Holiday Chamber Jazz Septet                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            photo: Dave Eagles

Bill Mays: piano/arranger - Neil Swainson: bass - Terry Clarke: drums - Perry White: bari sax/bass clarinet - Phil Dwyer: tenor sax/clarinet - Campbell Ryga: alto sax/alto flute - P. J. Perry: soprano sax/flute

The Holiday Chamber Jazz Septet features jazz improvisations on familiar holiday themes (with the Nutcracker Suite as it's centerpiece). Their music has proven to be entertaining for adults and children alike (and not specific to any one religious group). The enthusiastic responses and reviews the septet has received demonstrate their program's wide audience appeal.  

Past performances: New York City's St. Mark's Church; in Canada: Toronto Glenn Gould Theatre and the Old Mill Inn, Banff Center For The Arts, Edmonton Winspear Centre, Fort McMurray Keyano Theatre, Kamloops Sagebrush Theatre, Maple Ridge ACT Theatre, Nanaimo Port Theatre, Regina University Riddell Theatre, Saltspring Island ArtSpring, Saskatoon Broadway Theatre, St. Albert Arden Theatre, University of Calgary, Vancouver Orpheum Theatre and Norman Rothstein Theatre, Victoria Alex Gooldin Theatre, Vernon Ora Convention Centre, Whitehorse Yukon Arts Centre and Winnipeg Berney Auditorium.

Sample Program:

   Overture Listen mp3
   March
   Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy Listen mp3
   Dance of the Reed Flutes
   Arab Dance
   Waltz of the Flowers Listen mp3

Reviews: 

Ashante Infantry, Toronto Star, 12/22/10 -   click here

Lindy Sisson, Exec. Director, ACT Arts Centre, Maple Ridge BC, 12/10/10  "Whether you’ve never been to a jazz concert, or you are a jazz aficionado, the Jazzy Nutcracker will not only put you in the holiday spirit, but raise your spirits...it was a most heavenly 2 hours of music, filled with swinging joy and the most inventive musical arrangements you could ever dream of, giving familiar Christmas and classical tunes a unique and fun twist."

Mark Miller, Toronto Globe and Mail, 12/10/03 "...Mays is the man of this particular hour...new arrangements of several items with Christmas, or at least festive, connotations...as classical/jazz crossovers go, this one's as jazzy as it is classy...the line between jazz and classical music all but disappears."

Geoff Chapman, Toronto Star, 11/28/01 Septet's Debut A Taste Of Jazz Light "Last night's debut concert by the newly minted Chamber Jazz Septet was a taste of jazz light, but mercifully never became jazz smooth, that musical opiate for the inattentive masses. The ensemble assembled in a full Glenn Gould Studio was led by versatile pianist-composer-arranger Bill Mays, a New York-based artist who recently recorded the same heady brew of anthems from jazz, Broadway and classics with the Manhattan Chamber Jazz Septet.

It wasn't a silly season stir-fry, though it was a grand excuse to use a cartel of composers beyond category. How else can you have Claude Debussy, Thelonious Monk, Mel Torme, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Maurice Ravel on the same program? Mays recruited four leading Canadian reedmen: P. J. Perry, Phil Dwyer, Vern Dorge and John Johnson to go along with pulse kings Neil Swainson on bass and Terry Clarke on drums.

The leader himself augments his arranging skills with the finesse of Jimmy Rowles, the spirit of Art Tatum and the drive of Horace Silver on the keyboard. An elegant My Bells was followed by the show tune made famous a second time by jazz guru John Coltrane, My Favourite Things, whose cadences were clearly among yesterday's sax players' favourite things.

This was followed by an unlikely Brazilian slant on Debussy's Clair De Lune before Perry's forceful bellows on baritone sax upped the thrill index again, as it led to equally quirky skirmishes among the players tackling Monk's Stuffy Turkey.

Mays' own Christmas Thanksgiving Prayer was soulful and rich, while Ravel's Pavane was enlivened by Dorge's flute. Just as this appealing show concept was showing signs of bogging down in neo-schlock, a spirited trio take on Snow Job provided the kiss of jazz life. The closing Mays' versions of six movements from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite were absolutely splendid with bravura sax soloing the epitome of chamber jazz."