Percussion and swing era jazz fill early April concerts
Purdue Bands runs the musical gamut from “class,” with a concert full of swing era big band tunes with Purdue’s American Music Review on Friday, April 11, to an afternoon full of innovative percussion tunes playfully titled “Trash!” on Sunday, April 13.
American Music Review, directed by Bill Kisinger, will perform at 8 p.m. April 11 in the Long Center, 111 N. Sixth St., Lafayette. Purdue’s Percussion Ensembles and Winter Drum Line, under the direction of Pamela Nave, performs at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, April 13, in Loeb Playhouse of the Purdue Stewart Center. Both concerts are free.
Tunes made famous by the Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington and the Tommy Dorsey band will be featured on the American Music Review concert. Its entire trombone section will be spotlighted in the Dorsey theme song “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You.”
Among the classic tunes set for the big band program with vocalists are “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “Take the A Train,” “Night and Day,” “Fascinating Rhythm,” “Old Devil Moon,” “In the Mood and “Over the Rainbow.”
There’ll be a decidedly different flavor to Sunday’s concert dominated by trash can tunes, Latin dances and percussion works that border on the wild side. In “Diner’s Club,” a group of percussionists play all the silverware, glasses, pots and pans and other items they find in their restaurant setting before being smacked in the face with whipped cream pies in the number’s finale.
The concert starts off with 40 percussionists making music by drumming on metal and rubber trashcans in “Stinkin’ Garbage,” the piece that gives the concert its name.
Adding to the concert’s lively nature will be Billy Joel’s “Prelude.” “I added stuff and turned it into something else,” Nave says. That something else is a Latin dance that calls upon the percussionists to snake around the concert hall in a dance line while playing the piece on triangle, claves, drums and various other instruments. “It’ll get the crowd going because it’s big time dancing,” Nave says.
As counterpoint to the craziness, Nave has programmed Manuel de Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance,” and the Winter Drum Line goes classical with the third movement of Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 10.”
Freshman nursing major Diana Day from Indianapolis will be the featured marimba player on a newly released percussion work by Jesse Monkman titled “Rite of Passage.” “Jesse did a wonderful job on it. It’s a really nice, nice piece,” Nave says. “He wrote it because it’s fun to play but it’s also difficult because of the endurance it requires.”