MC Jazz Band Performances Set for 2020

MC music professor Craig Young often plays with the Jazz Band.

Central Mississippi jazz fans are in for a real treat early in 2020.

Mississippi College’s talented Jazz Band is booked for a concert on the Clinton campus in February. And the student musicians will follow up with a March performance at Mississippi’s “Two Museums” in Jackson.

In the new decade, MC’s Jazz Band will again feature musicians playing saxophone, trumpets, trombones and rhythm section instruments. The group is led by conductor Wayne Linehan.

MC music professor Craig Young, the university’s director of bands, often sits in at Jazz Band concerts with his saxophone every year.

The opportunity for students to perform at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and Mississippi History Museum event on March 20 will be awesome, Young says.

“We are very excited to go,” Young says.

The Jazz Band performance will coincide with the opening of a new museum exhibition titled “Mississippi Distilled: Piety, Politics and Prohibition.” The exhibit will focus on Mississippi’s complex relationship to alcohol and the state’s Prohibition era from 1908 through 1966.

The program that Friday in Jackson runs from 5-8 p.m. The public is invited.

Pamela Junior is the executive director of the two Mississippi museums and recently served as a Mississippi College guest speaker.

For those who cannot catch the MC Jazz Band’s performances in the capital city, a concert closer to home is an attractive alternative.

Music fans are invited to the February 25 Jazz Band concert at the Jean Pittman Williams Recital Hall. The program begins 7:30 p.m. on the Clinton campus. The event is free.

At a similar Spring concert last February, the MC Jazz Band performed selections like John Coltrane’s “Cousin Mary” along with pieces like Henry Mancini’s “Two for the Road.” The group belted out the George and Ira Gershwin classic “Love is Here to Stay.”

Jazz fans in metro Jackson are marking their calendars for April 24. That’s when the MC Jazz Band performs on the Brick Streets of Clinton. The program in the city’s historic business district begins at 6 p.m. that Friday. The event is free.

Concert-goers can also sample from various food choices at restaurants in the Jefferson Street vicinity and nearby food trucks that evening.

For more details, contact Dottie Serio of the MC Music Department at 601-925-3440 or Serio@mc.edu