SOUTH HADLEY — For one Saturday in March, you’re invited to step back in time to the era of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, when swing music was all the rage, radio was king, and the broadcasts were live.
March 8 marks the 20th anniversary of “The Big Broadcast” — Mount Holyoke College’s signature event celebrating the music and culture of the 1940s through a live “radio” broadcast — complete with costumes, commercials, a dashing emcee and plenty of toe-tapping music courtesy of the college’s Jazz Ensemble and Jazz Chorus.
TV22 meteorologist Brian Lapis returns as emcee “Fred Kelly,” Mount Holyoke Jazz Ensemble Director Mark Gionfriddo reprises his role as bandleader “Matt Morgan” and the college’s jazz ensembles are polishing up the best Big Band songs, solos and commercials from the past 20 years of “The Big Broadcast” shows to create an all-out anniversary celebration.
Gionfriddo said he’s also hoping to bring back Mount Holyoke alum, Michelle Brooks Thompson, known for her national anthem performances at Celtics and Red Sox games, as a guest performer. In addition, a special vocal jazz arrangement of “A Cottage and a Prayer” — a ballad written by the father of Valley resident John Anz in the 1950s for the Mills Brothers – is expected to be another highlight of the 20th Anniversary show.
“The Big Broadcast” will be live in two shows only – at 2 and 7:30 p.m. on March 8 in the college’s Chapin Auditorium, 50 College St., South Hadley. Tickets, priced at $10 for students and seniors, $20 for general admission and $25 for VIP seating, are available on the college website: mhc.ludus.com (click on tickets) or at the Odyssey Bookshop, 9 College St., South Hadley.
Looking back over 20 years of performances, Gionfriddo shared with Reminder Publishing that the college’s annual Big Broadcast had its roots in cabaret shows he did with “musician friends and some very talented amateurs” back in the 1990s. That group called “Puttin on the Ritz” did a 1940s-themed concert at the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke one year built around a “fictitious radio station called WIST” complete with a script Gionfriddo wrote, and cabaret singers appearing as “famous stars of the day like Allan Jones and Deanna Durbin.”
That show, and subsequent iterations by the cabaret group were a huge hit with audiences, and when Gionfriddo began directing the Jazz Performance Program at the college in 1999, he hoped to be able to revisit the idea as part of music education on the jazz era. In 2006 that hope came true, and he and the Jazz Ensembles put on the first “Big Broadcast” as a 2 p.m. matinee show.
“We didn’t advertise it like we do now, [and] we didn’t even know whether or not the students were going to connect with it,” Gionfriddo said. “And now the college considers it a signature event, which they only give that title to a small number of things.”
In the beginning, he said community — especially those who grew up in the 1940s and 50s — connected more with the performance than students. “Now the word is out, and we’ve got a kind of presence on campus. [Students] have heard about us and seen the pictures on the Mount Holyoke website,” Gionfriddo said. “Now I’m hearing from a lot of people who join us, they tell me ‘Yeah, I went to see The Big Broadcast and that made me really want to participate because I just think it’s so cool’ – and that makes me really happy.”
“It’s one thing to be playing jazz, studying jazz, the jazz history and everything. It’s another [thing] when you can kind of connect to an era like The Big Broadcast does and all of a sudden it becomes much more than just a concert,” Gionfriddo continued. “It’s a historical time travel thing, a study in stereotypes and how the [19]40s were a certain way that young people can’t connect with – the man goes out and is the breadwinner, the woman says in the house and cooks and cleans, keeps a good house and takes care of the kids. They find that kind of thing amusing.”
