The National Youth Band was held in Alberta from May 3 -10, 2014. A final concert was performed in Convocation Hall at the University of Alberta.

Conductor: Gareth Jones

 

Gareth Jones is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Calgary and is the director of the University’s Wind Ensemble as well as the Symphonic Band.  He is also the Director of the Alberta Winds, Calgary’s professional wind ensemble in addition to being a frequent guest conductor and adjudicator at music festivals across Canada. He was Assistant Principal Trumpet with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra from 1992 to 2007 and continues to play with the CPO whenever his conducting schedule allows. Before that, he held the same position with the Tulsa Philharmonic Orchestra.  


He has studied conducting with the renowned pedagogues Jorma Panula, Gustav Meier, Michael Haithcock, and Michael Jinbo. He has conducted ensembles from across Western Canada as well as Mexico and the United States.  Mr. Jones’s musical activities are greatly varied.  He has appeared as guest conductor and clinician with over two hundred orchestras and wind ensembles, been featured on Juno nominated blues CDs, appeared on CBC radio as a soloist and chamber musician, been a guest lecturer with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, been an adjudicator at music festivals across Canada, as well as conducting honour bands across Canada.  He can be heard playing chamber music, jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues with various groups around Calgary.  


As a conductor he founded the Calgary Honour Band and the University of Calgary Brass Choir.  He was also a founding member of the chamber ensemble “Rosa Selvatica” and has been a featured soloist with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra on several occasions.  He studied conducting at the Pierre Monteux Institute and Canada’s National Arts Centre and received his Master of Music in conducting from the University of Calgary. He studied trumpet at Northwestern University, where he won the prestigious concerto competition and a scholarship for performing excellence.

 

Guest Artist

 

ALASTAIR KAY (trombonist) is widely recognized as one of Canada's finest trombonists. Over the past three decades, he has performed with some of the world's best orchestras, entertainers, and jazz artists including Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Rich, Frank Sinatra, Harry Connick Jr., Dizzy Gillespie, Tony Bennett, Phil Woods, Mel Torme, Renee Rosnes, Diana Krall, Lionel Hampton, Slide Hampton, Bill Watrous and many others. He played lead trombone with Rob McConnell's Boss Brass for 15 years and guested with the Rob McConnell Tentet on several occasions.

His virtuosity and versatility have made him a first-call player for most of the studio, musical theatre, and jazz gigs in Toronto. In the recording studios, he has played on more than a thousand radio and television jingles and soundtracks, and on a multiplicity of CDs, records, and feature film soundtracks. He has been an integral part of Toronto's musical theatre production scene for many years, playing in long-running hit shows including "The Lion King", "Ragtime", "Fosse", "Crazy for You", and "Chicago".

 

He is highly respected as a classical musician, too, playing principal trombone with many major regional orchestras, including seven seasons with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet Touring Orchestra. He has worked frequently with the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, and in many contemporary music ensembles. Al is also busy as a soloist, playing standard classical and his own jazz repertoire with orchestras, concert bands and brass bands across Canada.

Al is also a dedicated educator. In addition to the hundreds of clinics and master classes he has given, and continues to give, he holds a full-time faculty position as Head of the Brass Department at Humber College in Toronto where his duties include teaching improvisation, brass master classes, private lessons, leading several jazz combos and the brass choir (small and large chamber ensembles).

 

Since becoming a Yamaha artist several years ago, he has performed in and presented numerous Yamaha-sponsored brass clinics and concerts. Travelling to Japan, he worked with Yamaha's head instrument designers on a new small-bore lead trombone, model YSL 697Z, an instrument which has since received rave reviews from all who have tried it, and quickly sold out in Canada. In 1997, Alastair Kay was honoured by Jazz Report Magazine as Canada's "Jazz Trombonist of the Year".

 

Al was part of the highly successful Boss Brass reunion concerts in December 2008

Awards: 

1997 - named Jazz Report Magazine's "Jazz Trombonist of the Year".