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ALAC has jazzy start to concert season

The new concert season starts with jazz and ends with Celtic music. Season tickets are waiting for you!

To kick off this year’s Concert Series, the Arrow Lakes Arts Council is bringing in Jazz Ensemble with Patrick MacGibbon, the NSS music teacher and an all-star band of Kootenay musicians on Saturday, Sept. 28 at the Bonnington Arts Centre starting at 7:30 p.m. Patrick MacGibbon will be playing saxophone, Nelson’s Doug Stephenson, is on bass, Selkirk College music teacher Steven Parish plays drums, and Canadian jazz legend Phil Dwyer on piano. These performers will be complemented by two NSS music students, Cyrus Galloway on saxophone and Rene Goodman on cello, as special guests for several numbers Come out and enjoy a great blend of new music and swingin’ jazz standards made famous by legends like Dave Brubeck and Frank Sinatra.

At the opening ALAC concert with Jazz Ensemble the winner of the raffle for the Fujibayashi sculpture that Toru donated to the Arts Council will be drawn. As you know, the ALAC has been actively working on finding the funds to have a Fujibayashi sculpture made for the Arrow Lakes. This sculpture, after two years of hard work by Janet Royko, is now in its final stages of being finished.

There is going to be a dedication ceremony for this major piece of work on Sunday, Sept. 29 at 2 p.m. on the waterfront where it is being placed on a base.

After finishing the sculpture, Toru made a small sculpture out of the same stone and donated it to the Arts Council. We are having a raffle for this beautiful piece of work for $20 per ticket to help cover the cost of the large sculpture. There are only 250 tickets and once they are gone there will be no more. The winner will be announced at the Jazz Ensemble Concert on Saturday evening.

Mirror Theatre is presenting ‘The Panto of the Opera,’ a pantomime (traditional British style farce that is anything but silent and has no mimes anywhere), with something for everyone – spectacle, physical comedy, visual jokes, verbal comedy and slapstick, on Saturday, Nov. 30, at the Bonnington Arts Centre.

Vancouver Opera will be performing on Sunday, Oct. 6 starting at 2 p.m. at the Bonnington Arts Centre. We will see The Barber of Barkerville, based on Rossini’s ‘The Barber of Seville,’ followed by excerpts from various operas performed by the professional singers from the cast.

The second concert in this Series is the Gryphon Trio, on Wednesday, Oct. 23. Awarded the 2013 Walter Carson Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts, the two-time JUNO winning Gryphon Trio has firmly established itself as one of world’s preeminent piano trios.

The Bergmann Duo is performing on Wednesday, Nov. 6. Their extensive repertoire ranges from the baroque to the contemporary and incorporates numerous own arrangements and composition. Currently they are directors at the Langley Community Music School.

The fourth concert of this Concert Series is the Foothills Brass on Friday, Feb. 21. This superb Canadian Quintet is dedicated to exceptional artistic presentation, meaningful educational activities and innovative leadership in the artistic community.

The final concert, Lizzy Hoyt, is on Saturday, March 1. Lizzy Hoyt is an award winning Canadian vocalist and songwriter who also happens to rank among the top Celtic instrumentalists in the country. She has won several awards, including the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013 by the Governor General of Canada for her outstanding contribution in commemorating Canadian veterans and history through music.

The Arrow Lakes Arts Council is offering three packages for our Season Concert Series patrons. All three packages will give you a reserved seat. You may take the two Kootenay Artists’ Concerts as one package, the Concert Series as our second package, or you may take all seven concerts as the third package. Please contact Marilyn Massey at 250-265-4087 for further information.