MANSFIELD, PA— Kenneth Sarch, Mansfield University professor 
emeritus of Music, recently led the Youth Orchestra of Santa Cruz (OSJ) in the world premiere concert celebrating jazz artist Mary Lou Williams.
The concert in Bolivia paid tribute to Williams as an icon of universal music and her contributions as a woman of color to the male-dominated genre of Jazz. While she was widely recognized in her day for composing works for such masters as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, the performance of her timeless compositions by OSJ marks a resurgence of interest in this legendary Jazz musician and composer and a worldwide effort to celebrate her legacy as one of the all-time giants of Jazz.
Williams was an African-American child prodigy born in 1910, who became an eminent pianist, composer, arranger and mentor of jazz musicians such as Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker. Over her 60-year career, Williams left a legacy of avant-garde compositions enriching jazz, swing, bebop, blues and even anticipating rock and roll and free jazz.
At age six, Williams helped her family financially by playing at house parties. At age seven she started performing publicly.
After some formal European classical music training, Williams concentrated on jazz and debuted at age 15 to the world of serious jazz musicians, playing with Duke Ellington, who later said, “Mary Lou is eternally contemporary. Her scores and interpretations are always ahead … her music maintains a quality that transcends time.”
Williams devoted her life to her remarkable virtuosity and consolidating her talents as an arranger. She endowed her arrangements with a modernist conception anticipating the trends that emerged decades later. In 1945 she composed Zodiac Suite, a work based on the astrological signs for jazz trio which was later adapted for symphony orchestra. This masterpiece was performed during the OSJ concert, making it only the second live performance of these orchestral arrangements since being performed at Carnegie Hall in 1946 by the Carnegie Hall “Pop” Orchestra.
Contemporary jazz giant Elio Villafranca was featured on piano. The renowned Cuban pianist and composer has lived in the U.S. since 1995. For almost two decades he has been at the forefront of the latest generation of piano giants, composers and bandleaders. Villafranca has been nominated twice for the Best Album category of the Grammy Awards.
In 2008, he was awarded the BMI Jazz Guaranty Award for the creation of his Concerto for Mariachi for Afro-Cuban Percussion and Symphony Orchestra. Last year he was selected by Chick Corea to perform at the first Chick Corea Jazz Festival organized at the Lincoln Center in New York. Over the years, Villafranca recorded and performed in the U.S. and abroad as a bandleader, playing alongside jazz masters such as Pat Martino, Terell Stafford, Billy Hart, Paquito D’Rivera, Eric Alexander and Lewis Nash, among others.
Sarch was the creator and first director of the National Youth Orchestra of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. He travelled to Bolivia in 2003 and stayed for several months consolidating the project. He returned in 2013 to lead in the commemorative concert of the decade and was invited back to lead the OSJ for this premier event celebrating the life and work of Mary Lou Williams. Sarch obtained his musical education at the Julliard School of Music in New York. He has conducted several orchestras and is a professor and lecturer at several universities in the U.S.