NEC Jazz Orchestra Kicks Off Regattabar's New Big Band Mondays Series

The NEC Jazz Orchestra makes an off-campus appearance on Monday, February 5 at the Charles Hotel’s Regattabar (1 Bennett St., Cambridge). The orchestra is the opening act for the Ken Schaphorst Big Band, the 17-piece ensemble of acclaimed composer, performer and Jazz Studies Co-Chair Schaphorst. The performance kicks off the club’s new Big Band Mondays series and features founding Contemporary Musical Arts department chair Ran Blake on piano and faculty member Dominique Eade ’82 ’89 AD on voice. The concert starts at 7:30 p.m. Its program includes George Russell’s “Ezzthetic,” Blake’s “Memphis,” and Schaphorst’s “Take Back the Country” and “Mbira.” Tickets $15-$25. For information visit regattabarjazz.com.  
 
Ken Schaphorst is an internationally acclaimed composer, performer and educator who has been a leading light on the Boston jazz scene for more than 20 years. As Co-Chair of the Jazz Studies Department at NEC, he teaches courses in jazz composition, arranging, theory and analysis as well as directing the NEC Jazz Orchestra. Before moving to Boston in 2001, he served for ten years as Director of Jazz Studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Schaphorst is also a founding member of the Jazz Composers Alliance, a Boston-based non-profit corporation promoting new music in the jazz idiom since 1985. 
 
Schaphorst studied at Swarthmore College, NEC, and Boston University, where he received the Doctor of Musical Arts in 1990. His composition teachers have included Thomas Oboe Lee, Gerald Levinson, William Thomas McKinley and Bernard Rands. Schaphorst was awarded Composition Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988 and 1991, the Wisconsin Arts Board in 1997, Meet the Composer Grants in 1987 and 1997, and was a Music Composition Finalist in the Massachusetts Fellowship Program in 1986. He won the Achievement Award for Jazz Education from DownBeat magazine in 2007. Schaphorst has released seven recordings as a leader: Ken Schaphorst Big Band: Making Lunch (1989), Ken Schaphorst Big Band: After Blue (1991), Ken Schaphorst Ensemble: When the Moon Jumps (1994), Ken Schaphorst: Over the Rainbow (1997), Ken Schaphorst Big Band: Purple (1999), Ken Schaphorst: Indigenous Technology (2002) and Ken Schaphorst Big Band: How to Say Goodbye (2015).