The Latin Jazz Festival at the Winter Palace Theater will feature Ed Byrne's Latin Jazz Evolution and Wayne Roberts' Latin Jazz Quintet.
Ed Byrne's Latin Jazz Evolution will perform on Saturday in Holyoke.In an effort to showcase local musicians, promote live music and highlight venues in the city the Holyoke Cultural Council is hosting a night of Latin jazz on Saturday as a culmination to Passport Holyoke’s Discover Holyoke Day.
Discover Holyoke Day allows people to purchase wristbands for $1 and enjoy musical, theatrical and artistic performances at Holyoke Heritage State Park, Wistariahurst Museum and Open Square. A full schedule may be found at
www.PassportHolyoke.org
The Latin Jazz Festival at the Winter Palace Theater will feature Ed Byrne’s Latin Jazz Evolution and Wayne Roberts’ Latin Jazz Quintet.
“We wanted to do something to close out the day of activities and what better way to do that then to have live music in a local Holyoke venue,” said Mark Dunlap, of the cultural council.
Dunlap said the cultural council conducts a yearly survey in which they ask residents to give their input about what events and activities they would like to see throughout the year.
“This year people said they wanted more performances, Latino events, festivals and events that promote the city,” he said.
The council applied and received a grant for $3,000 to use on culture events in the city this year.
The festival will include a raffle for an iPad, food vendors and performances by several local musicians including a local college or high school band as well as Wayne Roberts’ Latin Jazz Quintet and featuring Ed Byrne’s Latin Jazz Evolution.
Byrne’s band includes local musicians from Western Massachusetts as well as Hartford and New York City.
Byrne is a Grammy Award winning trombonist, composer and arranger, who has recorded with a great many of the jazz world’s leading musicians, in a career that has spanned four decades. A doctor of Musical Arts in Jazz Studies from the New England Conservatory of Music, Byrne was nominated Best Trombone Soloist by Latin New York magazine; his composition “Fenway Funk” was nominated for a Grammy Award.
Roberts, a Los Angeles native, holds a bachelor’s degree from the New England Conservatory of Music and a master’s degree from the Julliard School. Now a New York resident, Roberts has worked with Kirk Lightsey, Hal Galper and Vic Juris, among others.
The event will be held in the Winter Palace Theater on Cabot St. The venue was prepared by Dunlap and a group of volunteers who spent weekends clearing out the space below the Paper City Brewery.
“It was filled with a lot of junk and clutter and I’m surprised how many people were willing to come help clean it up,” he said.
The space was used in the past to host dance performances by the Wire Monkey Dance Company, but fell into disrepair. The dance company recently began hosting performances in the space again.
“There are a lot of requirement f
rom the Fire Department particularly getting a new sprinkler system and fire a alarm system in order to get a permanent certificate of occupancy, so the festival will be the last event at the Winter Palace for a while,” Dunlap said.
Major sponsors besides the Massachusetts Cultural Council include Paper City Brewery, United Bank, Holyoke Gas and Electric as well as SimmerMusic and Carousel Studios.