Mile High Jazz Concert Review

For my concert report I attended the Mile High Jazz Festival presented by Flesher Hinton Co. on February 16, 2017. The event took place in Macky Auditorium at the University of Colorado Boulder at 7:30 pm. The concert consisted of a student ensemble and then after a short intermission a faculty ensemble. I decided for this report to select the most impactful song from each ensemble and write about their musical components. The student ensemble consisted of: a piano, a bass, drums, a guitar, 4 trombones, 4 trumpets, 2 alto saxophones, 2 tenor saxophones, and one baritone saxophone. This makes a total of 17 musicians plus one for Professor Paul McKee who was the conductor. The student ensemble was very large and was arrange/modeled after a big band style. The musicians were ordered in rows with the front being the saxophones then the trombones then the trumpets. The other half of the stage contained the piano and guitar in front with the bass and drums in the back. The song I chose from the student ensemble is “C-Jam Blues Ala Mambo” which was originally composed by Duke Ellington and arranged by Michael Phillip Mossman. The song had a very fast tempo with a Latin feel and a duple meter. The first solo was from an unnamed musician playing a tenor saxophone. Which was then followed by a guitar solo from Jack Considine who played with a soft muted timbre. The next solo was a trumpet solo from an unnamed musician which appeared to be highly improvised. This is due to the monophonic texture and the large amount of riffs. This mimicked the style of head arrangements which were used by Count Basie in the swing era. This makes sense because the ensemble was modeled to a big band style. The following solo was from an unnamed musician playing the trombone. This solo appeared to be composed because it contained a lot of call and response between the trombone and the trumpet section. The rhythm of the of the song was created from a syncopation between the drummer Colin Hill and the pianist Ben Thompson. Overall, the musicians were not very expressive on stage. The drummer was the only musician that moved with the music and seemed to flow with the song. There also appeared to not be any visual or verbal communication between the musicians. The Thompson Jazz Studies Faculty ensemble consisted of: a piano played by Jeff Jenkins, a bass played by Bijoux Barbosa, drums played by Paul Romaine, a guitar played by Dave Corbus, a trombone played by Paul McKee, a trumpet played by Brad Goode, and a saxophone played by John Gunther. …show more content…
This makes a total of 7 musicians and was not lead by a conductor. The musicians were ordered with the piano, guitar, saxophone, trumpet, and trombone upfront while the bass and drums were in the back. The song I chose from the faculty ensemble is “Back Home” which was composed by Paul McKee and written in the key of “Back Home Again in Indiana” which was composed by Ballard MacDonald and James F. Hanley. The song had a fast swing feel and a triple meter. The song starts out with the bass playing the rhythm with forte in a legato style. The first solo is played by the guitar which was playing softly to create an interesting timbre. This was followed by a trombone solo which was played with a homophonic texture. During this section the trombone played the melody and the saxophone played the harmony. The next solo was played by the Brad Goode on trumpet with a bubble mute. This mute was used to create a sharp squeaky timbre. After this solo there was an equipment malfunction where the speaker and microphone in front of the saxophonist stopped working. This was right before what appeared to be a solo meant for the saxophonist John Gunther. He used hand signals to communicated to the other musicians that there was a problem and then quickly left the stage to try and resolve the issue. Meanwhile the piano and bass stepped in to fill the solo by playing an improvised arrangement with polyphonic texture which contained a large amount of call and response and syncopation. Then once the saxophonist returned