Photo by Laura Bufanda Photography

HOUGHTON — Friday and Saturday, the Rozsa Center stage will be transformed into an intimate jazz club for two themed concerts involving three Michigan Tech jazz bands. The shows will begin at 7:30 p.m. both nights.

Director of Jazz Studies Adam Meckler loves having the bands play Backstage Jazz shows, because they offer an intimate atmosphere and the energetic setting of a jazz club.

“We basically sell out our shows when we do Backstage Jazz,” he said. “Backstage Jazz, the house isn’t open, so it’s not 1,100 seats, but around 200 tickets are sold for these Backstage Jazz shows. It really feels like a jazz club. I think people really dig that. The response has been overwhelmingly positive.

“I think people really like what’s going on in the jazz program, like the kind of concerts we put on.”

On Friday, the Workshop Brass Band will perform music from a list that includes “I’ll Fly Away,” “Just My Imagination” and other classics such as “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Bourbon Street Parade.”

What makes the brass band so interesting, according to Meckler, is that the band does not learn music from sheets, but tackle the arrangements by ear.

“They listen to the music really well, and really because this music is a language, it’s so important that students are listening,” he said. “What excites me about the New Orleans-style band is that the students have really latched onto it.

“They’re checking out the heroes of New Orleans-style brass band music, and then they’re coming back to campus with all this knowledge and this sort of internal sense of what the language sounds like.”

After the brass band is finished, the R&D Big Band will take the stage and perform pieces that include “Theme From Sanford and Son” by Quincy Jones and “Tell Me a Bedtime Story” by Herbie Hancock.

“The idea behind this concert theme was, ‘Let’s do music from movies and TV shows’,” said Meckler. “I’ve never done anything like that before.

“Professionally, I always played my original music, so I don’t get a lot of opportunities to do cool themes like this,” Meckler said. “So it’s fun to theme shows and go, ‘Hey, let’s try a funk thing from this show. Let’s try a Latin thing from this show. Let’s try a jazz thing from this show.'”

Saturday evening, the Video Game Jazz Ensemble will cover television themes as well as video game music from titles such as Legend of Zelda.

“A lot of anime uses jazz-sounding music for their theme songs, and other songs throughout their show,” said Meckler. “So, we’re doing two songs from ‘Cowboy Bebop’ in the concert, which will be fun.

“Both of them are very challenging tunes. So, it’s interesting that a real jazz challenge can come from anime TV shows. Also, you get the added benefit of the students having listened to it many times.”

The Video Game Jazz Ensemble is actually managed by students. Meckler said. It was founded by students originally, and they do all the work of arranging the music and choosing what and where they play.

After their performance, the Jazz Lab Band will close things out with music from television and movies, such as “Spider-Man” and “Family Guy.”

“This concert is playing a song from ‘Whiplash,’ an arrangement of ‘Caravan,’ which is an old Duke Ellington tune, but it’s arranged by this guy, John Wassen, who I know pretty well, and who is a really famous sort of arranger,” said Meckler. “(He) did this arrangement for the ‘Whiplash’ movie, and it’s epic. It’s like this crazy-fast, sort of virtuosic kind of piece that takes a lot of skill to play, and our students are really doing a great job of playing it.”

The Jazz Lab Band’s performance will be enhanced by a video performance by Hancock High School student Mikah Kotajarvi, who will also help with some of the M.C. work for the night.

Tickets for the shows can be purchased online or by calling the Rozsa Box Office at 906-487-1906.