Monk Rowe, the Joe Williams Director of the Jazz Archive and Lecturer in Music Performance (Saxophone) will be honored with the 2018 Syracuse Area Music Awards (SAMMYs) Music Educator of the Year award on March 2.
The SAMMYs also recognize the best albums by members of Central New York's music community each year.
Rowe, who has taught music since 1974, was an instructor in Utica for many years before becoming director of Hamilton’s Fillius Jazz Archive in 1995.
The Fillius Jazz Archive has several hundred interviews with jazz greats onto its YouTube channel.
The Jazz Archive holds a collection of some 330 videotaped interviews with jazz musicians, arrangers, writers, and critics. Rowe has conducted most of the interviews of artists in the archive and has presented programs about the resource at conferences for the Jazz Education Network, the Music Library Association, and the International Society of Music Educators.
Rowe called the SAMMY award “a welcome surprise.” He said, ”Teaching and performing music is an ongoing education in itself, as students regularly prompt us to think differently about the subject at hand and cause us to devise new ways to approach it. Integrating the arts into education is a challenge I continue to develop and enjoy.”
He created the eDx online course, “Jazz: The Music, The Stories, The Players” in collaboration with members of the Library and Instructional Technology Services and said that was “yet another welcomed teaching experience.”
Rowe co-authored the book Jazz Tales From Jazz Legends with Romy Britell on Hamilton’s Couper Press. He is an active performer on saxophone and piano and has composed numerous works for both jazz and classical ensembles.
