133 Old Church Road
Claremont, NH 03743, Claremont
NH 03743
The Aardvark Jazztet will celebrate Ellington’s 120th Birthday with music spanning four decades. Selections from the Swing Era will include favorites such as Solitude, In a Mellotone, and Billy Strayhorn’s theme song for the Ellington Orchestra, Take the A Train. Ellington’s film music will be represented by Pie Eye’s Blues from the score for Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, and the Duke’s theatrical dimension will be heard in the lovely ballad I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good) from the musical Jump for Joy. The group will celebrate Duke’s late-period sacred music with the toe-tapping bossa nova Heaven from The Second Sacred Concert.
WCCMA is committed to making music accesible for all. Suggested freewill offering for this concert is suggested at $25 Adults, $20 Members, $5 Students, $40 for families.
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Founded in 1973, The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra has been a force in the international jazz scene for more than 40 years. Aardvark is one of the longest-running large jazz ensembles in the world. The band is well known for its wide-ranging shows, from new music by founder/director Mark Harvey to classics and rarities by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Mary Lou Williams, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and other jazz legends. Aardvark has given premieres of more than 175 works for jazz orchestra, performs widely, and appears on 14 CDs, including 8 discs from Leo Records, one of the world’s leading adventuresome music labels. Guest artists who have appeared with Aardvark include jazz luminaries Jaki Byard, Sheila Jordan, Jimmy Giuffre, Geri Allen, Raj Mehta, Dominique Eade, Lewis Porter, and Matt Savage, to name a few.
Composer/trumpeter Mark Harvey is the founder and music director of the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra and teaches jazz studies and composition at MIT. Harvey has performed in major venues including Fenway Park and Symphony Hall, Boston, the Knitting Factory and the Village Gate (NYC), the National Gallery of Art (DC), the Left Bank Jazz Society (MD), the Southern California Institute of Architecture (CA), the Berlin Jazz Festival (Germany), and the Baja State Theater (Mexico). His musical credits also include recordings with George Russell’s Living Time Orchestra (Blue Note), and Baird Hersey & the Year of the Ear (Arista/Novus) and appearances with Gil Evans, Howard McGhee, Sam Rivers, Claudio Roditi, and other notables.
Harvey has received commissions from the Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program, the 15th Annual John Coltrane Memorial Concert, FiLmprov, the the MIT Sesquicentennial Celebration, Organization of American Kodaly Educators,and the MIT Festival Jazz and Wind Ensembles, among others. In 2015, Dr. Harvey was named Boston Jazz Hero by the Jazz Journalists Association, one of 24 jazz advocates/activists recognized nationally.
