FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Press Release/MEDIA ADVISORY #08-226

Jazz Band Performs Friday, Dec. 5, at 8 P.M.

(St. Mary’s City, MD) Nov. 24, 2008— The St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM) Jazz Band will delight audiences with classic jazz tunes on Friday, Dec. 5, at 8 p.m. in St. Mary’s Hall of the Auerbach Auditorium at SMCM.  Under the direction of SMCM music professor Don Stapleson, student musicians will perform selections by Duke Ellington, Tadd Dameron, and Antonio Jobim, among others.  This concert is free and open to the public.  For more information, contact Michael Adams at 240-895-2113 or mdadams@smcm.edu.

Stapleson works as saxophone instructor, improvisation instructor, jazz ensemble director, and musicianship/aural skills instructor at the college, where he also directs the Jazz Combo and the Jazz Ensemble.  A prominent saxophonist and flutist, he performs with his own group, the Don Stapleson Quartet, as well as with the classical/jazz group, “Allegro con Trio.”  He has performed with Ray Charles, Dexter Gordon, Nancy Wilson, and recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Martha Reeves.  Stapleson attended the Berklee College of Music and holds degrees from SMCM and the University of Maryland. 

Among his other accomplishments, Stapleson has performed at the National Theater as a member of the pit orchestra during its productions of “Annie Get Your Gun” and “Cats.”  He is a former member of the Peabody Ragtime Ensemble and has recently appeared as guest soloist with the Chesapeake Chamber Orchestra.  He has also been heard in the orchestra at the Folger Theater during the Interact Theater productions of Noel Coward's “Private Lives” and Gilbert & Sullivan's “H.M.S. Pinafore.” 

St. Mary’s College of Maryland, designated the Maryland state honors college in 1992, is ranked one of the best liberal arts schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review, and Kiplinger’s. Founded in 1840 as Maryland’s “monument school” commemorating the state’s first capital, SMCM is the state’s only public honors college, offering “an Ivy-level College with a public-school price tag” (Newsweek).

Some 2,000 students attend the college, which has the highest graduation rate for all Maryland public colleges and universities, and an SAT average for student admissions of 1252. The school’s waterfront campus along the St. Mary’s River in Southern Maryland is home to the 2007 National Intercollegiate Sailing Association Women’s, Sloop and Team champions.