Saturday in Dixieland on the Charles

Find yourself wanting to just whistle some Dixie? Jonesing for some jazz? Then, get your fix during Arts First weekend at the Harvard Dixieland Ensemble’s “New Orleans to New England: Dixieland and Early Jazz” performance tomorrow in Memorial Church.

The 10-member ensemble will present an array of ragtime, traditional jazz, and Dixieland favorites, including “Down By the Riverside,” “Alabama Jubilee,” “Royal Garden Blues,” and “Eyes of Blue.” This spring, senior bandleaders Max S. Mishkin ’09 and Greg D. Dyer ’09 realized the two-year-long dream of putting together a small band by recruiting their fellow students in The Harvard University Band to join what is now unofficially called The Charles Riverboat Band.

Mishkin credits the ensemble’s adviser Thomas G. Everett, who also directs The Harvard University Band, with “pushing us to listen across the group and improvise instead of just playing what’s on the page... [H]e has helped to make our music a lot more exciting to play and fun to hear.”

Julie A. Duncan ’09, a pianist-turned-trombonist, had never had any experience with playing Dixieland, jazz, or any type of improvisational music before joining The Charles Riverboat Band. “I always refused to join jazz ensembles, because I was terrified of improv…but the [band] has allowed me to take baby steps toward improvising,” she says, “and now I will be playing a solo or two in Saturday’s performance.”

Similarly, most of the band members had no experience with Dixieland music before joining the band this semester. Reacting to this, Mishkin notes that their joint endeavor is a “good example of how much you can learn—and how much you can enjoy it—when you push yourself outside your comfort zone and try something new.”