UNLV’s jammin’ jazz program trumpeted at Joe Williams Scholarship show

By John Katsilometes

Thursday, March 5, 2015 | 5:30 p.m.

Amid its legacy as the home of The Rat Pack, haven for Elvis, hotbed for Cirque du Soleil and myriad other great entertainment options, Las Vegas also owns a robust jazz tradition.

Joe Williams, one of the greatest jazz singers ever, made Las Vegas his home. The Smith Center headliner Clint Holmes is picking up that lineage as he finishes a jazz album with the assistance of such luminaries as Dee Dee Bridgewater, Jane Monheit and The Count Basie Orchestra.

And UNLV has been a fertile development ground for some terrific jazz bands and musicians under the direction of Dave Loeb, who is equal measures talented, educated and impassioned about this form of music.

All of those forces converge Sunday at 2 p.m. at UNLV’s Artemus Ham Hall for the 25th annual Joe Williams Scholarship Fund Concert. The show is stocked with great performers, topped by the indefatigable comic Pete Barbutti, the aforementioned Holmes, “Frank: The Man, The Music” star Bob Anderson, longtime Frank Sinatra music director Vinnie Falcone, Holmes’ longtime MD Bill Fayne, iconic jazz singer Don Cunningham, “Vegas! The Show” cast members Reva Rice and Tezz Yancey, popular Las Vegas jazz vocalist Marlena Shaw, the fiery showroom headliner Earl Turner, the great lounge frontman Ronnie Rose, and expert vocalist and UNLV jazz studies instructor Jo Belle Yonely.

Pretty good value for a $25 ticket. Buy those at (702) 895-2787 and UNLV.edu/pac.

The grand orchestrator for all this jazziness is Loeb, who is among the busiest individuals on the local arts and entertainment scene. He is the music director of “Steve Wynn’s Showstoppers” at Encore Theater in Wynn Las Vegas and still hustles back and forth from Las Vegas to L.A. to compose and perform the music for Fox's “Family Guy.”

But Loeb is devoted to the UNLV Jazz Studies program, saying, “That is my main affiliation, and my goal is to educate and develop students as jazz musicians who can grow to play in any style and function.” As you might expect, the UNLV jazz program operates with a sparse budget but has still managed to produce bands that are among the best in the country.

The honors have poured in over the years. DownBeat Magazine, which doles out the annual DownBeat Awards, considered the most prestigious music honors across the country in the field of jazz education, twice honored UNLV Jazz Ensemble 1 as the nation’s top band in the Graduate College Large Ensemble — Outstanding Performance category.

Also, the UNLV groups have been invited to compete at the prestigious Monterey Next Generation Jazz Festival from March 27-30 in Monterey, Calif., and the school’s music ensembles are directed by some of the top artists in the city. Loeb and trombone great Nathan Tanouye, a member of Santa Fe & The Fat City Horns who writes the horn charts for Celine Dion’s orchestra, conduct the UNLV Jazz Ensemble 1 group.

The school’s Latin Jazz Combo is under the direction of Uli Geissendoerfer, a master keyboard artist who can be found each weekend at Dispensary Lounge. The Honors Jazz Quartet is under the direction of UNLV grad Otto Ehling, who plays in “Alice — A Steampunk Concert Fantasy” at Vinyl in the Hard Rock Hotel, among many other gigs (Ehling also is the last of the Liberace Scholarship award recipients). Those bands have been selected to compete in College Big Band and Open Combo divisions in Monterey, an enormous honor for the school.

The point of all of this laudatory information is that the UNLV Jazz Studies program is damn good, even as it fights against some long odds to keep its artistic level high.

“This is so important to us because we are honoring Joe Williams, who I feel is the greatest jazz singer of all time and keeping that legacy alive,” Loeb says. “He wanted to fund the program at UNLV, and we keep holding these shows to raise money and give the students as much exposure as possible.”

The band Sunday will be 20 musicians, all students. Count on some meandering but hilarious jokes from Barbutti, who can still bring the funny at age 81. Holmes is to sample from the “Georgia On My Mind” Ray Charles tribute show formerly at the Venetian. Expect any number of voices from Anderson, who might well stay in Sinatra mode with Falcone on piano. Turner is prone to tearing the place apart inside of three minutes, and there is not a weak link in this long chain of talent.

And, if you want to take some of it home with you, the CD “Smoke and Mirrors,” the UNLV Jazz Studies release from September, will be on sale. This album is not to be confused with Imagine Dragons’ latest release, “Smoke + Mirrors,” which dropped a couple weeks ago. But as is the case in Las Vegas, there is always room for jazz.

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.