”

During the 2025-26 academic year, Berg will focus on fundraising and collaborating with the Frost School’s Board of Advisors to strengthen the school’s resources for the future. Beginning on August 15, 2025, Professor Serona Elton will serve as vice dean to oversee day-to-day operations. Elton, an experienced music industry executive, is Chair of the Music Industry Department and was previously the Associate Dean for Administration. Information about the search for Berg’s successor will be announced soon.

Central to Berg’s transformation of the Frost School was the Experiential Music Curriculum, or “Frost Method,” a revolutionary re-imagining of the conventional music curriculum which Berg created with faculty leaders during his first two years here. The Frost Method incorporates creative skills in composition, improvisation, arranging, and performance with entrepreneurial and practical skills in areas like marketing, production, technology, pedagogy, and critical/contextual thinking into the school’s syllabi. The aim is to teach students, not only to be expert in their field, but to be adventurous and resourceful, ready to adapt and succeed in a complex and changing music world. It’s called being “Frost Built.” 

“We have a curriculum and ethos that is very distinctive and aspirational among our peers,” Berg said. “We are a school where people have more choices about how to fit together the pieces to build themselves, where they learn the skills they need to be successful in life. A school where people work across genres with mutual respect and admiration.”

That bold, visionary approach, unique to the Frost School, has attracted a stellar faculty of performers, composers and scholars.

Berg has expanded that vision with groundbreaking programs. In 2008 he brought in the Henry Mancini Institute, which trains graduate students in multiple musical genres and media, who have performed on numerous national television specials, film scores, and major label recordings, collaborating with artists including Renée Fleming, Gloria Estefan, John Williams, Quincy Jones, Pharrell Williams, Stevie Wonder, Bobby McFerrin, Andrea Bocelli, Joshua Bell, Terrence Blanchard, Celine Dion, and Josh Groban.

Berg instituted the Donna E. Shalala MusicReach program, which serves over 1500 underserved kids in Miami-Dade County each year with music lessons, classes, ensembles, and technology workshops, inculcating social and emotional learning and academic as well as musical skills. He installed the Stamps Scholars Program, funded by philanthropists E. Roe Stamps and his late wife Penny, which provides full scholarships to members of four outstanding chamber ensembles.

Berg forged external partnerships to export the Frost Method and elevate the school’s profile. The Frost School at Festival Napa Valley is a teaching and performance program in orchestra and chamber music, which attracts 70 stellar classical music students each summer. The Frost School also co-presents the JAS Academy, a summer jazz program, with Jazz Aspen Snowmass in Aspen, Colorado for 50 career-ready young jazz artists.

He has overseen the fundraising and construction of two major facilities: the Patricia L. Frost Studios, which opened in 2015 with over 80 spaces for teaching, rehearsal, and performance; and the Knight Center for Music Innovation, a state-of-the-art performance and new technology venue, which opened in 2023 and houses the Robert and Judi Prokop Newman Recital Hall, the Thomas D. Hormel Innovation Stage, and innovative windowcast technology to showcase performances on an exterior plaza.

His final contribution to the Frost School will be fundraising to support what he’s created. “What matters to me most in this final year is to build the resources to maintain and propel the school’s greatness, and to attract the best students and faculty,” he said. He will follow with a year-long sabbatical, and return to the Frost School in a yet-to-be-defined role after that.

A musical prodigy who began in a program for gifted children at the Cleveland Institute of Music as a very young boy, Berg also played with his father, an accomplished jazz trumpeter. He worked his way through the University of Houston School of Music playing six nights a week in a band that played Latin, Jazz and Top 40 tunes, which he called a “nighttime and daytime education.” When he completed his master’s in piano performance, at 23, he was married with two children, and opted for a teaching job at San Jacinto College instead of touring and late-night gigs, staying for 12 years.

In 1991 Berg joined the faculty at the University of Southern California School of Music in Los Angeles, where he became a professor and chair of Jazz Studies, while also building a flourishing musical career, and countless professional and artistic relationships, in LA.

Berg was preparing to focus on his artistic career when the Frost School lured him across the country in 2007. He was so compelled by the ambition and spirit of possibility here that he took the job almost immediately. “There was a culture in Miami that said we’re on the rise, let’s do things together,” Berg said. “At the Frost School there was a willingness to do something great.”

Nearly two decades later, Berg feels confident enough in what he’s built at the Frost School to finally turn back to his music. “The legacy that we’ve created here is enormously meaningful to me,” he said. “But I can’t afford to wait another 20 years.”

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Shelly Berg on TKA

Fabiola Méndez accompanies Bad Bunny for his NPR Tiny Desk Concert, along with backing band LoS SOBRiNOS, keyboardist Luis Irizarry, producer “Big Jay”, bassist Krystal Santana, gïuro and tamborine player Emanuel Santa, and fellow cuatro player Luis Sanz.

Fabiola Méndez had her own Tiny Desk Concert in September of 2024.

Bad Bunny Tiny Desk Concert

Fabiola Méndez Tiny Desk Concert

Fabiola Méndez on TKA

via Financial Times

The band’s third Blue Note release delivers edgy dynamics and mixed emotional shades

Renee Rosnes assembled the all-women band Artemis in 2016 for a European tour to mark International Women’s Day. Nine years on, the band’s third Blue Note release, Arboresque, finds Artemis stripped back to a core quintet and playing with the collective strength of an established working band. Saxophonist Nicole Glover joined Artemis for 2023’s well-received second album, In Real Time, but the other members were in on the project from the start.

The set begins with the prowling noirish moods of “The Smile of the Snake”, written by one-time Art Blakey pianist Donald Brown and one of three covers arranged by Rosnes, the band’s prime mover and a technically astute pianist. As the theme slithers over sparse double bass, Glover and trumpeter Ingrid Jensen harmonise moodily and solos sustain the theme’s emotional tension. Later in the set, Rosnes’s subtle arrangement and the strength of Noriko Ueda’s double bass refresh the late Wayne Shorter’s oft-played “Footprints.” Equally appealing is the lilting cover of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s waltz “What the World Needs Now Is Love”.

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ARTEMIS on TKA

The main event: The 2025 GRAMMY Awards, officially known as the 67th GRAMMY Awards, took place at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Sunday, Feb.2. 

GRAMMY WINNERS

Best Jazz Instrumental Album: 
“Remembrance” — Chick Corea and Béla Fleck

Best Alternative Jazz Album:
“No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin” — Meshell Ndegeocello

GRAMMY NOMINEES

Category 30 – Best Jazz Performance

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Voting closes February 28th, 2025 11:59 pm CST. The 46th Blues Awards will take place May 8th, 2025 in Memphis, TN.

Album of the Year:

Hill Country Love, Cedric Burnside

Traditional Blues Album:

Hill Country Love, Cedric Burnside

Traditional Blues Male Artist:

Cedric Burnside

Blues Rock Album:

Broken, Walter Trout

Blues Rock Artist:

Walter Trout

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Cedric Burnside on TKA

Walter Trout on TKA

via No Depression

Catherine Russell & Sean Mason – My Ideal

There are jazz singers, there are great jazz vocalists, then there is Catherine Russell. For her ninth album, she forgoes her usual backing band and performs alone with pianist Sean Mason. Her interplay, where you distinctly hear her marvelous voice lovingly caressing the lyrics, with Mason is extraordinary. A beautiful record by my favorite vocalist.

Abdullah Ibrahim – 3

The album contains two on stage performances in London in 2023: one live before a sold out audience, and the other on the afternoon before that show by Ibrahim and his trio. Here is what Will Friedwald, the Dean of jazz critics said about the South African pianist: “One of the most lyrical of contemporary jazzmen… the atmosphere is more like a classical concert than a jazz event; throughout, the house keeps incredibly still, like it is hanging on every note and doesn’t want to miss a single one of them.” Ibrahim was also interviewed last year on NPR’s World Café.

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Abdullah Ibrahim on TKA

Catherine Russell on TKA

Rammana, set to be released March 28th, is Salin’s second studio album.

Over the course of two years, Salin created Ramman, which she refers to as Afro Thai Funk. Watch the video to hear Salin talk about her inspiration, her travel, and her sound that defines the new genre.

Watch the video here

Salin on TKA

via Glide Magazine

Salin is a Thai-born, Canada-based Juno-nominated drummer, producer and composer. Her current music explores the enchanting sounds of Northeast Thailand and marries it with the 70’s psychedelia of West Africa, all through the lens of modern soulful production. Through her music, she ponders themes of identity, spirituality, and humanity, all paired with a dose of fun to create a unique sonic journey for her listeners.

Her latest release “Si Chomphu” has been in Top 40 chart of Cat Radio’s (Thailand) and KCRW’s (LA). She also has the opportunity to perform at a variety of festivals, including CHANEL Summer Tour 2024, and the Montreal International Jazz Festival (2022,2024). Working with both local Thais as well as Canadian musicians, Salin is bringing together elements of East and West in the form of her second full-length album, set to be released in March.

Today Glide is offering a premiere of standout track “Painted Lady,” an enchanting song complemented by even more enchanted vibes. Surrounded by the rich golds, yellows, and browns of a leafy forest on a sunny fall day, Salin lays down a groove-laden drum track that is a quiet force. Incorporating jazz, funk, and a mellow, calming rhythm, she is completely in her element as she provides percussive guidance to this soundtrack featuring top-notch trumpet and saxophone with shimmering keys and in-the-pocket bass playing. There is a warm, mellow feeling to the track that is enhanced by the visuals as Salin seems to bask in the moment and the music.

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Salin on TKA