Washington and Lee University’s Department of Music will present “Dream a Little Dream” on Thursday, April 9, at 8 p.m. in Wilson Concert Hall.
Featuring the University Jazz Ensemble and the Rockbridge County High School Jazz Combo, the concert is free. The concert will also be streamed online at https://go.wlu.edu/ livestream. The doors to Wilson Concert Hall will open 30 minutes prior to the event.
Directed by Terry Vosbein, the program celebrates the richness and variety of the jazz tradition through music by some of its most notable composers and arrangers — including Clifford Brown, Paul Desmond, Tadd Dameron, Duke Ellington, Neal Hefti, Billy Strayhorn and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Drawing on styles from swing and bebop to cool jazz and Brazilian song, the evening offers audiences a broad and engaging portrait of the art form.
A central highlight of the concert is “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” performed in a new arrangement by Vosbein and featuring firstyear alto saxophonist Maia Adolphus. The song holds a remarkable personal connection: its melody was composed in 1930 by Maia’s great-grandfather, Milton Adolphus, who sold the piece outright as a teenager for $12.50, long before it became one of the most frequently recorded standards in American popular music.
The concert will open with the Rockbridge County High School Jazz Combo, offering a showcase for outstanding young regional jazz musicians and underscoring the evening’s spirit of collaboration between university and local student performers. In keeping with tradition, the combo and the University Jazz Ensemble will also perform together on “This Dream’s Got Groove,” a composition Vosbein wrote for this occasion.
Founded in 1996 as an academic ensemble within the Department of Music, the University Jazz Ensemble continues a Washington and Lee jazz tradition that dates back to the W&L Jazz Kings of 1920.
