LITTLE ROCK — A good wind will blow five woodwind players to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway this week.
Imani Winds - Toyin Spellman-Diaz, oboe; Mariam Adam, clarinet; Jeff Scott, French horn; Monica Ellis, bassoon; and Valerie Coleman, flute - will perform at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in UCA’s Reynolds Performance Hall.
The program will include an arrangement for woodwind quintet of the “Scherzo” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Felix Mendelssohn; Afro-Cuban Concerto by Coleman; Suite Belle Epoque in Sud-Amerika by Julio Medaglia; Terra Incognita by jazz pioneer Wayne Shorter; Woodwind Quintet by Daniel Schnyder; and The East Suite, consisting of The Lotus Pond by Gamal Abdel-Rahim, arranged by Adam Lesnick; Andaluza byManuel de Falla; and two traditional Klezmer dances, “Khosidl” and “Freylekh,” arranged by Gene Kavadlo.
Much of the 14-year-old quintet’s repertoire consists of compositions written by its members or for the group.
“A lot of our music has been written for us,” says oboist Spellman-Diaz. “We have commissioned several works.
“But before we even came along, there was a wide spectrum of music that was written for the wind quintet, because it’s such a funky group of instruments; if you get over the fact that you’re not going to get a nice heterogeneous sound, you can put in basically anything.
“There are some people that really take the wind quintet seriously that try to make different sounds come out of it. We’re lucky to have two ofthose people within the quintet,” Coleman and Scott.
Coleman’s Afro-Cuban Concerto was one of the quintet’s first original works.
“That piece has an interesting story,” Spellman-Diaz says. “We were asked by the Brooklyn Philharmonic to play a concerto with them, and they said, ‘What we want is a concerto for wind quintet with Afro-Cuban influence. What can you recommend?’ And we said, ‘There’s no such thing.’
“So Valerie said, ‘We don’t have it yet, but we can make that happen if you can hang on a bit.’ I don’t think that gig ever happened; in fact I know it didn’t. Well, it happened years later, after she had written it.
“But [in the meanwhile] she decided to write a piece we could perform on our own. It’s one of the first substantial pieces that was written specifically for us, and it has been sort of a catalyst for our careers.
“From then on, we decided we weren’t going to wait to find music that we wanted to play, we were going to arrange it as we needed it or as we wanted it.”
The quintet toured for a while with Shorter, a legendary jazz saxophonist, and Terra Incognita was among the results.
“We’ve been really lucky to have a whole bunch of collaborators that have really taken us to school every time we work with them,” Spellman-Diaz says. “With Wayne, it wasn’t necessarily that we improvised with him; it was just being in his presence, was an education in and of itself.
“He was full of stories ofhis times with Miles Davis and hanging out with John Coltrane, and of course Herbie Hancock’s his best friend. Just hearing his stories and being in his happy, open, almost innocent presence has been an incredible inspiration.
“And then to have him write a piece for us - it was the first piece he ever wrote that didn’t involve him actually playing, just for somebody else alone to take his ideas and go with them. It was a tremendous honor getting him to agree to do it.”
The quintet’s performance is part of what the university is billing as an “African-American Heritage Celebration.” But Spellman-Diaz says the ethnic or racial makeup of the quintet is less important thantheir love of the music.
“It’s important to know that even though we got together because we’re all [black] or Latino, and that was important to our performing, what has kept us together is not our backgrounds but our love of what Imani Winds is doing- the outreach, the concerts filled with music that wouldn’t necessarily be heard together, actually going after these ideas and dreams.
“It’s not necessarily about what you look like, it’s getting together and sticking to something. It’s kind of like being married to these four other individuals. We don’t necessarily just sit down and play; we’re very much communicating with each other as we play. That kind of joyous commitment is love.”Music Imani Winds
7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Don
ald W. Reynolds Perfor
mance Hall, University
of Central Arkansas, 201
Donaghey Ave., Conway.
“African-American Heritage
Celebration,” a collaboration
between the UCA music
department and Minority
Student Services. Free.
(501) 450-5769; (501) 450-
3135.
Style, Pages 45 on 02/20/2011