Happy New Year from everyone in the Nova Jazz Orchestra. Here’s some great news to get this new year rolling: Back in September, and with the guidance of our excellent saxophonist Kari Musil, we had the good fortune of recording a set of music at Baby Blue Arts Studios in Minneapolis. That performance is now available at Baby Blue’s website in its entirety, consisting of four original tunes: The Whole Man, To the Source, That’s How I Know, and 11:04. (Also, don’t forget to check out the interview with Mike Krikava about Nova.)
Like The Nova Jazz Orchestra, Baby Blue Arts is a volunteer organization that serves the musical life of our region. Don’t forget to visit Baby Blue Arts on a regular basis to check out all the great music.
We’ve got a great Christmas concert coming up! Mike Krikava gives all the details below:
Greetings Nova Jazz friends,
The Nova Jazz Orchestra is set to release our 12th CD of all-original music. This release is being timed with the holidays so we will do a combination CD Release and Holiday concert on Sunday, December 22, at 4pm. The location is Saint James Lutheran Church, 460 West Annapolis Street, West St. Paul, MN. The concert is free of charge.
This concert will be very special. In addition to some holiday favorites, Nova is releasing its CD “Concerto Nova & the Jazz Music of W.A. Mathieu.” The Concerto is a six-movement work that combines elements of Jazz and Classical to form something that is entirely new. We recorded the Concerto live at Saint James back in April and the piece is made all the better for the stunning acoustics of that room.
This program will feature Bill Mathieu’s works for Jazz Orchestra written from 1958 to 2012. This concert will include the first-ever public performance of a piece Mathieu wrote especially for the Nova Band. Written as a through-composed Concerto in the classical style, the “Concerto Nova” is a six-movement masterwork, that melds bebop and cool jazz into a third stream work of amazing sounds.
W.A. “Bill” Mathieu
Nova is very pleased to be able to perform this outstanding music and hope you can join us. And we are particularly proud of our collaboration with Mathieu. He broke into the music scene in 1958 when, as an 18-year-old phenom, he became staff arranger and trumpeter on the Stan Kenton Orchestra. Kenton’s 1959 album, Standards in Silhouette, showcases Mathieu’s rich melodic writing and sophisticated harmonies. That album was critically acclaimed and remains one of the highlights of the Kenton Discography. Bill then spent time writing for Duke Ellington, Maynard Ferguson and others. In the mid-‘60s, Bill became the founding music director of the Second City Theatre in Chicago and its companion theatre in San Francisco. Bill remains a renowned composer, compositional teacher and music author on the West Coast. Nova collaborated with Mathieu in 2010, in playing a number of previously-unrecorded originals and arrangements for the Kenton band, culminating in a critically-acclaimed album. That collaboration ripened into Mathieu writing Concerto Nova especially for the Nova Band.
To give this music its full scope, we have scheduled a second premier for Sunday, April 28, 2012 at 4 pm at Saint James Lutheran Church, 460 Annapolis Street, West St. Paul. This event will be a concert and live recording session as Nova strives to get a studio-quality recording of the Concerto with a live audience.
I hope you can join us for one of these premier events.
A belated but hearty thanks to all those who came out to our CD release party last month. Your support was and is certainly appreciated; we felt lots of good vibes coming from our audience at the Shorewood. Onward — here’s what’s coming up for Nova:
November 22: Our monthly performance at the Shorewood Bar & Grill, 7pm-11pm.
What: CD Release Party and concert. 1st set: Minnetonka High School Jazz Band I. 2nd Set: Nova Contemporary Jazz Orchestra’s selections from 14 newly recorded works by Bill Mathieu**Nova’s studio recording of these compositions released by Tantara Productions.
Happy New Year from everyone in the Nova Jazz Orchestra. Here’s some great news to get this new year rolling: Back in September, and with the guidance of our excellent saxophonist Kari Musil, we had the good fortune of recording a set of music at Baby Blue Arts Studios in Minneapolis. That performance is now available at Baby Blue’s website in its entirety, consisting of four original tunes: The Whole Man, To the Source, That’s How I Know, and 11:04. (Also, don’t forget to check out the interview with Mike Krikava about Nova.)
A belated but hearty thanks to all those who came out to our CD release party last month. Your support was and is certainly appreciated; we felt lots of good vibes coming from our audience at the Shorewood. Onward — here’s what’s coming up for Nova: