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Miami
saxophonist Ed Calle, the BYU-Idaho Sound
Alliance jazz band, University Choir, a small orchestra and vocal soloists
will join together to perform the “Jazz Up the Holidays”
concert in the Kirkham Auditorium at BYU-Idaho
Friday, Dec. 12, as part of the Center Stage Performing Arts Series.
Tickets
are $8 for the general public and $2 for BYU-Idaho students. They can be
purchased at the ticket office in the Manwaring Center,
by calling the BYU-Idaho Ticket Office at 496-2230 or by visiting the
website at www.byui.edu/tickets.
Calle is arranging and writing music specifically for
the university students to perform with him. He last performed on campus
five years ago at the annual jazz festival and his playing was electrifying,
says Mark Watkins, director of jazz at BYU-Idaho.
Even
if Calle’s name is unfamiliar, most people
have probably heard his music. His fiery tenor has graced the work of
Gloria Estefan from the earliest days of the
Miami Sound Machine, and he’s heard on Grammy-award-winning
recordings by Arturo Sandoval, Vicky Carr and pop singer Jon Secada. He’s also recorded with Julio Iglesias, Vanessa Williams, Bob James, Frank Sinatra
and many others, as well written and arranged music for motion picture
soundtracks.
His
passion, however, is jazz, an affection he discovered upon hearing a
Michael Brecker recording back in his teen years
as a student at the University of
Miami. Since then he has never
looked back. Born in Caracas of Spanish parents, the Latin connection is
also a part of his sound.
“My
focused goal as a musician is to appeal to as many people as I possibly can
without selling out or playing music that’s overly simplistic,”
he says. “I’m not holding anything back; I’m just trying
to create good melodies and play them with emotion.”
Besides
playing, writing is vital to Calle’s
creative instincts. “Writing is a big part of your own voice as a
musician,” he says, “and it’s the vehicle you use to
state your case musically. If you have a song that people can remember, you’ll
get a lot more mileage out of it than just standing up and playing 32 bars
of something with no melody.”
Calle strives to be both an artist and an entertainer. “As
a person, I’m very light-hearted. I’m not the musician who
wears the artsy shirt or whose house is painted black. I’m pretty
average – except when there’s a saxophone in my face. Then I
become something else. When I’m eight or twelve bars into what I’m
doing, the artist in me takes over. When I’m in that zone, you could
slap me in the face and I wouldn’t even realize it. I’m only
thinking about the music.”
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