By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Chris Buzzelli didn’t change his tune when he retired.
A guitar professor and director of the Bowling Green State University Jazz Vocal Group, Buzzelli retired from the university last May after teaching there since 1984. While he keeps active as a guitarist, he’s also wanted to maintain a hand in vocal music. So this summer he got together a few former students for a concert at the Hayes Home in Fremont.
This Saturday, the group billed as Chris Buzzelli and Friends will perform at the Pemberville Opera House at 7:30 p.m. as part of the Live in the House series. Tickets are $12 at the door or at Beeker’s General Store in Pemberville or by calling Carol Bailey at 419-287-4848.
Joining Buzzelli, who sings and plays guitar, for the show will be vocalists Samantha Ulrich, Emily Holsoe and David Breen with instrumental support from Ariel Kasler, piano, and Kevin Eikum, bass.
“This is kind of my ideal group,” Buzzelli said. “I get to play, to sing, to write. It contains all my interests.”
Buzzelli didn’t seek out the job of directing the jazz vocal group. Paul Hunt had done it for a number of years and when he left there were a couple short-term directors. When one of them stepped aside on short notice, Dean Richard Kennell asked Buzzelli to take over. “I said I would until he found someone else.”
It became a long-term commitment. “I loved doing the group at the school and I’ve gotten into a lot of arranging and getting my arrangements published. It became an unexpected part of my career.”
He’s also started singing as well. For a while he had a Nat King Cole tribute group with Eikum on lead vocals and bass, and Buzzelli joining the vocal choruses.
When he retired Buzzelli decided he’d like to have a group to express that side of his musical personality.
To get started he is relying on charts the singers knew from their time with the university’s ensemble, though “everyone had to learn a couple new things.”
The program will be a mix of his own arrangements as well as charts from the books of Manhattan Transfer and the New York Voices. During his tenure as director, he helped bring the New York Voices to campus for a summer jazz vocal camp that continued 2009 through 2015.
He said he may also mix in a tune or two from Nat King Cole.
Among the selections will be “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Stone Soul Picnic,” “Corner Pocket,” “A Nightingale Sang on Berkeley Square,” “No More Blues” and Buzzelli’s medley of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Lean on Me.”
Jazz vocal groups differ from pop a cappella ensembles and show choirs in their more complex harmonies and a focus on the music without choreography and costumes.
“If we do a pop tune, it’s a very jazz influenced arrangement,” he said.
Right now the group, which has not settled on a name, has one voice on a part. That’s, he said, “a little unnerving … no one else knows the music.”
Buzzelli envisions expanding the ensemble and bringing in more voices from the community.
