North Coast Winds

North Coast Winds joyfully celebrates their 11th season! Formed by five alumni of the Cleveland Institute of Music in 2013, the North Coast Wind’s commitment to inspired music-making, and memorable educational programming has led the group across the United States in performances and residences. They are award-winners of the Yellow Springs Competition for Emerging Professional Ensembles and were first woodwind quintet ever featured at the iconic NightTown jazz club in Cleveland, Hts.

NCW is distinguished by its imaginative programming, threading story lines together across generations and cultures. Most recently, NCW produced a program for Musicivic Inc., a chamber music incubator and livestream platform. Recorded during the pandemic, and marketed as a “high-octane trip through time and space, culture and place”, this production featured works by Eugene Bozza, Antonin Dvorak, and Valerie Coleman and reached audiences around the world. recordings from the production garnered NCW a semifinalist position in the 2021 Petrichor Records International Music Competition.

Other impactful local projects include — in 2015, NCW founded the North Coast Winds Summer Institute while raising significant scholarship funds to enable every qualified student to attend. This unique program served students for seven seasons. During the pandemic, they partnered with the Music Settlement to offer pop up musical front-lawn concerts to bring live music to neighborhoods in NEO Ohio.

Individual Bios
Flute — Kimberly Zaleski
As the Touring Flutist with 5 Time Grammy Nominee, David Arkenstone, Kimberly Zaleski has performed throughout the U.S. Highlights include performances at The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, and the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. She can be heard on two of his newest albums, “Fairy Fantasy” and “Quest for the Runestone.” Based in Cleveland, Kimberly is the Principal Flutist of the Firelands Symphony Orchestra and Second Flutist with CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra and has performed with The Cleveland Orchestra, The Cleveland Pops Orchestra, Erie Philharmonic, and many other ensembles throughout Ohio. She studied at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University and The Cleveland Institute of Music and is the Flute Professor at The University of Akron. She has given masterclasses and performances at Arizona State University and Penn State University and is a Performing and Teaching Artist on the roster of the Center for Arts-Inspired Learning Agency with her band, IN2ATIVE.

Oboe — Danna Sundet
Danna Sundet’s artistry, broad range and versatility has its roots in her exotic upbringing. She grew up in Brazil, the Canary Islands and Texas speaking three languages fluently from early childhood. She is professor of oboe at Kent State University and served as artistic coordinator of the Kent Blossom Music Festival for the last fourteen years. She is the director of the John Mack Oboe Camp, and she performs as principal oboe of the Erie Philharmonic. She has performed with the Cayman Islands Arts Festival, the Carmel Bach Festival, Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival. She is a regular performer with the Bellingham Festival of Music in Washington as well as The Hampton’s Music Festival in New York. She has performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Houston Symphony and with orchestras and chamber ensembles in Mexico, Norway, Paraguay and Brazil. She records regularly for Ludwig Masters, and has CD’s published by Worldview International, Ancient Paths, Panoramico’s and for the Kent Blossom Music Festival as well as the Bellingham Festival and with the Black Squirrel Winds and most recently with the Cleveland Chamber Choir of Cleveland. Ms. Sundet is regarded as one of Ohio’s most influential teachers of young oboe students. She mentors her students in establishing vibrant professional careers in the music industry as performers, instrument repair technicians, recording artists, music librarians, archivists, small business owners in the reed making industry and in arts management.

Clarinet — Ben Chen
Praised by Cleveland Classical for a “wonderfully mind-blowing sound,” clarinetist Ben Chen has forged a career of extensive orchestral experience and chamber music collaboration. He currently holds positions with the Erie Philharmonic and Cleveland Pops Orchestra. Ben was previously principal clarinetist of the Youngstown Symphony, Sarasota Opera Orchestra, and assistant principal and E-flat clarinetist of the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra. In addition to his contracted appointments, Ben has performed in subscription concerts with The Cleveland Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, and as guest principal clarinetist with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Equally dedicated to chamber music, Ben celebrates a decade with the award-winning North Coast Winds quintet this season. He also presents recitals nationwide as the Edgewater Duo with his husband, pianist Dean Zhang, in addition to frequent festival performances all over the world.

Bassoon — Arleigh Savage
Bassoonist Arleigh Savage, is a founding member of the North Coast Winds where she serves as ensemble coordinator, bringing her love of live music performance and enthusiasm for community-driven arts projects to her work. She is a member of the Youngstown Symphony, Cleveland Pops Orchestra, Cleveland Ballet, and the Lancaster Summer Festival Orchestra. Describing her recent performance with the Local-4 She Scores project, Clevelandclassical.com writes “(bassoonist) Arleigh Savage calmly glided through the significant technical demands.” Arleigh’s newest project is Sororii, a female-led cello/bassoon duo that writes original world-indie music exploring sisterhood across cultures. Sororii released their debut album, Esperanza, in 2022 with grant support from New Music USA. Arleigh has taught bassoon at The College of Wooster and recently joined the music faculty at Cleveland State University.

Arleigh grew up in East Lansing, MI and earned a Bachelor of Music at Michigan State University. In 2010 she moved to Cleveland, OH to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music under the tutelage of John Clouser, receiving a master’s degree in 2012. Upon graduation, she was the recipient of the George F. Goslee prize in bassoon. Arleigh played as a contracted member of the Ohio Light Opera in 2011 and attended the Colorado College Summer Music Festival in 2012 and 2013, where she was a winner of the concerto competition. In the summer of 2015 Arleigh was invited to study with notable bassoonist, Frank Morelli, at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada.

Horn – Emily Shelley
Hailing from Toronto, Ontario, Emily Shelley is a versatile horn player and educator making a significant impact in the classical music world. She holds the second horn position with both The Wheeling Symphony in West Virginia and the Erie Philharmonic in Pennsylvania, and is a founding member of the North Coast Winds. Beyond her performing roles, Emily serves as the Education and Community Lead at Piano Cleveland, where she merges her passion for music with community engagement and fostering music education in schools. She lives in Cleveland with her husband, young son, and many animals.

Final program
Red Clay & Mississippi Delta — Valerie Coleman

Suite for Wind Quintet — Gunther Schuller
I. Prelude
II. Blues
III. Toccata

La cheminée du Roi René — Darius Milhaud
I. Cortège (procession)
II. Aubade (dawnsong)
III. Jongleurs (jugglers)
IV. La maousinglade (sarabande)
V. Joutes sur l’Arc (jousting on the River Arc)
VI. Chasse à Valabre (hunting at Valabre)
VII. Madrigal nocturne (nocturnal madrigal)

Quintet — Elliot Carter
I. Allegretto
II. Allegro giocoso

—intermission—

Miniatures — William Grant Still, arr. Adam Lesnick
I. I ride an Old Paint (U.S.A)
V. A frog went a-courtin’ (U.S.A.)
IV. Yaravi (Peru)
III. Jesus is a rock in a weary land (U.S.A.)
II. Adolorido (Mexico)

Selections from Porgy and Bess — George Gershwin, Lyrics by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, arr. By Bill Holcombe

Aires Tropicales — Paquito de Rivera
IV. Vals Venezolano
I. Habanera
VI. Contradanza

Click Here to Watch the Concert on YouTube (The link will go live at 7:15pm, and the concert will begin at 7:30pm.)

Watch this concert live

Program notes
written by: Ben Chen
Jazz took the world by storm. New sounds and new ideas for a new age, an age that also saw the emergence of the woodwind quintet. Our program explores the parallel stories of how this distinctly American art form reframed musical possibilities around the globe while the wind quintet simultaneously emerged as an established genre of chamber music.
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Who better to start off such a story than Valerie Coleman, a flutist and composer who redefined the wind quintet for the twenty-first century? As the founder of the acclaimed Imani Winds, Coleman knows the personalities and combinatorial possibilities of each instrument intimately. Like much of her writing for wind quintet, Red Clay and Mississippi Delta demands the utmost virtuosity from each member, in this case to create a driving tapestry of fiendish yet nonchalant licks. Coleman traces her lineage to the Mississippi Delta through her mother’s side of the family, a place of “juke joints and casino boats that line the Mississippi river, to the skin tone of kinfolk in the area: a dark skin that looks like it came directly from the red clay.” In this short piece, we see the latest possibilities of the wind quintet infused with the spirit of the birthplace of jazz in the Deep South.
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Nothing good stays in one place for long, and jazz began to proliferate in the clubs and cultural circles around the country. Gunther Schuller was a 19-year old horn player when he wrote his Suite for woodwind quintet, the same year he changed employment as principal hornist for the Cincinnati Symphony to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. He went on to work with many jazz greats, including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Eric Dolphy. From this plum pedigree in both worlds, Schuller wrote music in what he deemed the “Third Stream” style, integrating both classical and jazz techniques. After a brisk Prelude, the Blues movement puts on full display Schuller’s affinity for jazz idioms and for his own instrument, with the French horn taking up a rare jazz solo. The closing Toccata references the train rides he would take between cities as a child, with clear nods to the rhythmic revolution unleashed by Stravinsky not long before.
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The spread of a distinctly American musical language continued to other continents, with musicians across the pond in Europe catching on to its infectious grooves and sonorous harmonies. Darius Milhaud was part of a rather irreverent French group of composers called “Les Six,” or The Six, who reveled in jazz’s modernity in the café and cabaret scene of Paris. Milhaud himself was one of the most enthusiastic adopters of jazz elements into his own musical language, and he went on to teach famed jazz pianist, Dave Brubeck.

La cheminée du roi René is a suite of music originally written to accompany a film, Cavalcade d’amour. The film traces three owners of a castle in the French countryside over the centuries, with Milhaud’s portion concerning the medieval court of King René I. Each short movement gives an impression of an activity, from a procession, a dance-like morning song, jugglers, a slow and elegant court dance, jousting tournaments, hunting in the woods, and a charming evening madrigal to conclude a full day at the castle. Milhaud infused this piece with folk-like ornaments and harmonic flavor, yet the movements also belie his modernist tendencies. While his other pieces may be more explicitly influenced by jazz, La cheminée du roi René in a way shows the profound influence of the genre on Milhaud’s writing without jazz itself.
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At first glance, the music of Elliott Carter may seem out of place in a narrative about jazz. Yet on closer inspection, there are striking similarities in their shared rhythmic vitality, distinct personalities emerging through solos, and dynamic sense of energetic gestures – similarities that speak to the cross-pollination of cultures in a melting pot like New York City. The Quintet for Winds showcases the dense intricacy of Carter’s “ultra-modern” style, written during a period when his music became increasingly complex. The first of the two movements carries notes of regret, as ominously sustained melodies ooze over inevitable, march-like accompaniments. Outbursts from solo instruments seem to protest some calamity, ending with an unanswered question from the clarinet. The closing movement frolics through examining every possible subdivision of the beat, like a meticulously structured yet heated debate amongst five friends. After reaching what seems like a climax, the movement ends abruptly with the clarinet again, this time jokingly reminding us that perhaps the stakes weren’t so high after all.

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William Grant Still came into a golden age of American music, when classical, jazz, popular, and folk styles had blended like never before. From this fertile soil, Still’s prodigious ability and prolific output launched him to numerous “firsts” in American history as a composer and conductor. Despite his barrier-breaking achievements, there were times Still could not attend events of his own work without police protection, and his 1939 marriage was performed in Mexico as California had a legal ban on interracial marriage. Though he did live to see the acclaim of his groundbreaking work, it is only recently that his place in the pantheon of American composers has been more widely recognized.

The Five Miniatures were written as a postcard to a British conductor and his wife, a souvenir in song of their trip to the americas. While there may be little overt jazz stylings in this piece, Still’s musical montage of the western hemisphere presents in each movement a musical forerunner, an ingredient that would form the basis for a distinctly American art form. From Sante Fe, New Mexico, I Ride an Old Paint tells the tale of a rider who so loved his horse that he begged for his bones to be tied to it after his death. As they ride off into the westerly-setting sunset, Still animates the cowboy tune alternating between mournful chants in the oboe with epic harmonies reminiscent of Dvorak. The exact origins of the next movement, A Frog Went A-Courtin, have been lost to time, said to have been sung for over four hundred years. Some trace this charming tune to Kentucky, perhaps Virginia, while other places claim it as their own. The middle movement comes from Peru, where Yaravi is said to mean “lament” in the language of the ancient Incas. The absence of a dear one is keenly felt through the poignant stillness of this haunting melody. Jesus is a Rock in a Weary Land features the clarinet in this spiritual from the American south, and Still notes that he preserved the authentic, undulating rhythms as would be heard in a Black church of the time. As such, we can hear clearly the basis for swing and the through-line linking spirituals with the blues and jazz – at their core a music of hope and resilience in the face of unimaginable hardship. The set closes with a jaunty news-song from Mexico; Adolorido regales listeners with the age-old tale of betrayal by a jealous partner.

–—
An apocryphal story says that Maurice Ravel refused George Gershwin composition lessons, instead asking to study with this young American for the commercial success he had already achieved. Accurate or not, it is true that the famed composition teachers in Europe (including Ravel) did not want to teach Gershwin out of fear of contaminating his fluently jazzy style. After work in tin-pan alley, vaudeville, Broadway, recording piano rolls, and the perennial hit Rhapsody in Blue, a vacation to the beaches of South Carolina served as the inspiration for Porgy and Bess. Set in Charleston, the opera follows the residents of Catfish Row, a fictional Black tenement, through universal challenges of jealousy, addiction, disability, disaster, and othering. Gershwin had considered the culture of Black southerners to be the most authentic basis for American folklore, yet the opera was met with mixed reception regarding its depiction of African-Americans. In spite of this, its most famous tunes have become ensconced in American cultural consciousness, from Summertime to It Ain’t Necessarily So.
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Like Coleman and Schuller at the top of the program, fellow American composer Paquito D’Rivera represents a renaissance-artist equally adept at performing and composing. A consummate clarinetist and saxophonist, D’Rivera has won numerous Grammy and Latin Grammy awards for his work in classical, Latin jazz, performing, and composing.

His Aires Tropicales draws upon dance forms from his native Cuba, each movement inspired by and dedicated to a different composer. The upbeat Contradanza, complete with surprise sound effects, pays homage to Ernesto Lecuona, the great Cuban composer and pianist often compared to a Gershwin for his influence in Latin American music. The three reed instruments take up the reflective Habeñera, which combines their fibrous sonority with atmospheric, mirage-like textures to create a mood both earthy and ethereal – a fitting tribute to Maurice Ravel. The final movement draws upon the work of Venezuelan guitarist Antonio Lauro, who sought to elevate his country’s music to that of a national art form. The Venezuelan waltz in particular was a mix of colonial and native influences, with its high syncopated character and how it constantly plays rhythmic games with the expected lilt of the waltz. Above all, the three movements show not only the delightful synthesis of styles from across the world, but also deliver a good time that anyone, anywhere will know firsthand.

At this point in time, all pews in West Shore Church will be used and the decision to wear a mask will be a personal one. There will be both a live audience, and live streaming for those at home. Donations are always welcome. For further information email us at info@rockyriverchambermusic.org, or follow RRCMS on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.