Celebrate Valentine’s Day this year by attending the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra concert at the Kent State University at Tuscarawas Performing Arts Center at 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 14.
For 31 years, the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra has been Northeast Ohio’s premier jazz voice. Led by Paul Ferguson, the CJO promotes jazz in its historical and contemporary forms through concerts with gifted jazz musicians, arrangers, composers and educators in northeast Ohio. The CJO aims for worldwide recognition in cooperation with guest artists, and looks to shepherd young musicians toward the future of jazz. This season exemplifies this mission and vision through a variety of new music, new compositions and arrangements, and a stellar line-up of well-known guest artists and young up-and-coming talent!
Ferguson has been director of Jazz Studies at Case Western Reserve University since 1988. A graduate of the University of Akron and the Eastman School of Music, he has traveled with the Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller bands as lead trombonist and arranger and currently fills those functions with the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra. Ferguson was principal trombonist of the Canton Symphony from 1989-98 and at various times has also performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, Cleveland Opera, the Ohio Chamber Orchestra, Apollos’s Fire, the Cleveland Chamber Brass, the New Hampshire Festival Orchestra and various groups across Northeast Ohio. In 1995, Ferguson was the recipient of the Gil Evans Fellowship in Jazz Composition. He has two recordings–”Blue Highways,” recorded with the RIAS Big Band of Berlin, and “Friends,” recorded with his own orchestra. He has taught at an International Jazz Seminar in Zarautz, Spain, wrote three arrangements for the Glenn Miller Orchestra and wrote three arrangements for the Cleveland Pops for use on “The Drew Carey Show.”
Tickets for the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra start at $27 and can be purchased at the Performing Arts Center box office, online at www.kent.edu/tusc/pac or by calling 330-308-6400. The box office is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The Performing Arts Center’s 2016-2017 Season is sponsored by Michael Taylor Insurance and Financial Incorporated, an Allstate Agency.
Free parking is available for all shows. Kent State Tuscarawas is located at 330 University Dr. N.E. in New Philadelphia.