Cuesta Jazz Will Rock Your
Holiday World December 5

An exciting combination of Big Band and Vocal Jazz tunes has been scheduled for local fans, with a performance featuring Vocé, Encore, the Cuesta Jazz Ensemble and Cuesta’s newest instrumental group, the Little Big Band, directed by Warren Balfour. The performance is scheduled at 7:00 p.m., Sunday, December 5th at the Blakeslee Auditorium, located behind the Cuesta College San Luis Obispo Campus. Cuesta College’s award-winning jazz groups are directed by John Knutson, James Miley, and Dr. Warren Balfour.

The Cuesta Jazz Ensemble (CJE) will open the evening with a diverse set of big band music, ranging from a fantastic note-for-note arrangement of Miles Davis’ seminal cool jazz standard “Boplicity” to Jim McNeely’s “Lickety Split,” a jazz concerto for baritone saxophone and big band featuring Aaron Wolf on the bari sax. Other notable pieces on the program include Thad Jones’ “Big Dipper,” Maria Scheider’s gorgeous ballad “My Lament,” featuring young tenor Andrew Conrad, and composer/arranger Chuck Owen’s quirky tribute to Louis Armstrong, “Red Beans and Ricely Yours,” which attempts to show what happens when “a Dixieland group gets swallowed whole by a giant whale of a big band.” Immediately following the CJE, the Cuesta Little Big Band will make its concert debut in Blakeslee Auditorium with a rousing set of swing standards and originals led by Cuesta College Professor Emeritus Warren Balfour.
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During the vocal portion of the concert, Vocé will sing a funk version of the pop tune “Spinning Wheel” a samba/soul rendition of “You Don’t Love Me Like You Used To” and of course a few of their hard-swinging jazz standards. In the spirit of the season, both Encore and Vocé will be singing fresh new jazz arrangements of holiday songs.

The evening promises to be filled with quality performances. The Cuesta Jazz Ensemble performed to a standing-room-only crowd as the only community college instrumental group invited to perform at this year’s International Association for Jazz Education’s annual conference in New York City, and Cuesta’s premiere vocal group, Vocé, has consistently been one of the most recognized vocal jazz groups in the state for the last 20 years.