The United States Embassy and the Creative Productions and Training Centre (CPTC) have partnered to mark April as Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM). Activities for the month include a jazz film festival, a jazz marathon on Creative Television (CTV) and a jazz exhibition. They will be held at the Wycliff Bennett Studios at the CPTC.

CTV's Jazz Jammin' Marathon from April 17 to 19 will be three days of back-to-back jazz programming, featuring a line-up of concerts, feature films, documentaries and interviews with Jamaican and international jazz musicians and singers.

The film series, which will feature the inaugural season of the critically acclaimed LEGENDS OF JAZZ with Ramsey Lewis, blends one-of-a-kind music performances, rarely seen archival material and intimate conversations with the top artistes of the genre. And so far, the venture has received rave reviews from major publications around the US.

Free admission

The films will be shown each Thursday at 6:30 p.m., and are free to the public.

The jazz specials from the CPTC's archives include the Blues on the Green, Jazz in the Gardens, and Seretse Small's Live Music Nation series, as well as television productions with Jon Williams, Dr Kathy Brown and Friends, Dennis Rushton, Sonny Bradshaw and the Big Band, Ernie Ranglin, Maurice Gordon and Friends, Mickey Hanson, Sonny Bradshaw, Cedric Brooks, Lester Sterling, Ian Herd, singer Totlyn Jackson and others.

The jazz exhibitions Louis Armstrong: King of Jazz, Duke Ellington Remembered - 1999 and Jazz will run throughout this month and is also open to the public.

Since 2002, JAM has been celebrated in April by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. The month of April was selected as it is the birth month for a number of leading jazz figures, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton, Gerry Mulligan, Tito Puente and Herbie Hancock.