Percolating Purchase

Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire

Purchase College lives up to its reputation as a conservatory college with not one but three student performance groups on display. First up it’s the Purchase Jazz Orchestra, which performs 7 p.m. April 20 at the college’s Performing Arts Center with Grammy Award-winning conductor Todd Coolman and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire.

Akinmusire is a Blue Note recording artist who has been named one of the Faces to Watch in 2011 by the Los Angeles Times.  He will perform “The Touch of Your Lips,” “Secret Heart,” “Isotope” and other selections.  His music, according to the Los Angeles Times, is “remarkably fluid, adventurous…and  hard-wired with the sound of something new.”

A professor of music and director of the Jazz Studies Program at the college, Coolman has recorded and performed with many of the greatest jazz artists and recorded three CDs as a leader.  He performed as bassist with the late James Moody for 26 years, including on the James Moody album “4B,” which won a Grammy this year for Best Jazz Instrumental Recording of the Year.

The Purchase Jazz Orchestra performs classics from the Big Band era, featuring musicians from the Jazz Studies Program of the Conservatory of Music, Purchase College School of the Arts. Tickets are $22.50.
Then at 7 p.m. April 21, David DeJesus leads the Purchase Latin Jazz Orchestra in dance music from the Caribbean, including salsa and the Cha-Cha-Cha. Students from the Conservatory of Music will perform works by Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez and Jesus Alemany. 

Purchase Latin Jazz Orchestra

Orchestra director DeJesus is a saxophonist who is active in the New York City scene.  A regular member of the Grammy Award winning Arturo O’ Farrill Afro-Latin Jazz Alliance and the Grammy-nominated Bobby Sanabria Big Band, he has performed with such legends as Jimmy Heath, Ray Barretto, Dave Valentine, Candido,  Paquito D’Rivera, Larry Harlow, the Chico O’Farrill Afro-Cuban Orchestra, the Fort Apache Band, the Village Vanguard Jazz orchestra, and the Mingus Big Band.
Tickets for this concert are $22.50.

Purchase Repertory Theatre gets into the act April 26-May 1 with Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” directed by Dennis Reid.

In this adaption by Ntosake Shange, author of the play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf,”  a black woman tries to profit from selling goods to both sides in the Civil War to protect her adult children from their own heroic impulses.

Director Reid is a writer, producer and educator. His most recent project was an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” which he wrote and directed for the Vassar College’s Drama Department. He has performed at regional theaters throughout the country, developed a one-man show, “Mandingo of Manhattan,” and has directed at a variety of theaters. He is on the faculty at Vassar and has taught at Columbia University, Fordham University, and the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival.

The Purchase Repertory Theatre includes students from the School of the Arts Conservatory of Theater Arts at Purchase College, who perform classical and contemporary plays.  Stage design, lighting, costumes and technical support are all provided by students in the Conservatory’s Design/Technology program. Tickets are $20.

The college is on Anderson Hill Road between Purchase and King streets. 251-6200, artcenter.org