(bright music) - Enjoy an evening of jazz with Westminster Performing Arts Jazz Ensemble, featuring an octet with rhythm, horns, and vocals.

And here with more is director Tony Elison.

Hi, Tony.

Thanks for being here.

- Of course.

- So you're kind of doing the "American Songbook" standards in this concert.

Tell me what you're covering.

- Yeah, we're featuring a number of so-called jazz standards, "American Songbook" standards.

The "American Songbook" tunes that we're gonna be featuring are "Honeysuckle Rose," famous tune by the great pianist and entertainer Fats Waller, as well as "No Moon At All," another classic "American Songbook" standard.

But we are also featuring a number of jazz classics like tunes from the Miles Davis record "Kind of Blue," the greatest-selling jazz record of all time, as well as other more obscure tunes, one from the "Horace Silver Songbook," Horace Silver, the great jazz pianist and composer.

And we're gonna be playing a tune by him called "Mary Lou," named after the great pianist Mary Lou Williams.

So a number of selections will be featured at the concert.

- Great.

And it's an all-student ensemble, right?

- It is an all-student ensemble, yeah.

So we have about maybe a little over half the students are music majors.

We have some theater majors in there who are taking a role as an instrumentalist, as a jazz instrumentalist in this case.

And we also have a number of other students from other majors, including biology.

We have a computer science major.

So it's a wide spread of students.

- Oh, that's great.

You must have fun working with them, I'm sure.

- Yeah, definitely, yeah.

- And you get to introduce them to a wide variety of styles and sounds.

- Yeah, for sure.

So in addition to the more jazz type tunes that I had mentioned before, we're also featuring some other songs from different styles.

So we're doing a Bossa nova tune by the great Antonio Carlos Jobim entitled "So Danco Samba."

That can be heard famously on the "Getz/Gilberto" album, if you're familiar with that.

But a lot of styles, so.

- Great.

Well, it sounds like a great concert and thank you so much for being here.

- Yeah, of course.

- And if you'd like to know more about that upcoming concert, the Westminster Performing Arts Jazz Ensemble, December 11th from 7:30 to 9:30 at the Emma Eccles Jones Recital Hall in the Florence Gillmore Hall.

Go to westminsteru.edu/calendar.

I'm Mary Dickson.

Thanks for watching "Contact."

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