Now, Don't Be Jive'n: The UTEP Faculty Jazz Combo November 3, 2004!

¡Ora, UTEP! Hooray for the UTEP Music Department and Music 1327 !

"While the program for this night's performance was drawn from a variety of jazz classics, ranging from Theloneus Monk and Cootie Williams' Round Midnight to the UTEP combo's rendition of The Nearness of You by Ned Washington and Hoagy Carmichael, it would be safe to say that Elisa Fraser Wilson's vocal arrangement of the old World War II Nat King Cole original Straighten Up and Fly Right (1943) sent the main message for the entire evening's event, for all the order of the pieces performed was often improvised.

"Perhaps it was merely a subconscious reflex, perhaps not. But it immediately struck this reviewer that the selection and stellar performance by all concerned of this particular piece was amazingly appropriate, and for any number of reasons. Number one was timing.

"As the author Daniel Mark Epstein tells us in his excellent biographical work, Nat King Cole (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999), on page one hundred: "Straighten Up and Fly Right, the song about the monkey who takes a ride on a buzzard, is Nat's greatest composition. The song is so superior to his others that it stands apart, marking not only the peak of his own creative powers but also a certain moment in history and the mood of a nation, black and white, at war."

"There can be little doubt that for those lucky UTEP students who witnesed this UTEP Faculty Jazz Combo's performance some sixty-one years later, on the night of Wednesday, November 3, 2004, the mood was once again that of an America black and white, at war."