Orchestra Iowa jazzing up Holiday Spectacular in Cedar Rapids

In recent years, Orchestra Iowa’s Holiday Spectacular has pumped up the pops with rock, blues and cabaret.

Now it’s time to jazz things up.

Get ready for a musical experience like no other, according to Maestro Timothy Hankewich, when the Iowa Women’s Jazz Orchestra joins Orchestra Iowa onstage Friday through Sunday, Dec. 15 to 17 at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Cedar Rapids.

“What we’re doing is unique among all orchestras in North America for our holiday program,” he said, pointing to the candy-cane twisting of jazz big band and symphonic orchestra to create a new festive flavor.

If you go

What: Orchestra Iowa’s Holiday Spectacular, with special guests, including the Iowa Women’s Jazz Orchestra

Where: Paramount Theatre, 123 Third Ave. SE, Cedar Rapids

When: Dec. 15 to 17, 2023; 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $20 to $64, artsiowa.com/tickets/concerts/holiday-spectacular-2/ with student discounts available at the Ticket Office, 119 Third Ave. SE, Cedar Rapids, or (319) 366-8203

Guest artist’s website: iowajazzwomen.com/

Audiences should catch on pretty quickly, when “Yo Tannenbaum” kicks off the program.

Hankewich arranged the familiar carol for the two ensembles. He also wrote “Holiday Surprise” for the Children’s Discovery Chorus to perform with the jazz band.

The latter “will feature a lot of surprising holiday tunes that you don’t necessarily hear all the time, but will easily be recognized as part of everybody’s youth,” he said.

Other pieces have been arranged by Steve Shanley and Paul Clark, well-known in local circles and in regional, national and international realms.

Combining their efforts was the key to combining the ensembles for this year’s show.

“We had to start planning for this program in early March,” Hankewich said by phone from Jacksonville, Fla., where he was preparing to guest conduct the Jacksonville Symphony’s holiday pops Dec. 7 to 10.

  Buy Photo

“Many people make the assumption that musicians just get together and jam, and a concert just happens. Not in my world. We read music for a living,” he said.

“And there is absolutely no Christmas music ever written for big band and symphony orchestra. We had to make it ourselves.”

With one foot in jazz and the other in classical styles, merging the two was a challenge.

“It takes a lot of creativity, but when you have highly skilled musicians like Steve Shanley and Paul Clark, they know how to write for ensembles,” Hankewich said.

“The biggest challenge was for us to look into our crystal ball to plan this program. As we speak, I am still not sure how we’re going to fit everybody onstage.”

Begin with a full-sized orchestra, add 17 jazz instrumentalists, vocalist Cindy Shadrick, the Orchestra Iowa School’s youth Discovery Chorus, and the Cedar Rapids Concert Chorale — and the stage will be bursting at the seams.

“Somehow we’re supposed to make that fit. So back in March, Ed Karr, our chief operations officer, and I started experimenting with stage plots — drawings to scale — to see how we could seat the musicians on stage,” Hankewich said.

“As of now, we theoretically have a solution, but we’ll see how that actually works in practice.”

They’ll only have a couple of chances to figure that out — a tech rehearsal with the jazz band and choir, followed by a dress rehearsal with everyone the night before opening.

“Then buckle up,” Hankewich said. “Away we go.”

Jazz ensemble

His aha merger moment came in October 2022.

“Orchestra Iowa had the privilege of sharing the stage with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. That was such a spectacular event,” he said. “I immediately thought, ‘Why don’t we do something like that for Christmas?’ ”

Then his thoughts turned back to mid-August of that year, when the Iowa Women’s Jazz Orchestra performed during the KCCK Jazz Under the Stars series in Cedar Rapids.

“I had heard them, and they’re terrific,” he said, noting he especially appreciates the ensemble’s mission to elevate the faces and roles of women in jazz.

“I love their mission, and any way you can share music with as many people and as many diverse backgrounds as possible, I am all for,” he said. “But at the end of the day, I asked them to join us because they’re good — really good.”

  Buy Photo

Toni LeFebvre, who founded of the women’s ensemble, said audience members should “expect the unexpected.”

“We’re playing some tunes that will be very familiar, but obviously orchestrated and arranged in new ways because music for big band and orchestra doesn’t exist. So much of it had to be written and arranged especially for this event, so this will be the first time that any of these arrangements have really been performed in this way.”

She’s looking forward to the audience reaction.

“Their ears are gonna perk up at every single piece, because the general audience will certainly know and be able to connect to almost everything that they’re hearing,” she said. “It’ll just be cool to see how they respond with it being in a different style or tempo or whatever, than they might be used to.”

And she’s looking forward to reaching new audiences, beginning back with the Aug. 18, 2022, Jazz Under the Stars gig at Noelridge Park.

“That was a great performance, and I feel like we reached a lot of the community for that day, and hope to reach even more for the (holiday) show,” she said.

“I think we will be reaching a new demographic or dynamic of audience members that might seek out the more classical performances within our community, that will be able to see the Iowa Women’s Jazz Orchestra and hopefully become fans of ours, as well.

“The (jazz band’s) mission is to showcase and encourage the participation of women and girls in instrumental jazz music, which is an area where women have been marginalized in the past. So I think anytime we can get out in front of such wonderful, large and giving audiences, that’s just feeding our mission and the importance of why this band exists.”

Most of the band members come from the Corridor, said LeFebvre, 31, of Fairfax, a trumpet player who teaches fifth and sixth grade band at Prairie Creek Intermediate in Cedar Rapids’ College Community School District. She has a core group she contacts when gigs come up, and if some of those players aren’t available, she reaches out to her statewide network. Instrumentation includes saxophones, trumpets, trombones, piano, bass drums, and occasionally, a vocalist.

Genesis

The jazz band originated in 2017, when LeFebvre was a graduate student in music education at the University of Iowa.

“My research interest was women in jazz, and the historical context of women that have been pioneers in jazz,” she said, “and why there aren’t more women participating in instrumental jazz professionally, and even going back to high school and college groups.”

So she and her professor came up with the idea of creating an all-women’s jazz band in Iowa, knowing that “would definitely be possible because Iowa is such a special place for jazz education,” she said.

“We really have so many great mentors, musicians, teachers, especially in students of the jazz idiom within our state, from the middle school age going all the way up into high school, college and professionally. I knew that something like this would thrive and be supported in the state of Iowa, and so far, it really has,” she said.

Most of the members are band directors, and despite their busy schedules, unite to play about six major gigs per year, with smaller ensembles from within the group also stepping into various spotlights. Members also serve as guest educators, clinicians and musicians.

Serving in guest educational capacities moves beyond the matter of gender, and into the realm of inspiring “people who don’t see a future for themselves within the jazz genre,” she said, “to know that it is totally possible, highly encouraged, and that a future in jazz is for anybody who wants to do it.”

It’s paying off. LeFebvre is seeing inroads for women in jazz since her grad school days.

“There’s so many great women pioneers and advocates that are coming and just doing amazing things in the jazz world,” she said, “and I think those are being celebrated in really positive ways. I would say it’s getting better all the time.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com