Music Club Summer 2012 part 1 and 2. Tony Steve and John Citrone.

We've had two music club presentations so far this Summer, and they've both been amazing! (scroll down for information on the upcoming Music Club's!)


In June we had Tony Steve, a percussion and composition professor at Jacksonville University. He's got quite an impressive history as a musician; being a member of the Jacksonville Symphony for 13 years, touring with “A Chorus Line” in Europe, appearing in Korea as marimba soloist with the Brooklyn Percussion Ensemble, and performed as percussionist at Madison Square Garden for “A Christmas Carol”. He's worked with Henry Mancini, Lou Rawls, Sheri Lewis and The Xaiver Cugat Orchestra. And he's won numerous ASCAP writers awards.

And as expected, he was an amazing guest to our first Music Club for the 2012 Summer. We talked about different drumming styles and different types of drums. He played a number of pieces including some he had written. Some of his performances were set to film and he even introduced the kids to electronic drums. Here's a video!

It was clear he had a lot of great experience to draw from and the kids really appreciated and learned a lot. The performances prompted some great discussion and questions.

Our second Music Club of the Summer featured John Citrone, another professional working musician although this time a little different. Along with his usual lessons and students, John has taught rhythm workshops for STOMP! and Blue Man Group, as well as performing in a number of groups both domestic and internationally. He's been a writer, producer and director for a number of musical theatre performances and documentary films. John has even played with member of Frank Zappa's original band, and wrote and recorded the theme for a Jacksonville Jaguars commercial!

John's session started off with a great body rhythm workshop. He actually didn't even talk for the first 5 minutes of the session, just got different sections of the room to work on different rhythms.

He had the kids on stage (and in the audience) working of different rhythms a lot. Everyone got to talk about rhythms you can make and rhythms in nature. He spent the second half of the session talking about the drum set and the evolution of a lot of beats you hear today. We talked about how different drums make different sounds in related to the size of the head and the depth and radius of the drum shell. The kids had a lot of great questions. I think everyone of them left hoping to get a drum set soon.

Here's some videos from the program.

Music Club is geared towards children ages 8-12, although children ages 6-14 may attend. We’ll explore different types of music, and learn about particular artists / composers, instruments and theory. And as you just read and saw - we have special guest performers and speakers!

I hope you can join us for the upcoming sessions.

July 24th @ 2pm - Tropic of Cancer
(click to see video of their last Music Club performance here and here.)

August 7th @ 2pm - After The Bomb Baby!
(click to see video of their last Music Club performance here.)