The Saint Louis Brass Quintet to play year’s first Music Monday

Take two trumpets, one French horn, a trombone, and a tuba—put them in the hands of virtuoso performers—add some lighthearted demonstrations, and you have the Saint Louis Brass Quintet. The quintet will play the first Music Monday concert of the year at 7:30 p.m., Oct. 14, in King Chapel.

“We have a lot of fun with the audience, ” trombonist Melvyn Jernigan told a reporter after a concert last fall. “It starts off really kind of straight and then gets lighter as we go along,”  said Jernigan, a music educator who has also performed with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.

A special event for this tour is the new work “Aesop’s Fables” by Anthony Plog, in which the brass music is used to accompany the clever stories.

The program will feature American composers of both jazz and classical genre.  The Quintet has commissioned two jazz oriented arrangements including  an arrangement of Louis Armstrong favorites and will present them at this concert together with another new commission: “Daylight at Midnight” by Dana Wilson. Allan Dean has written many of the arrangements incorporating  Renaissance music and tangos by the Argentinian Astor Piazzolla.

The show will also include humorous demonstrations, one focusing on the history of the brass instruments from the time of King Tut to the present, including the straight trombone and the French horn fashioned from a twelve foot section of garden hose.

Members of the quintet include trombonist Melvyn Jernigan, trumpet soloists Allan Dean and Ray Sasaki,  hornist Thomas Bacon, and Daniel Perantoni on tuba.

General admission is $10 ($5 for students) at the door. Admission is free to Cornell students, faculty, staff, emeriti faculty, and retired staff, and to Purple Pass holders. The Purple Pass is free to residents of Mount Vernon and Lisbon and families with children enrolled in the Mount Vernon and Lisbon school districts.

This presentation is supported by the Arts Midwest Fund, a program of Arts Midwest that is funded by the National Endowment for the  Arts, with additional contributions from The Iowa Arts Council and General Mills Foundation.