Friday, June 15, 2012

Promenade! Art Walk Concert, 06/05/2013 @ 7pm



Tony Steve, percussion
Bob Moore, piano
Joe Yorio, Bass Clarinet







Born To Be Wild (1967) / Mars Bonfire (b.1943) ; arranged by David Lang (b.1957)
Choro 1. (2002) / Augusto Marcellino (1910-1973) ; arranged by Gordon Stout (b.1952)
Low Viscosity (2010) / Bob Moore (b.1962)
In A Mist (1927) / Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931) ; arranged by Red Norvo (1908-1999)
Dance of the Octopus (1933) / Red Norvo (1908-1999)
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in CONEY ISLAND (1917)
      Silent Film – Directed by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle
      Score arranged by Tony Steve (b.1959) and Bob Moore (b.1962)


Percussionist and composer Tony Steve is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Music and Percussion at Jacksonville University. He has performed with the Jacksonville Symphony, Israeli Festival Orchestra, Glimmerglass Opera Orchestra, Hartford Symphony, North Eastern Pennsylvania Symphony, Greenwich Symphony, and Bridgeport Symphony.  He toured with A Chorus Line in Europe, appeared as marimba soloist with the Brooklyn Percussion Ensemble in Korea, and performed as percussionist at Madison Square Garden for A Christmas Carol, and also has worked with Henry Mancini, Lou Rawls, Sheri Lewis and The Xavier Cugat Orchestra. Tony's works are published by Media Press, Keyboard Publications and Percussion Arrangers, and he has won numerous ASCAP writers awards for his compositions, which are performed in America as well as in Europe and Asia. His degrees include a Bachelor of Music from Jacksonville University and a Master of Music from Ithaca College, and he is completing a doctorate at Florida State University.


Multifaceted composer and pianist Bob Moore is the Music Director for the Episcopal Church of Our Savior, and was Director of Music Ministry at the Cathedral-Basilica of St. Augustine, where he co-founded the St. Augustine Music Festival. He has published nearly 200 choral and instrumental works, many of which have been recorded on 6 CDs and appear in various denominations’ hymnals. He was a resident composer in the Faith Partners Program, a finalist in the Jacksonville Symphony’s Fresh Ink competition, and has been the recipient of numerous commissions. In addition to his private students, Mr. Moore has taught band and chorus in public and private schools, and has directed community choral groups as well.

Joe Yorio grew up in Rochester, New York studying saxophone, flute, and clarinet at the prestigious Eastman School of Music. He earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of North Florida, and has since made a name for himself playing in the horn sections of Aretha Franklin and The Temptations, as well as touring with several Broadway shows and backing up entertainers Robert Goulet, Bob Newhart, and Regis Philbin. Along with Tony Steve and Bob Moore, Joe performs sacred jazz and world music as a member of the trio De Profundis, and he also performs with the quintet Freudian Slip. Mr. Yorio is an adjunct professor of saxophone at Jacksonville University.

PROGRAM NOTES by Edward Lein, Music Librarian

The classic rock anthem Born To Be Wild is by Canadian songwriter Mars Bonfire (b. 1942 as Dennis McCrohan, aka Dennis Edmonton), and it was first recorded in 1967 by Steppenwolf, the band in which Bonfire’s brother was the drummer. The song is used under the opening credits of the 1969 film Easy Rider, and since then it has appeared in numerous other film and television productions, and has been covered by wildly diverse musicians, including in a duet between Ozzie Osbourne and Miss Piggy. Among its most ironic incarnations is the post-minimalist creation by American composer David Lang (b. 1957). who won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for The Little Match Girl Passion. Lang definitely has the “motor running,” but one might venture that his version is about as far-removed from the Easy Rider “rebel biker” persona as you can get.

The music of the Argentine guitarist Augusto Marcellino (1911-1973) was first introduced to American composer Gordon Stout (b. 1952) by Pablo Cohen, a guitar teacher on the faculty of Ithaca College, where Stout has taught percussion since 1980. Marcellino’s guitar choros are written in a style derived from Brazilian folk music, and Cohen suspected that they would be well suited to the marimba. Stout discovered that indeed they were, and, in addition to Choro 1, he published marimba arrangements of several other pieces by Marcellino, and also took them as models for some of his original compositions.

Originally from Charleston, South Carolina, Jacksonville composer Bob Moore (b. 1962) studied composition with Richard Proulx, William Schirmer, Gordon Goodwin and Bud Udell at the University of South Carolina, Jacksonville University, and the University of Florida. He is the St. Augustine Orchestra’s composer-in-residence, and the SAO recently premiered the orchestral version of his Low Viscosity, with the composer conducting and Tony Steve (b. 1959) as the marimba soloist. As a piano and percussion duo, Bob and Tony frequently perform jazz and experimental music together, and they are noted for their collaborations providing live music for silent films.


Even as a young child, Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931) could play almost any piece he heard by ear, and at seven he was hailed as a miniature musical genius by the Davenport Daily Democrat, the newspaper in his Iowa hometown. Largely self-taught on piano and cornet, Beiderbecke was one of the most original and influential jazz musicians of the 1920s, despite being largely unknown to the general public when he died at age 28. First conceived as a piano solo, In a Mist is Beiderbecke's most famous composition, and its fluid and "misty" harmonic language demonstrates an affinity with the musical Impressionism of Debussy and Ravel.

Red Norvo (1908-1999) began playing marimba professionally in 1925, making him a pioneer in the use of mallet instruments in jazz bands, and he continued performing and recording into the mid-1980s, when a stroke ended his career. Along the way, the Illinois native collaborated with many of the eras superstars, including Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Billie Holiday, Dinah Shore, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, and Frank Sinatra. He also scored several "number one" hits with his own band, and he and his wife, vocalist Mildred Bailey (1907-1951), became known as "Mr. & Mrs. Swing." In 1933, Norvo was joined by Benny Goodman on bass clarinet, and a couple of other friends on guitar and bass, for a recording session that included the previously-mentioned In a Mist, and Norvo's own Dance of the Octopus. As Beiderbecke's piece might be called impressionistic, Dance of the Octopus veers toward the surreal, and it's said that upon hearing the recordings the studio director ripped up Norvo's contract on the spot. But the recordings were released nonetheless, and continued to sell throughout the decade.

Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle (1887-1933) was one of Hollywood's greatest comedic filmmakers of the silent era, and he had an unheard-of, million-dollar-a-year contract at the height of his career. But in real life, in 1921 Arbuckle became a tragic Hollywood character, ostracized and demoralized after being falsely accused of raping and killing a "party-girl" acquaintance who died several days after attending a party that he also had attended. Despite courtroom testimony which clearly demonstrated that the woman had died from a ruptured bladder, and that there was neither any evidence nor death-bed accusation that she had ever been intimate with Arbuckle or had been raped by anyone, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst published sensational "accounts" that portrayed Arbuckle as a lecherous monster who forced himself on innocent young women, against the backdrop of a town where debauchery was the norm. But among those who actually knew him, the shy Roscoe was called "the most chaste man in pictures," and even though he was acquitted in 1922, this didn't stop moral crusaders from demanding his execution. One of the very few celebrities who never faltered in publicly showing support for Arbuckle was his protégé and Coney Island co-star, Buster Keaton (1895-1966). Even though Arbuckle and his movies had been so wildly popular, it was perhaps unfortunate that Arbuckle's character in Coney Island is a philandering husband, because this type of on-screen persona may have made it easier for the fickle public to buy into the trumped-up scandal that still casts a shadow over his reputation.

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