Guest Artist Spotlight: Jordan Rich

Radio personality Jordan Rich, will join the Concard Band as guest artist for the Winter 2015 concert, ”Portraits.” Rich will narrate Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait and W. Francis McBeth’s Of Sailors and Whales.

Guest Artist Jordan Rich
Narrator

Jordan Rich was born and raised in Boston and has been a fixture on radio and TV for more than thirty-five years.  A communications major at Curry College in Milton, MA, Jordan began his career WRKO in Boston at age 18, working as weather reporter and morning show sidekick.  He was eventually promoted to morning co-host, and worked with radio greats Charlie Van Dyke and Norm Nathan.  Jordan also hosted an innovative Broadway/Hollywood music show titled “Music Sunday” for two years.

Jordan worked as a talk show host at WLLH-AM in Lowell, Massachusetts, and also handled weekend music shift at WSSH-FM. He became the WSSH-FM morning host and won numerous community awards.

In 1996, Jordan joined WBZ News Radio 1030 as a fill-in talk host,  eventually succeeded his longtime friend and mentor, the late Norm Nathan. Since then, he has interviewed thousands of authors, actors, athletes, historians, artists and scientists and has a loyal audience throughout 38 states and Canada. He often welcomes local and independent authors on his show and enjoys reading a stack of books each week in preparation.

Winter Concert Poster

Winter 2015 Concert Poster, "Portraits"

Building the Concert Band Audience

John Philip Sousa conducted the
Marine Band (1880–1892) and
the Sousa Band (1892–1931).

The Concord Band has multiple objectives, and we continue to make progress on most of them. For example, we continue to be one of the leading forces among community concert bands, world-wide, in the commissioning of new music for this ensemble.

The Concord Band, probably more than ever before, continues to present the very best in concert band music to the public in our area at reasonable cost. Why more than before? We now tackle great pieces of music for symphonic wind ensemble that would have been considered beyond our capability just a few years ago. For example, Aerial Fantasy, by Michael A. Mogensen, presented on our Winter, 2014, Concert program, was commissioned by the Washington, DC-based Air Force Band. Since its members are all professional musicians, they, according to Mogensen, “could play anything” he wrote—and he admits that this is a difficult piece to play.

One significant area where the Concord Band has not achieved its objective is in building our audience. And we are not alone among concert bands in this respect. Probably the best symphonic wind ensemble in New England, now that the Air Force Band of Liberty no longer exists, is the Metropolitan Wind Symphony—like the Concord Band, a community band with no paid members. However, many of its members were either trained as music performers or as music teachers. They are a wonderful group, but they have as much trouble building an audience as does the Concord Band.