Jazz Orchestra earns ‘outstanding performance’ from DownBeat
The Fresno State Jazz Orchestra was recognized successful DownBeat Magazine for its “Undergraduate College Outstanding Performance” successful its 48th yearly Student Music Awards. The favoritism places them among the apical 4 successful the planetary competition, with Butler University and Lawrence University named winners and Berklee College of Music besides achieving an outstanding performance.
“It’s a brainsick feeling of conscionable emotion and admiration for those students and knowing each the hard enactment that we’ve each been putting successful has paid disconnected for them to get recognized connected a satellite stage,” said Richard Lloyd Giddens Jr., manager of jazz studies. “It’s unthinkable to beryllium honored and spot Fresno State’s sanction adjacent to Berklee College of Music, Frost School of Music and Eastman School of Music, each of these large powerhouse schools, and we’re close there.”
The Fresno State Jazz Orchestra has consistently been 1 of the apical jazz ensembles connected the West Coast for implicit 4 decades. The past of the ensemble includes first-place awards astatine the Reno Jazz Festival and the Pacific Coast Collegiate Jazz Festival. The radical has appeared successful Europe, Japan and galore festivals passim the United States. Under Giddens’ leadership, they person performed with respective notable impermanent artists, including Mary Halvorson, Gerald Clayton, Melissa Aldana, Keyon Harrold, Rachel Eckroth, Francisco Torres and Damion Reid.
The ensemble recorded a unrecorded medium astatine the Fresno State Concert Hall successful April, which volition beryllium released this fall.
