ATLANTA – North Atlanta High School flute players were treated to a rare master class Thursday night, while their classmates and parents got a bravura performance, as beatboxing flautist Greg Pattillo and his Trio PROJECT both instructed and entertained a crowd of about 300 at the NAHS Center for the Arts.
{Beatboxing}
“Beatboxing” flautist Greg Pattillo shows North Atlanta High School flute players how to get the most unusual percussive sounds out of their instruments.
Pattillo and his two colleagues -- cellist Eric Stephenson and bass player Peter Seymour -- all products of the Cleveland Institute of Music, took the students, and audience, through their varied repertoire that included zany, “beatboxing” arrangements of classics like Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” and Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” to jazz favorites like Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” and Thelonius Monk’s “Epistrophy,” as well as some original compositions.
{Playing}
The Trio PROJECT (from left): flautist Greg Pattillo, bass player Peter Seymour and cellist Eric Stephenson entertains students and parents at North Atlanta High School.
Pattillo told the industry magazine Flute Talk last year that his “beatboxing” style is often erroneously lumped in with rap or hip hop, but it actually grew out of his experience playing bluegrass in Ohio, and he considers his big watershed piece was “Super Mario Brothers.”
The master class/concert was the latest in NAHS Center for the Arts Director Reginald Colbert’s increasingly bold and innovative approach to bring in outside performers and music specialists to work with his students, and follows the summer workshop conducted at North Atlanta by the staff from the Julliard School in New York.
{Group Standing}
North Atlanta High School Center for the Arts Director Reginald Colbert with Trio PROJECT.
