History center: Panel, concert to salute jazz musician Sam Rivers

Orange County Regional History Center will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of jazz musician Sam Rivers with a panel, a pop-up photo gallery and a concert in October.

Rivers died at age 88 in Orlando on Dec. 26, 2011, after spending about two decades in Central Florida. He was born in Oklahoma in 1923, grew up in Chicago, and his career as a composer and saxophonist included working with jazz and blues artists such as Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker.

The history center events set for Oct. 7 start with a panel discussion moderated by Matt Gorney, Rivers’ manager and producer in Central Florida. Participating will be Monique Rivers Rencher, daughter of the musician; Doug Matthews, leader of the Sam Rivers Rejuvenation Orchestra; Rick Lopez, who wrote “The Sam Rivers Sessionography,” a biography; and Michael Heller from the University of Pittsburgh Department of Music, which is the home base of the Sam Rivers Archive.

The panel starts at 2 p.m. at the history center in downtown Orlando.

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Photography of Rivers taken by Orlando’s Jim Leatherman will be on display at the history center, where copies of Lopez’s “Sessionography” will be for sale. Rivers information also is included in the current exhibit called “Figurehead: Music & Mayhem in Orlando’s Underground.” The panel and related activities at the museum are included with regular admission.

In the evening, the Sam Rivers Rejuvenation Orchestra will perform at The Social on Orange Avenue. Show time is 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 and will go on sale Aug. 25. (There is a presale for museum members this week.)

Sam Rivers’ move to Orlando in the 1990s came at the invitation by an array of jazz musicians that had arrived to work at Walt Disney World, his daughter told the Orlando Sentinel after his death.

“He had chances to go anywhere he wanted, but the musicians here told him, ‘Your band awaits you,’ ” she said. “When he walked into the room for the first rehearsal, they all stood up and clapped. He told me, ‘How could you refuse an invitation like that?’ ”

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For more information on the Oct. 7 events, go to thehistorycenter.org/SR100

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