Singing, dancing and jazz are what the Varsity choir, Pops choir and Blue Notes jazz band delivered to the audience on Tuesday.

“I felt like it went great,” choir director Chad Pape said. “At this point in the year all of your students are completely frazzled and lost and I’m very proud that they are here and that they enjoy what they are doing and they put on a good show, so I thought it went very well.”  

The Varsity choir performed first, followed by the Blue Notes jazz band, then the Pops choir and finally the jazz band again to end the concert and the year for the performers. Despite traditions in these performances go as far as back as the 1950s, the Blue Notes jazz band still added some new things into their performance. One was adding junior Emma Landsdowne as the vocalist in their performance of “Over the Rainbow.”

“The hardest piece was the Path Metheny called ‘In Her Family’ that’s the hardest from a musical standpoint and in terms of making that sound the way it is supposed,” Blue Notes band director Nate McClendon said. “The other difficult piece was ‘Birdland’ that was hard from a technical standpoint, all the students had very individual parts so they couldn’t rely on their sections; their parts were pretty much totally individualized so it was hard from that standpoint but [‘In Her Family’]  was the hardest overall.”

The Blue Notes jazz band had previously performed  “In Her Family” during the Wichita jazz festival. This allowed them to be more familiar with this piece of music than “Birdland” which they only had two weeks to practice before the Showcase choir concert.

The jazz band wasn’t the only group that found some of their pieces that they performed to be difficult.

The Pops choir also performed an Adele piece, “Skyfall,” at the end of the concert.

The Varsity choir rarely includes different types of music in their performances, but this time Pape made an exception. with allowing the Varsity choir to perform a piece from the Disney movie “Moana” that they arranged by themselves.

“Even though it’s silly music,” Pape said. “Finally having the kids understand how to make their own arrangements and kind of become better musicians, probably the Moana was the one I was most proud of, just because of the product because to start to approach music in that way, even though the music itself wasn’t that difficult, having the kids understand how to create music on their own is the most fun for me.”  

The Pops choir had been preparing for this final performance since the summer, which includes the Summer Choir Camp that they use to introduce the dances. During the camp, they spend seven hours a day for two weeks working on learning the dances in order to continue the 68-year-long tradition of the Pops choir dancing during their performances.

“In a way this was a send off to the seniors, but over the course of the year we have become more than family,” Pops choir member Grant Williams, senior, said. “We are so close that this is more of like a goodbye to the family that we have created because next year the juniors will come back and they will have their new family but they will never get this family again.”