Noce is proud to present it's first live-audience show in over four months featuring the Max Wellman Quartet. On top of this being our (re)opening night, we will also be celebrating Wellman's first 29th birthday. To top it all off, renowned composer Nate Sparks will be playing piano throughout the event.
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Vocalist Max Wellman is enticing music lovers throughout the region. With a sound evoking the likes of Sinatra and Connick, Wellman’s recordings & performances promise that the Great American Songbook is alive & well for a new generation of listeners.
Wellman co-founded Noce, a state-of-the-art jazz club in the Western Gateway neighborhood of downtown Des Moines. Additionally, Wellman has appeared at some of the great clubs throughout the country, from Dizzy's Club Coca Cola at Lincoln Center to Andy's Jazz Club in Chicago to Dazzle in Denver & many in between. Performances alongside vocalist Rose Colella & pianist Annie Booth have been met with rave reviews.
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Nate Sparks is a New York-based composer/arranger/performer who grew up in Runnells, Iowa. Nate began playing the piano at age 7, trumpet at 11, and pursued jazz throughout his middle school and high school years. His acceptance into several national high school honor bands and music festivals led him to a post-secondary study of jazz at the Juilliard School, where he also began his career as a writer.
Since then he has been commissioned to write music for the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra, Bobby Sanabria and the Multiverse Big Band, the Grammy-Nominated MSM Afro-Cuban Orchestra, Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, The ABS Chamber Orchestra, the New York Trumpet Ensemble, and the Des Moines Big Band among others. While he regularly takes commissions for freelance work, his main outlet as a writer is with his own band, the Nate Sparks Big Band, a New York-based 18-piece jazz orchestra. Playing exclusively his own compositions, arrangements, and transcriptions, the Nate Sparks Big Band performs regularly at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola in New York City.
In May of 2017, Nate graduated from Juilliard with a Bachelor's degree in performance, and now in addition to writing and performing, actively pursues a career as a jazz educator. Since then, Nate has been a faculty member of the Lafayette Summer Music Jazz Workshop and the Simpson College Jazz Workshop. He has also been a guest clinician for the New York Youth Symphony Jazz Orchestra (New York, NY), The University of Scranton (Scranton, PA), Drake University (Des Moines, IA), Delaware Valley High School (Milford, PA), and Southeast Polk High School (Des Moines, IA). Nate also teaches private lessons in Jazz Piano, Piano Fundamentals, Theory, Jazz Improvisation, Composition and Arranging, and Trumpet.
