Jazz Concert Report #2

Jesus Ramos

On October 11 2013, there was a jazz concert that I thought was really good. Unfortunately I could not attend the concert due to other reasons, however I watched the concert on the IC website.

The first piece that was played was by Duke Ellington, called “Flaming Sword”. My guess is that they wanted to start off with something groovy to put people in a happy mood.  In addition to that, I like how they had time for most of the musicians to have a little solo improvisation. I say that because even though they had guest artists, they still had the wind instruments and the piano player participate and improvise their solos. In classical music, I do not believe that happens. Well of course that does not happen because classical music is more strictly organized, unless there is a specific part where one instrument plays on the music.

There was one piece that was really memorable to me. I just absolutely loved this song. I do believe this song is called Trixie’s little girl, written by a former student of Jack. His name is Pete McGinnis. This song starts off really smooth and soft. To me this is a very romantic song, like an oldie. I can even see myself dancing to this song. Its like everything is black and white, but this song brings out the colors to present some romance. I am so impressed that that by not looking at the video and just listening to the song, it sounds like an mp3 recording. I actually never really knew that a trombone could take the melody to the song and just make the song sound so beautiful.

The jazz concert was great as I mentioned. However, there were things that I also did not like about the concert. Little minor things, like I do not understand why the guitar player did not solo, or could even barely hear him play. There were parts on different songs where I could listen to him play a little bit, but if I just really concentrated. I could see that he is a good player, but there was no solo part for him. I also did not like that the composer Pete McGinnis did not performed as much as Jack Gail did. Sure Jack Gail was great at playing and improvising, but I thought it would have been nicer if Pete also played more than he did, especially because I really loved that song “Trixie’s little girl”.  Now I really want to attend another jazz concert in person.