Band concert has jazz flair Tuesday night at the Weidner
GREEN BAY — The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Symphonic Band and Wind Symphony will have an added sound at Tuesday’s concert as jazz musicians, including faculty members Chris and John Salerno and the UW-Green Bay Vocal Jazz Ensemble, will participate in a joint performance.
The special joint concert, the last of the fall academic semester, starts at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 9 at the Weidner Center for the Performing Arts.
UW-Green Bay Director of Bands Kevin Collins will conduct. Chris Salerno and the Vocal Jazz will perform the first half of the concert with the Symphonic Band in a collaborative performance of John Williams’s, “Dry Your Tears, Afrika” from the movie Amistad.
John Salerno will be featured on both flute and alto saxophone with the Wind Symphony, performing on the opening work, a light-jazz piece, “TranZendental Danse of Joi,” which composer James Bonney calls neither “highbrow” nor “lowbrow,” but “nobrow.”
Concluding the concert is a funk-inspired composition, “Chunk,” which also features John Salerno on “beat-box, funk” flute.
The Wind Symphony also presents its second installment of music exploring the Campus Common Theme, “Waging War, Waging Peace,” by performing “Bali,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Michael Colgrass.
The work is Colgrass’s response to the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, which took the lives of more than 200 people.
Colgrass, who having lived on Bali for a time, incorporated elements of Balinese Gamelan music and Arabic music to honor the peace-loving nature of the Balinese people and their cultural tradition of passive resistance.
Other works on the concert program include an arrangement of George Gershwin’s “Prelude II,” “Greensleeves,” arranged by Alfred Reed, and selections from Gordon Jacob’s liberal orchestration of keyboard works by William Byrd, “The Battell.”
Tickets are $7 general admission, $5, senior citizens and students.
The Weidner Center is located on the UW-Green Bay campus, 2420 Nicolet Drive.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: For more on the campus wide Common Theme visit, www.uwgb.edu/commontheme/ )
#08-258
