SATURDAY at 7:30 P.M.

Cal Poly Humboldt Jazz Orchestra and Wind Ensemble

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The Cal Poly Humboldt Department of Dance, Music and Theatre presents “Jazz Orchestra and Wind Ensemble” Join us Saturday, March 8th 7:30pm at the Fulkerson Recital Hall at Cal Poly Humboldt. Tickets are $15 General, $5 for Children and Free for Cal Poly Humboldt students with ID. To purchase tickets, visit tickets.humboldt.edu/dance-music-and-theatre. Tickets are also available at the door.

The Jazz Orchestra will perform the following:

“Cool Breeze” by Dizzy Gillespie and Tadd Dameron. “Cool Breeze” started as a counterline that Gillespie played on a Coleman Hawkins tune called “Disorder at the Border” when he was a part of Hawkins’ band early in Gillespie’s career. Gillespie then joined the Billy Eckstine Orchestra and Tadd Dameron wrote for that band the arrangement that we’re playing, titling it “Cool Breeze”. When Gillespie formed his own big band several years later, he used the same Dameron arrangement and kept it in his repertoire for the rest of his career. Our performance will feature Raymond Endert on trombone and Mathias Severn on tenor sax.

“Opus Four” by Charles Mingus. This is a lesser-known Mingus tune from later in his career that includes such favorite Mingus devices as a constantly changing groove and unusual phrase lengths. We’re playing the arrangement written by Boris Kozlov for the Mingus Big Band and featuring Nate Heron on trombone, Hayden Hickcox on trumpet. John Gerving on piano, and Gavin Kingsley on drums.

“Israel” by John Carisi. Carisi composed and arranged “Israel” in 1949 for the Miles Davis Nonet, better known as “The Birth of the Cool Band”. Carisi wrote the tune as a new kind of 12-bar blues and named it “Israel” because the State of Israel was also new that year. The arrangement we’re playing is Mike Tomaro’s adaptation for big band of Carisi’s original nonet arrangement. It will feature Ricardo Paredes on alto sax and Andrew Henderson on the trumpet.

“Butter” was composed by Jerry Dodgion as a tribute to the trombonist Quentin “Butter” Jackson, best known for his plunger mute playing in the Duke Ellington Orchestra. “Butter” was first recorded by the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, for their album Twenty Years at the Village Vanguard. The band, now known as the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, is this year celebrating its 50th year of playing every Monday night at the Village Vanguard, the famed New York City jazz club. Our performance will feature John Gerving on piano and Lily Storseth on trombone.

“Struttin’ With Some Barbecue” by Lil Hardin Armstrong. Lil Hardin was Louis Armstrong’s second wife and his bandmate in the Hot Five, Armstrong’s groundbreaking band from the late 1920s in which he established jazz as a swinging soloist’s art form. “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue” is considered one of the Hot Five’s greatest recordings, and Armstrong re-recorded it with his big band in the late 1930s in an arrangement written by Chappie Willet. That is the version we’re playing and we’ll feature Andrew Henderson on the trumpet, along with solos from Luke Faulder and Mathias Severn.

The Wind Ensemble will perform:

“Folk Song Suite” by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Folk Song Suite was commissioned by the band of the Royal Military School of Music. It was premiered on 4th of July 1923, at Kneller Hall, with H.E. Adkins conducting. In three movements, the suite contains many different folk songs from the Norfolk and Somerset regions of England, including “Seventeen Come Sunday”, “Pretty Caroline”, “Dives and Lazarus”, “My Bonny Boy”, “Green Bushes”, “Blow Away the Morning Dew”, “High Germany”, and “The Tree So High”. Historically, the suite is considered (along with Gustav Holst’s two suites for military band) to be a cornerstone work in the literature, and one of the earliest “serious” works for the wind band.

“Xerxes” by John Mackey Xerxes is a concert march. Xerxes, for those who haven’t seen 300, was King of Persia from 485 BC until his assassination by stabbing in 465 BC. Midlothian High School, in Texas, commissioned the piece.

“I’d originally thought I’d write a march along the lines of the Ives Country Band March, but the more I worked on that idea, the more I felt like I was just trying to reinvent the Ives march, which is already a sort of reinvention of a march. My version sounded like bad Ives, and although it’s a great, crazy piece, I wouldn’t describe the Ives as sounding ‘good’ to begin with. So many concert marches blur together in my head, all of them in some peppy major key, falling into either the chipper patriotic American sound or the more prim British sound. Since I don’t really do prim, or patriotic, I went with … angry. The plan was, ‘This is going to be a march about somebody who is bad news.’ It’s just a fairly straightforward concert march, only a little nastier. I don’t expect it’ll be played at a lot of July 4th parades. (Well, maybe somewhere like NYC.)” —John Mackey

“Resting in the Peace of His Hands” by John Wesley Gibson. John Gibson’s composition is based on a relief sculpture of the same title by German artist Kaethe Kollwitz (1867–1945). Kollwitz was a significant German artist who witnessed a great deal of suffering in her lifetime. Her husband, a physician, was assigned to care for the indigent, and they were forced to deal with the loss of their own son Peter in World War I and their grandson Peter Jr. in World War II. These situations all had a profound effect on her work. The expression of suffering in her work earned her respect among German artists and enemies within the Nazi government.

“Resting in the Peace of His Hands” is a significant work for Kollwitz as it was intended to express “the feeling of utter peace” while most of her work was designed to express torment. The phrase “Resting in the Peace of His Hands” is a quote from Goethe, and she intended that it be the central element of her family tombstone.

“Havendance” by David Holsinger. David Holsinger’s first child, his daughter Haven, was the inspiration for this 1983 composition. Its driving rhythms represent the energy of an eight year old, who was constantly dancing and twirling around the house, dreaming of being a ballerina. The composition undergoes several variations in style, but it is always filled with energy. Some passages evoke the image of a single dancer, with solo pirouettes and leaps; these light efforts grow to draw in the full dance company with an unrelenting, underlying rhythm. Havendance is the first of three dancesongs honoring the composer’s children; Nilesdance and Graysondance reflect the diverse personalities of his two sons.

DATES/TIMES

• Saturday : 7:30 p.m.

WHERE

• See Event Description

PRICE

• $15
• $5 Children
• Free Cal Poly Students with ID