Band will present `An Evening of Love and Jazz'

The Ontario Chaffey Community Show Band will present “At Last: An Evening of Love and Jazz,” a concert featuring jazz and popular songs, 7:30 p.m. Monday at Gardiner W. Spring Auditorium on the campus of Chaffey High School, 1245 N. Euclid Ave., Ontario.

Admission is free, and the Woodwind Celebration Ensemble will present a pre-concert performance at 7 p.m. in the lobby, where coffee and cookies will be available.

Guests artists will be Dan Friberg, Skip Cain and Reed Gratz.

Gratz is a retired University of La Verne professor of music and has taught at Washington State University, the University of Miami and several universities in Europe. He has been awarded a jazz composition grant from the National Education Association, a research grant in African American music and two Fulbright Lectureships and has performed with recording artists including Herb Alpert, Bobby Shew and Buddy Defranco, according to a news release.

In the Feb. 26 concert, the Ontario Chaffey Community Show Band will perform two of Gratz’s compositions, “Erin’s Eyes” and “George.”

Dan Friberg, who received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from Cal State Long Beach, began teaching vocal music for the Fontana Unified School District in 1966. He taught 15 years at the junior high level and was choral director at Fontana High School for 20 years, according to the news release.

Friberg has played the trumpet and sung with many groups in Southern California and has served as minister of music at several churches.

In the Ontario Chaffey band’s concert, he will sing “Corcovado” by Antonio Carlos Jobim, known in English as “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars.”

In his first performance with the Ontario Chaffey Community Show Band, Skip Cain will sing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “The Summer Wind.” Cain, who served in the U.S. Air Force at the former Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, is an alumnus of Chaffey College.

Band members who will be featured as soloists are clarinetist Holly Audet, who will play Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer”; bass trombonist Don Edberg, playing “Makin’ Whoopee”; euphonium player George Osorio, playing “Somewhere” from “West Side Story”; clarinetist Neil Vargas, playing a transcription of the Buddy Defranco song “Tenderly”; and Pat Arnold, one of the band’s assistant directors, playing tenor saxophone in Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.”

The concert also includes “Just in Time,” “Smooth Operator” and “Moanin’.”

Michael and Lynne Kennedy will narrate the program..

For information, go to showband.net.