Dylan Emerson

Mr. Jeffrey Cloutier

MUS 2950

23 November 2021

Concert Review - Peak FreQuency

For this concert review, I went to a concert at the Chapman Foundations Recital Hall on

October 9, 2021. This concert featured UCCS music faculty guitarist Colin McAllister, trumpeter

Glen Whitehead, percussionist Randy Bowen, and guitarist Russ Callison. I really liked how the

guitar and drums looked, as they did not look like your typical instruments. The guitar was

actually headless, where the body went into the neck and did not have a head stock at the end.

The drums themselves had some sort of spiral thing near where the hi-hat would be, but I

assumed this was just a fancy stand of some kind. These designs were very interesting to me.

The music itself felt dissonant and mysterious. Whitehead demonstrated excellent

trumpet playing, nailing several complicated runs and showing a mastery with dynamics, playing

with the volume to keep me moving in my seat. I had difficulties following along with the piano,

because it sounded like when I would randomly smash the second the octave on my own

keyboard, but I know the pianist was doing this methodically. My brain isn’t very jazz oriented,

so some of the more experimental or dissonant sections they performed did not mesh well with

me. At one point, Whitehead began blowing his trumpet very raspily into the piano itself, while

the pianist played quietly. The audience was very quiet throughout the whole thing, and a lot of

them probably felt just as uncomfortable as I was at some of the experimental moments. The

trumpet-piano blowing went on for what felt like forever, and began to make me cringe in my
seat at some points. At one point, it seemed like the trumpeter was trying to see how loose of an

embouchure he could maintain while still producing sound!

The historical and cultural context of this performance was certainly modern. Throughout

the performance, the performers were performing a wide array of dissonances that on one hand

felt random and annoying, but on the other hand, methodical and practiced. I’ve learned from

this experience that experimental, modern jazz just isn’t for me. As mentioned before, I felt the

balance between the musicians was well done and the sound carried well throughout the venue,

but I did not enjoy sitting through this performance.