• The October/November issue of Crescendo & Jazz Music: The Musicians’ Magazine (London) detailed the contributions of Nathan Davis, Pitt professor and director of Pitt’s Jazz Studies Program, to the Oct. 1-2, 2004, celebration of International Music Day at UNESCO’s world headquarters in Paris. Davis helped organize Jazz Meets the World: A Tribute to Jazz in Education—a two-day event featuring a concert by a multinational band, specially assembled by Davis, along with lectures and demonstrations by jazz artists and students from around the world. In addition to playing tenor and soprano saxophones, Davis served as musical director of the band that included trumpeters Jon Faddis and Maurice Brown, trombonist Marc Godfroid, saxophonist Johnny Griffin, pianist Makoto Kuriya, drummer Billy Cobham, bassist Abraham Laboriel, guitarist Nelson Veras, vocalist David Linx, and guest solo pianists Martial Solal and Billy Taylor.

After the concert, Pitt Provost James V. Maher and International Music Council (IMC) President Kifah Fakhouri presented Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Awards from Pitt’s International Academy of Jazz and IMC to Griffin, pianist Michael Sardaby, Solal, and Taylor. Davis also moderated an Oct. 2 roundtable discussion about the golden years of jazz in Paris in the 1960s. The discussion, held in the Maison des Cultures du Monde Theater, was modeled after the annual Pitt Jazz Seminar and Concert, which marked its 34th anniversary last fall.

• In a Jan. 29 interview for National Public Radio’s (NPR) Weekend Edition, Jeffrey Schwartz, Pitt professor of anthropology, put to rest the misconception that George Washington wore wooden dentures. The first president of the United States—who, at the age of 22, began losing his teeth and the bone in which they were secured—wore five sets of dentures throughout his life, but none was wooden. “As a matter of fact, nobody seemed to have worn wooden dentures in the 18th century,” Schwartz told NPR’s Scott Simon. “I’ve finished doing some more research on this, and the misconception, I think, derives from the possibility that the ivory that was used as the substrate in which to pin so-called dental structures, whether they be real teeth or modeled to look like teeth—the ivory itself would stain after tea and wine and whatever else; and it just looked [like] the color of wood, but, in fact, it was ivory.”

According to Schwartz, it appears that the portrait of Washington that most people are familiar with—a Gilbert Stuart painting, the mirror image of which is printed on one-dollar bills—is a portrait of a man without teeth and without his dentures in to give structure to his lower jaw. To find a better representation of Washington, Schwartz and a team hired by curators of the first president’s Mt. Vernon estate will scan a set of Washington’s dentures, then “put them digitally into the scanned life mask and bust of Washington, to figure out what the size of his oral cavity was at that time [the age of 22], and then, using other examples of jaws with teeth, to reconstruct Washington’s lower face as a younger individual.” The dental scans made news Jan. 26 in The Baltimore Sun, Jan. 31 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Feb. 1 on cnews.canoe.ca. Schwartz is scheduled to appear on ABC’s Good Morning America later this month. History Channel is following Schwartz’s team as it constructs three models of Washington: one of him as a 19-year-old surveyor, one of him at the age of 45 as he took command of the Colonial Army during the Revolutionary War, and one of him at his inauguration at the age of 57. The History Channel coverage is scheduled to air in the fall of 2006 and will coincide with the public unveiling of the models.