Pharez Whitted '82 to Headline Saturday's DePauw Jazz Festival

March 8, 2016

Jazz lovers are invited to a day loaded with music from that genre this Saturday, March 12, as the DePauw University School of Music presents its first jazz festival. The program will include performances from high school and middle school jazz ensembles from across Indiana, valuable clinics, and master classes with professional jazz musicians. Topping off the festival will be a closing concert by the DePauw Jazz Ensemble, directed by Steve Snyder, and acclaimed trumpeter Pharez Whitted, a 1982 graduate of DePauw and leader of Chicago’s Pharez Whitted Sextet.

All performances, beginning at 9 a.m. with the Greencastle Middle School Jazz Band, will take place in Moore Theatre, located within the Judson and Joyce Green Center for the Performing Arts on the DePauw University campus.

Each student group is allocated a 20-minute performance, which will be followed by a 20-minute clinic with Whitted, currently the director of jazz studies at Chicago State University and this year’s guest clinician as well as artist. After judges complete their tabulations, the jazz trumpeter will join the DePauw Jazz Ensemble for the final performance of the day at 5 p.m. 

Whitted (son of the late singer, bassist and Indianapolis Jazz Hall-of-Famer Virtue Hampton Whitted and the nephew of trombonist Slide Hampton) has worked with such musical giants as Wynton and Branford Marsalis, George Duke, Kirk Whalum, The Temptations, Lou Rawls, John Mellencamp and Ramsey Lewis. He has two superb solo recordings on the Motown/Mojazz record label, Pharez Whitted and Mysterious Cargo; one by Owl Studios, Transient Journey, nominated for an Independent Music Award in the Jazz Album category; and his latest CD on Origin Records, the funky hard bop For The People.

General admission to Whitted’s guest performance with the DePauw Jazz Ensemble is $5. Tickets for seniors, youth and all students are free and may be obtained online (music.depauw.edu) or at the Green Center box office beginning one hour prior to the closing concert. (at right: musicians from Greencastle Middle School perform)

For more detailed information and schedule of events, all of which are open to the public, click here.

Back