Featuring Fantasies for Anna by Christopher Dedrick, Canadian Brass teams up with wind players in this concert band celebration.

Canadian Brass CONCERT BAND ESSENTIALS
Featuring the soloists of the Canadian Brass

Band Tradition
In past centuries virtually every North American city and small town had its own town band. It was natural for bands to become a feature of American public education, allowing millions of school children to experience the joy of wind band music and performance. The members of the Canadian Brass are inheritors of this band tradition, each having gotten his own start in school music programs. The Brass have of course retained their love of the wind band medium and under Chuck Daellenbach’s direction created a large repertoire of Wind Band music based on their best known brass compositions and arrangements. This CD is effectively a “best of” collection of great Canadian Brass music titles.

The Band
Canadian Brass gathered their friends and colleagues around them in the concert hall of the University of Toronto to create this disc. Toronto is known for find wind players and many of the participants performing alongside the brass are onetime students of Brass. In fact, the music was conducted by one of Daellenbach’s former students, Dr. Cameron Walter.

Repertoire
This wind ensemble excursion carries on the Canadian Brass tradition of starting their concerts with Just a Closer Walk with Thee. Classical titles include Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, Handel’s Suite from Water Music, Pachelbel’s Canon, and a new significant contribution to the Wind Ensemble repertoire, Fantasies for Anna by Christopher Dedrick. Additionally two works at the very foundation of the Canadian Brass style are heard, Bach’s Little Fugue in G minor and Gabrieli’s Canzona per sonare.

Every North American wind player shares the great indigenous jazz tradition, and celebrating this tradition are five Dixieland masterpieces executed in the inimitable style of the Brass. Completing the sonic Wind Ensemble picture are Rayburn Wright’s tribute to North American folk music, Red, White & Brass and Ron Romm’s signature tune La Virgen de la Macarena.

The Experience
There is something so special about the sound of a great band—the very reason bands have been around for hundreds of years. If you are already playing a wind instrument this music will remind you why you wanted to play in the first place. If you have played and let it go fallow, this music will make you want to get out your instrument out again!