CEEF Helps Bring Aardvark Jazz Orchestra to CEHS

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If you were in search of a great blend of education and the arts, of sweet dulcet tones meeting howling high notes, or even of nostalgia colliding with modern zip - you'd have found it at the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra concert held at CEHS on November 16th.

The 15-piece award-winning orchestra treated audience members to a trip back in time to the days of big band bravado.  From the first number, music director and conductor Mark Harvey's piece "Three Bs & a Bop," the toe-tapping was compulsory.  Harvey's piece, inspired by the composition of Duke Ellington, echoed eras gone by, when music took the listener on a journey - in this case back to the rip-roaring 20s and beyond.  The majority of the remaining pieces performed represented some of Ellington's best, and featured the full orchestra often accompanied by talented vocalists Jerry Edwards and Grace Hughes.

In an example of the so-called "jungle sounds" of Duke Ellington's early work, "The Mooch" brought together the pleasant screech of the clarinets with the elephant-like roar of the trumpets in a wild romp. The trombones, saxophones and woodwinds were not to be denied their moments throughout the night, and each was given a chance to both blend with the rest of the orchestra adding to the lush depth of the group, as well as a solo for most to shine on his or her own.

The evening's music was punctuated by Harvey's commentary about Ellington, and the indelible mark his musical innovation has made in the world of music. Freedom, a musical expression of Ellington's feelings on the subject, introduced the audience to a bit of such innovation, with the help of narrator - and Cape Elizabeth Superintendent - Alan Hawkins. In answer to Harvey's declaration, "would that every school superintendent were a jazz fan," Hawkins spoke Ellington's own words, written for his 1968 Second Sacred Concert.

Harvey states that it was Ellington's credo "to move beyond category in life and music, to seek that which breaks down barriers, erases boundaries, and moves us toward the new."  Harvey and his band enabled Cape Elizabeth students and others to get a glimpse into Ellington's efforts toward that end, and with great pleasure.

The Aardvark concert as well its in-school residency, pre-concert panel discussion and post-concert reception were funded in part by a grant from the Cape Elizabeth Education Foundation and the New England Foundation for the Arts, and coordinated by CEHS music teacher Tom Lizotte.