THOMAS REED FEATURED AS GUEST ARTIST FOR VARIABLE WINDS CONCERT

The Ashland Area Community Concert Band (AACCB) and Ashland University Concert Band, both under the direction of Ashland University Director of Bands Leonard Salvo, will perform a joint concert on Sunday, April 22 at 4:00 p.m. in the University's Hugo Young Theatre.  The concert is free and open to the public.

The concert will begin with the Community Band performing Howard Cable's arrangement of The Shield of Freedom March, the signature tune for the movie of the same name, followed by Gustav Holst’s Second Suite in F for Military Band.  This suite in four movements uses English folk songs and folk dance tunes throughout. Third Suite by Robert Jager includes three movements titled March, Waltz and Rondo. The final two pieces performed by AACCB are Arthur Benjamin's Jamaican Rumba, a light music piece full of attractive ideas and catchy rhythms; and his First String Quartet (Pastorale Fantasia) which was awarded a Carnegie Prize in 1924. 

After a brief intermission, the Ashland University Concert Band will take the stage with Gustav Holst's three-movement Suite No. 1 in E-Flat, and continue with Robert Russell Bennett's five-movement Suite of Old American Dances which opens with Cake Walk, then the Scotch round dance Schottische, the pre-cursor to the Fox Trot Western One-Step, then the Wallflower Waltz and ending with the bright, syncopated Rag.  Guest soprano saxophonist Thomas Reed will perform with the band on his composition Shades of Blue, which he wrote in 2000 for the Ashland University Concert Band.  The work is cast in a single movement but outlines four major sections: an introduction, a jazz waltz, a jazz ballad and a closing allegro.  Following the presentation of the outstanding band member scholarship, recognition of the senior members and the playing of the Ashland University Alma Mater, Remember, the band will conclude their program with W. Francis McBeth's The Sea Treaders (In Calm and Storm). Commissioned by the United States Naval Academy Band for its 150th anniversary celebration, the work portrays the sea in both calm and storm in two connected movements.