The Centennial Celebration Concert on Tuesday, April 8 is a landmark commemoration of the 100th birthday of the Frost School of Music and the University of Miami. It’s a momentous historical marker. A once-in-a-century party.
It’s also a unique concert featuring spectacular Frost School alumni artists from a host of genres and eras. Here’s a look at what promises to be a fantastic evening of music, conceived and directed by Frost School dean Shelton G. “Shelly” Berg and hosted by University of Miami alum and celebrity television entertainment journalist Jason Kennedy.
Jazz guitarist and composer Pat Metheny spent a short but pivotal period at the Frost School’s jazz program in the early 70s, sharing and shaping the program’s adventurous, intensely creative character. Metheny, who’ll play a medley of three of his compositions, is a supremely skilled and expressive musician with an astonishing creative range that has earned him 20 Grammy Awards in ten different categories and made him a vastly influential artist for 50 years. Prepare to be dazzled.
Another famous performer from the early days of the Frost School’s jazz program will be singer/pianist/composer/bandleader Bruce Hornsby, who graduated in 1977. (He and Metheny have collaborated multiple times.) Hornsby has built an extraordinarily rich career that’s ranged through pop, Americana, jazz, classical, and electronica, collaborating with a who’s who of artists in multiple genres. On Tuesday he’ll perform his indelible 1986 breakout hit “The Way It Is,” a poignant, powerful call for humanity and empathy that still resonates today.
Love Broadway? This show has one of its luminaries, Frost School music theater alum Joshua Henry, a Tony-nominated singer and actor who’s starred in productions of “Ragtime,” “Carousel,” and as Aaron Burr in “Hamilton” – enabling him to sing one of the iconic show’s most famous songs, “The Room Where it Happens.”
Three very different graduates of the jazz vocal program will also take the stage. The best known is Jon Secada, whose family fled Cuba’s communist dictatorship for Miami’s working-class, immigrant community of Hialeah when he was 11. Secada got a bachelor’s and a master’s in the Frost School’s new jazz vocal program in the 80s, a place that represented the pinnacle of musical achievement in his new country. He became part of the musical family of fellow Cuban emigres Gloria and Emilio Estefan as a backup singer and songwriter for the crossover star. In 1992 the couple introduced Secada as a solo artist with “Just Another Day/Otro Dia Mas Sin Verte,” which he’ll sing on Tuesday. The pop ballad, which Secada co-wrote, was a multi-million-selling hit in English and Spanish, with an irresistible hook lifted by Secada’s soaring voice and sensual presence – a breakthrough moment for Miami and Latin music.
Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Raquel Sofia, a 2009 jazz vocal graduate, launched her career in the thriving Miami Latin music world that the Estefans and Secada did so much to create. Sofia sang backup for superstars Juanes and Shakira, then came into her own with a Latin Grammy nomination for Best New Artist for her 2015 debut album “Te Quiero Los Domingos” (“I Love You on Sundays.”) On Tuesday she’ll sing a new composition, “Llorando en una bici” (“Crying on a Bicycle”), a bluesy, jazzy heartbreak song that Sofia wrote after crying over a fight with her boyfriend while riding home on her bike.
Dominican-American jazz singer Ashley Pezzotti, a 2018 jazz vocal graduate, is a singer’s singer with numerous critical raves, who’s performed and recorded with jazz icons like Wynton Marsalis and Arturo Sandoval. Pezzotti will perform “September in the Rain,” a swinging, upbeat jazz tune.
Especially for younger singers like Sofia and Pezzotti, part of the thrill of performing on Tuesday will be the grand, lush backing of a symphony made up of Frost School undergraduate classical music students and graduate students from the Henry Mancini Institute, with arrangements created for this concert by Berg, students from the Studio Jazz Writing Program, and its director Stephen James Guerra Jr. They’ll be joined by a rhythm section of ace alumni instrumentalists: guitarist Andrew Synowiec, drummer Marko Marcinko, and bassist Will Lee (son of former Dean William F. Lee), plus veteran drumming faculty Steve Rucker. Berg will also play piano and conduct. And it wouldn’t be a party without the beloved Frost Band of the Hour, who’ll bring the fanfare and school spirit.
Another star alum performing Tuesday is Ben Folds, an influential singer-songwriter-composer best known for the beloved 90s alternative rock trio Ben Folds Five. Folds came to the Frost School in 1986 on a full percussion scholarship. At the end of his first semester, he got into a fight with a student-athlete who was bullying a friend in their shared dorm, and broke his hand – which caused him to fail his jury exam the next day. Folds famously threw his drums into Lake Osceola in frustration and dropped out. (He also made piano his primary instrument.) But he still credits the Frost School as crucial in shaping him as an artist, and returns to perform “Theme from ‘Dr. Pyser,’” a rollicking, piano-driven instrumental from his Ben Folds Five days.
They may not have studied at the Frost School, but the Latin pop-rock group Bacilos formed while studying at the University of Miami and got their start performing on campus. Bacilos’s irresistibly catchy, melodic songs made them Latin music stars in the early 2000s, and they’ve recently reformed after a years-long hiatus. They’ll perform their first hit, the lilting “Tabaco y Chanel.” The song has a charming backstory: it was inspired when member and lead songwriter Jorge Villamizar, cleaning up an apartment he shared with his girlfriend, picked up one of her sweaters, and smelled her perfume and cigarettes.
Two younger performers, both of whom graduated in 2019, are exemplars of the Frost School’s cross-disciplinary ethos. Carter Vail, who majored in music engineering and minored in songwriting, has gone viral with short, quirky, edgily hilarious videos like “Dirt Man” On Tuesday he’ll perform a more traditional tune, “Harder to Kill,” a break-up song from his second album, “100 Cowboys,” which Vail wrote with another Frost School alum and is one of his favorite live numbers.
Alexis “Idarose” Kesselman, a producer, artist, and songwriter who majored in media production and scoring and, like Vail, minored in songwriting, saw her career explode with “Glimpse of Us,” a darkly affecting song she wrote for pop-electro artist Joji that was a huge global hit in 2022. Now Kesselman takes the stage to perform her life-changing composition.
With all these fantastic artists, you expect a fantastic rendition of "Happy Birthday." On hand to lead everyone in a medley of two irresistible modern birthday anthems, the Beatles’ raucous “Birthday” and Stevie Wonder’s soulful “Happy Birthday” will be actress, singer, and fabulous diva Dawnn Lewis, the Frost School’s first music theater graduate. Everyone is invited to sing along.
If you go:
The Centennial Celebration Concert takes place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, April 8 at the Lakeside Patio on the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus. The concert is free and open to the public, and you can RSVP here.
More information can be found on the University’s centennial website at 100.miami.edu or at the Frost School Centennial Celebration website.
