Jazz Band and Percussion Ensemble to perform

Northwestern College’s Jazz Band and Percussion Ensemble will present a concert on Saturday, Nov. 15, at 7:30 p.m. in Christ Chapel. The public is invited to attend.

Directed by Dr. Timothy McGarvey, the 18-member Jazz Band will perform six pieces. The ensemble will open its performance with A New Kind of Soup by Doug Beach. The group will also play A Tribute to Tommy Dorsey, which will feature Josh Van Der Maaten on trombone. In George and Ira Gershwin’s Someone to Watch Over Me, Dan Mangold will play a flugelhorn solo.

The six-member Percussion Ensemble, under the direction of Dan Duffield, will perform four pieces. “With a smaller ensemble this semester, we want to explore some of the vast percussion ‘pops’ literature, which should flow well with the Jazz Band’s portion of the concert,” says Duffield.

The ensemble will open with Roll-Off Rhumba by Vic Firth, which is a cross between a standard march and an Afro-Cuban rhumba. Cystic Mystic by Scott Johnson is a Latin jazz piece with several improvised solos. Music for Pieces of Wood by Steve Reich is a minimalist piece generated by South American rhythms played on tuned claves. The ensemble’s final piece, South of the Border by Edward Freytag, crosses Mexican and Spanish folk songs.