A full audience anxiously anticipated a jazz-filled morning provided by Michael Kocour and ASU Student Jazz Combos in the Lakeside Room at the Tempe Center for the Arts Tuesday.
The Student Jazz Combos performed as part of the Performance with a View series sponsored by Friends of Tempe Center for the Arts and Tempe Camera.
The group played its own tunes such as Michael Moynihan’s “Moonrae” and Max Knouse’s “Key to a Door,” but also played jazz hits such as Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘bout a Thing,” to open the performance, and Clifford Brown’s “Delilah” and Nat Adderley’s “The Little Boy With the Sad Eyes” to close the show.
The Student Jazz Combos is a group of this year’s jazz seniors who were handpicked by Kocour, an associate professor and director of jazz studies at ASU.
The group was composed of McCluer Burton on alto saxophone, Moynihan on tenor saxophone, Knouse on guitar, Branson NeJame on piano, Jerome Salazar on bass, Andrew Schiller on bass, Robert Carrillo on drums and Jesse-Lee Yarbrough on drums.
Kocour picked The Student Jazz Combos to perform at the Chicago Jazz Showcase in December 2011, where they played with the Benny Golson quartet for four nights.
Golson, a well-known saxophone player and composer, is known for his popular tunes such as “Killer Joe” and “Whisper Not.”
“As I listen to the ASU Jazz All Stars (the group) perform I am overcome with the feeling of experiencing tomorrow, today,” Golson told Kocour while the group was in Chicago.
The Student Jazz Combos and Kocour also played three concerts at high schools while in Chicago for the Jazz Showcase.
“These folks went and knocked everybody’s socks off in Chicago, and TCA got a little taste of it,” Kocour said.
Kocour brought several groups of students to TCA, including ASU's Big Band in December 2011, who played a Ray Charles Tribute Concert. The Student Jazz Combos was the most recent group to perform.
Kocour became involved in the Performance with a View series early on when Gail Fisher, a founder and board member of Friends of TCA, contacted him about having students perform, he said.
“(Performance with a View) gives the students a chance to perform at TCA with a ready audience,” Fisher said.
Kocour worked with Friends of TCA to model the series after the Coffee at Kerr series at ASU Kerr Cultural Center in Scottsdale, Kocour said.
Performance with a View is an ongoing series started by Friends of TCA in February 2009 as a community outreach project to acquaint audiences with TCA, Fisher said.
“The distance between the performers and the audience is very small,” Fisher said. “It’s intimate.”
The first performance in the series four years ago had an audience of only 30, but similar to the crowd at Tuesday’s performance, people frequently fill every seat, Fisher said.
“It’s really caught on,” she said.
Reach the reporter at michelle.peirano@asu.edu
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