There is a new addition to Fort Wayne’s live music scene: 3 Rivers Big Band, a 17-piece jazz ensemble that plays not only the classic music of the 1930s and ’40s big bands, but also explores the sounds of contemporary composers and arrangers.
3 Rivers Big Band consists of five saxophones (two alto saxes, two tenor saxes, and a baritone sax), four trombones, four trumpets, and a rhythm section (with piano, bass, drums, and guitar).
The band consists of band directors, church musicians, teachers, theater people, students, and a number of people who work at Sweetwater. The latter makes sense, since the group started as a musician’s initiative there.
“The 3 Rivers Big Band wasn’t originally intended to be a performing band,” bassist Dave Martin said. “I believe that musicians need to play music, since that’s what makes us musicians. Otherwise, we’re just people who own instruments.”
Musicians come together
A Sweetwater employee, Martin learned that a number of his coworkers had been music performance majors in college.
“As musicians, we tend to think of our musical ability as a big part of our self-image, so I started thinking about how to help those musicians play more often, to remind them that they are musicians,” he said.
The answer was to form a reading/rehearsal big band that would get together once a month to play through charts, perhaps work on the challenging sections for a bit, then pull out another chart and do it again. Fortunately, Chuck Surack, Sweetwater’s founder, made his collection of big band charts available to the group, in addition to his own skills on the baritone sax.
This group met and played together a couple of times at the Sweetwater Performance Theatre, then moved, at Surack’s suggestion, to The Club Room at The Clyde to play together one Sunday afternoon each month. After a couple of rehearsals, the group booked a Christmas show in The Club Room, and the 3 Rivers Big Band was born.
wide range of songs
The band’s ever-expanding repertoire includes well-known swing tunes from the Glenn Miller Orchestra, (including “In the Mood,” “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” and “Tuxedo Junction”), Count Basie, and Duke Ellington. They also play material from composers like Thelonious Monk, Thad Jones, Cole Porter, Henry Mancini, and Arturo Sandoval, as well as songs from movies like Beauty and the Beast and The Wizard of Oz, and even cartoon favorites like “Meet the Flintstones.”
The musicians in the 3 Rivers Big Band are encouraged to bring their own charts to the group. Trumpet player Alex Kastner wrote an arrangement of Jimmy Van Heusen’s “Darn That Dream,” that has become part of band’s set list, and Jose Hernandez, another trumpeter, brought a special arrangement of themes from Star Wars (in 5/4 time) to celebrate Star Wars Day, May 4 (or 5/4) this year.
“Over the next few months, we’ll be continuing to learn new tunes and polishing the ones we already have,” said trombonist Marcus Farr, the leader of the band. “The new songs will keep our musicians engaged, while the classic songs give our audiences something that they know.”
