NEW YORK (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — Wendell Logan, jazz and concert music composer died at the age of 69 after a short illness according to the New York Times.
Professor Logan founded the jazz department at Ohio's Oberlin Conservatory of Music more than two decades ago and was the chairman of the jazz studies department and professor of African-American music at Oberlin College's conservatory at the time of his death.
Among Logan's best-known concert works are “Doxology Opera: The Doxy Canticles” (2001), a gritty sung drama of race and morality with a libretto by Paul Carter Harrison, and “Runagate, Runagate” (1989), a setting of Robert E. Hayden’s poem about a fugitive slave according to the New York Times.
Reviewing the performance in The New York Times, Allan Kozinn wrote, “Mr. Logan’s music — a volatile mixture of angularity, harmonic haziness and expressive dissonance tempered with openly tonal sections — adds a palpable dramatic dimension to the narrative.”
Logan's passion for Jazz and talent in composing concert music, a discipline that black composers have historically been discouraged from pursuing, have developed the professor into an African-American legend in music education and composition. – CelebrityAccess Staff Writers
