February 8, 2007

Cellist Karen Patterson joins the Dayton Philharmonic for an evening of jazz and classical music Saturday, Feb.17, at the Schuster Center in Dayton.

By Virgil Hervey

Yellow Springs own cellist Karen Patterson will perform with the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra at the Schuster Center on Saturday, Feb. 17, at 8 p.m. in a concert with the double-edged billing, “Boundless Harmony.”

Patterson, who teaches and maintains a performance schedule out of New York, will this weekend return to the area to head up a jazz ensemble that will team with the orchestra for an evening of classical, jazz, dance, gospel, and traditional African-American music. Her ensemble consists of pianist Vince Evans, saxophonist Donald Walden, blues guitarist (and brother) Nerak Roth Patterson, harmonicist Frédéric Yonnet, bassist Marion Hayden, and drummer Andre Wright.

The program will begin with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Danse Nègre, followed by Patterson’s solo performance in Gabriel Fauré’s Elegy. Also included will be Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 1, Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance, op. 46, No. 3 and Scott Joplin’s “The Ragtime Dance.”

In a turn to spiritual music, Patterson, the orchestra and her ensemble will perform three traditional gospel numbers: “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “I Wonder as I Wander,” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” The highlight of the concert is a commissioned piece by Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh. After a performance by the jazz ensemble of a Miles Davis piece, the concert will conclude with the theme from the 1959 Brazilian film Black Orpheus.

The concert is as much about community as it is about the music, according to Patterson, who in a recent interview pointed to the DPO’s free Community Performance Series, which she described as a run up to her event. The series consisted of three free concerts during the past few months at area churches with the orchestra’s strings and percussion joining the choirs of those churches, and a free concert featuring the Carrillon Brass at an area high school.

“It’s all part of on ongoing strategy of community engagement — working to forge better and stronger links between the orchestra and the community,” DPO Music Director Neal Gittleman said in a recent interview. “ ‘Community’ means everyone, but it especially means audiences whom we haven’t served as well in the past as we could.”

Patterson described the effort as “expanding the audience profile.”

“We need to reach out and embrace them and make them a part of what we are doing,” she said.

The endeavor, which has been going on quietly for a couple of years, according to Gittleman, is now less quiet, thanks to the church concerts and the performance with Patterson.

“Karen and I have been planning this performance for so long — going on five-plus years now — that it feels like we’ve done it before. But this is actually our debut together,” he said.

“For the past dozen years or so, collaboration with local artists has been part of the DPO’s DNA,” he said. That effort has sometimes meant featuring local singers as soloists in choral and vocal concerts. Sometimes it meant teaming up with such local performing arts groups as Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, the Human Race Theatre Company, the Bach Society of Dayton, the Central State University Chorus and Rhythm in Shoes.

“Yes, we bring big name artists from outside to play with the DPO, too,” he said. “But the orchestra has always had its roots deep in the greater Dayton community, and it always will.”

Patterson, a self-described military brat and daughter of the late Lt. Col Thaddeus (Pat) and Faith Patterson, moved to Yellow Springs in the eighth grade. A graduate of Yellow Springs High School and Ohio University, she went on to study at the Göethe Institute in Germany and with master musicians Gerhard Hamann, Mstislav Rostropovich, Janos Starker, and Keter Betts, bassist for Ella Fitzgerald. She also holds a graduate degree from Antioch University.

“I was always interested in jazz,” she said. “It’s a part of my culture.”

But it was Rostropovich who pointed out how a union of spirituals and classical music could parallel the well-established link between folk tunes and classical music.

“That was the only conversation we ever had in English,” she said.

As for the Yellow Springs community, Patterson, who has been a frequent performer at the AACW Blues Fest and coordinator of that event’s innovation stage, said she hopes a lot of villagers will show up for the concert.

The support his orchestra normally gets from Yellow Springers has not eluded Gittleman.

“But Yellow Springs isn’t exactly your typical town of 3,700, is it?” he said. “It’s a diverse, hip, and culturally engaged audience. So it makes sense that Yellow Springs would be ‘over-represented’ in just about every conceivable worthwhile activity.”

The Yellow Springs High School music department and the Youth Orchestra Association will jointly sponsor a school bus to the concert. For more information, call Yvonne Wingard or Dennis Farmer at 767-7224. The bus will leave the high school parking lot at 7 p.m. Students and seniors will be given preference for bus seats.

Contact: vhervey@ysnews.com