DeKALB – “This is for Ron,” said Rodrigo Villanueva-Conroy, the director of the NIU Jazz Ensemble. 

Villanueva-Conroy and his band, joined by the NIU Jazz Orchestra led by Reginald Thomas, played its spring concert Wednesday. 

After the death of the former head of the jazz department Ronald Carter on Feb. 24, both Villanueva-Conroy and Thomas talked about Carter’s legacy on the jazz community at NIU and the world as a whole. 

“If it were not for professor Carter, I wouldn’t be a pianist,” Thomas said during the concert. 

After the performance, Thomas talked about how he inspired the Jazz Orchestra to memorialize Carter’s legacy properly. 

“I often tell the students before we hit the stage to play for someone you love and that was the decision tonight, to play for him,” Thomas said. 

Thomas and Carter’s bond goes back to Thomas’ high school years when Carter was his band teacher.

“One of the things he recognized in me was the passion,” Thomas said. 

Carter even invited 15-year-old Thomas to play with Carter’s professional bands.   

“It was a very different teacher-student relationship because I was playing with him professionally every weekend in clubs and places I had no place being,” Thomas said.

After directing the jazz program at NIU for 23 years, Carter left an impression on NIU students and community members alike.

“He left an impact on thousands and thousands of kids,” Thomas said during the concert. 

Thomas dedicated the last two songs of the concert to Carter. 

“The Neighbor from Naylor,” a song written by Carter’s son, was the first of these two.

Clay Horseley, a parent of one of the performers, said “The Neighbor from Naylor” strayed away from the typical type of jazz the groups play. 

“It’s so different than anything they’ve done before,” Horseley said. “Normally, they’re classical jazz, traditional jazz, but just to hear some kind of bluesy, kind of not tight, kind of loose was fun.”   

Highlighted by a drum outro played by first-year Jonathan Garrett, “The Neighbor from Naylor” was a swing chart with open solo sections.  

A touching memorial to a lost mentor, “The Neighbor from Naylor” was the last song on the program. 

Thomas, however, had one more surprise in store. 

When Carter was in charge of the program, he would end every concert with “Down Home Blues,” and Thomas ended this concert with his own cover. 

“There was a touching moment with professor Thomas paying tribute to Ron Carter who as an educator, as a musician, as a person, means so very much to so many people here at NIU and, as prof. Thomas was saying, in the greater jazz community,” said Austyn Menk, admissions coordinator for the School of Music and piano player for the Jazz Orchestra. 

For trumpet player and second-year master’s student Gabriel Wade, Thomas’s version of “Down Home Blues” was a great way to honor Carter. 

“It was a heavy, heavy experience,” Wade said. “I know that Ronald Carter meant so much to prof. Thomas, and I just wanted to make sure I honored Ronald Carter’s legacy.” 

WOMEN’S HISTORY

“We should talk about Mary Lou Williams as a composer and arranger as much as we talk about Duke Ellington,” Thomas said after the Jazz Orchestra’s first song. 

While the concert’s finale was dedicated to Carter, the rest of the Orchestra’s set was full of songs either composed by women or in memory of women. 

Pieces like Mary Lou Williams’ “O.W.” and Noriko Ueda’s “Uneven Pieces” were among the songs featured in this part of the set. 

Khadija Nagi, a junior jazz performance major, has been developing a method of integrating international jazz music into the school’s repertoire. 

For this concert, she picked “Uneven Pieces,” a piece written by a Japanese composer, Noriko Ueda.

“It’s a beautiful piece,” Nagi said. “Everybody seems to be in agreement that it’s just a gorgeous piece.” 

Mikayla Chin, a junior jazz performance major and lead alto for the Jazz Ensemble, said NIU is a great place to be a young musician because they value your work ethic, not if you are a man or a woman.

“It doesn’t matter what your background is as long as you work hard,” Chin said. “You can be the lead player. You can be in the Jazz Orchestra.” 

The Jazz Orchestra plays next at 7 p.m. April 18, and the Jazz Ensemble will have their next concert at 7 p.m. April 23.

“They’re both really high-level ensembles,” said Liam Kantzler, a senior music performance major. “The Jazz Orchestra, they just sound like a professional group. It’s really good.”