DEARBORN — Henry Ford Community College will present a Big Band Motown Review at 8 p.m. Jan. 30 at the Ford Community & Performing Arts Center, 15801 Michigan Ave.
The concert will feature Ed Nucilli and the Plural Circle Jazz Orchestra as well as HFCC’s award-winning Henry Ford Big Band and Midnight Blue, HFCC’s top vocal jazz ensemble. The instrumental groups will perform big band and jazz hits made famous by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Benny Goodman and Glen Miller. Midnight Blue, directed by Kevin Dewey, HFCC’s director of vocal music, will sing a medley of Motown’s most well-known hits.
Tickets are $20 each and can be purchased by calling (313) 943-2354 or in person at the Ford Center box office. For more information about the concert, e-mail Rick Goward at [email protected]
Midnight Blue and the Henry Ford Big Band are two of the nine performing ensembles at HFCC. Some 250 musicians take part in HFCC performance groups each year and perform locally, nationally and internationally.
Nuccilli founded the Plural Circle Jazz Orchestra in the 1960s, and the band continues to perform today in the Detroit area, most prominently at the legendary Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, which is hailed as the world’s oldest jazz club. Nuccilli is a master composer and trumpeter and has performed with several top-name artists, including Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., Wayne Newton, Lou Rawls, the Supremes, the Spinners and the Four Tops.
Members of the Plural Circle Jazz Orchestra also have had experience with such well-known artists as Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, the O’Jays, Marie Osmond, Roy Clark, Dizzy Gillespie, Maynard Ferguson and the Temptations.
The concert is a prelude to HFCC’s annual President’s Collage Concert Feb. 27 at the Ford Center, featuring 250 of HFCC’s top vocalists and instrumentalists.