St. Albert bands offer joint Christmas concert

The St. Albert Community Band and the Saint City Big Band joint Christmas Concert is usually a fairly straight-ahead evening of music that you could safely put on the stereo.

This year’s concert at the Arden Theatre on Wednesday, Dec. 7 promises to deliver much of the hearth and home groove of the holiday season smoothly blended with specialty pieces.

However, despite the joyous markers of the season, this particular concert will also carry a few poignant moments as the St. Albert Community Band salutes former trumpet player Kahlman Kovacs, a passionate and committed 15-year member who passed away this year.

The Saint City Big Band opens the two-hour concert with two Christmas numbers and a comfortable cross-section of different styles, says band director Tom Smyth. He joined the band in 1986 and has been the musical director for all but five years.

For his intro, Smyth has selected Alan Baylock’s simple setting of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.

Immediately following is Summer Never Ends, with a trombone solo spotlighting Jeremy Moorehouse, music teacher at Elmer S. Gish Elementary and Junior High School.

“I was looking for a ballad and I was looking for a feature number for Jeremy. He hasn’t had a solo in several years,” says Smyth, who also plays trumpet for Gateway Big Band and the Mission Hill Band.

One selection that takes a minute to get used to is O.P. It stands for Oscar Pettiford, an American bass player. He wrote the work for Charles Mingus, a musician, jazz composer, bandleader and civil rights activist.

Mingus’ compositions defied categorization and this piece “is well-known and written with bizarre harmonies and melody lines. It’s fairly fast and discordant, but it’s done in a harmonious way.”

Smyth always works in a Latin piece and this year it’s Perdito, a pop swing arrangement by Victor Lopez from the famed Miami Sound Machine.

“This was originally done by the Ellington Band as swing. Victor does it as a Latin funk number and every once in a while it breaks into swing.”

A cinematic style chart is introduced through Lennie Niehaus’ No Pain, No Gain. Niehaus is a Los Angeles area saxophonist whose claim to fame was writing several scores for Clint Eastwood movies.

“It starts with a flashy intro by the bass section and goes into a nice easy swing.”

For Smyth the big drawing card is the program’s versatility.

“It’s got lots of good music. Players are well prepared and we have some real talent from St. Albert and the surrounding areas.”