Roger Gilliam

Music Director and Conductor

The 2007-2008 Concert Season marks the fifteenth season for the Mesquite Symphony Orchestra under the Musical Direction of Roger Gilliam.

Mr. Gilliam has been involved since 1981 in community music organizations, having served as a member of the Town North Community Band from 1981 to 1993 and from 1986 to 1993 as its Music Director and Principal Conductor. In 1990, Mr. Gilliam was one of the founders of the Bravura Wind Ensemble. From 1988 to 1990, he was a playing member of the MSO, serving as Principal Trumpet. In 2004, Mr. Gilliam became Director of Bands at Sunnyvale Schools in Sunnyvale, Texas. Mr. Gilliam is the Adjunct Brass Instructor at North Lake College in Irving, Texas, as well as an active private lesson instructor and freelance trumpet player in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.

Mr. Gilliam holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Southern Methodist University, where he was Principal Trumpet in the Wind Ensemble, the Chamber Orchestra, the Opera Orchestra and the Dallas Civic Symphony. He received a Master of Music degree from the University of Hartford in Hartford, Connecticut. Mr. Gilliam has performed as a member of the Garland Summer Musicals Orchestra, the Corpus Christi Symphony, the Hartford Symphony, the Connecticut Opera Orchestra and was a founding member of the Galliard Brass Quintet. Mr. Gilliam has studied trumpet with Bill Hipp, Richard Gianguilio and Robert Nagel. SeeSaw Music, in New York has published seven of Mr. Gilliam's compositions and several of his works are available through the Robert King catalog. In addition to these compositions, Mr. Gilliam has launched his own publishing company, RGC Music, which will provide a distribution point for the new compositions he has written.

Mr. Gilliam is also active as a performer and teacher. In addition to being the Adjunct Brass Instructor at North Lake College in Irving, he works with several different schools teaching private brass lessons, including Forney, Mesquite and Garland. He is also active as a clinician, working with both orchestras and bands. Mr. Gilliam serves as the Sunnyvale School District Director of Bands.

Brave Combo

Rarely, if ever, has a band name been more apropos, not only at the group's inception, but even more so 28 years after the fact. Keyboardist, guitarist, accordionist, and singer Carl Finch founded the band in 1979. Alongside Finch for most of Brave Combo's 28 years has been multi-instrumentalist Jeffrey Barnes, who joined in 1983. Barnes is known for his lively and imaginative stage wear, as well as playing an array of reeds and woodwinds, harmonica, pennywhistle, guitars, you name it, sometimes in multiple, simultaneous combinations. Rounding out the current line-up are trumpet and flugelhorn player Danny O'Brien, drummer Alan Emert and Ann Marie Harrop on bass guitar

At first glance, back in 1979, the Denton, Texas, based outfit was, in shorthand, pegged as a New Wave polka band, a courageous if not almost oxymoronic endeavor during that particular rebirth of the cool. Yet it clicked and launched a stunning run that has now catapulted it into the new century. Over the last 28 years, Brave Combo has collected a dizzying array of descriptive musical pegs, boldly going where few bands have gone before, and even fewer could (or would) dare to venture. Succeeding in its first mission, Brave Combo is America's premier contemporary polka band, and a Grammy winning one at that. In the same breath, to name some but hardly all of the colors found on Brave Combo's musical palette, one can describe them as a groundbreaking world music act, a hot jazz quintet, a rollicking rock'n'roll bar band, a Tex-Mex conjunto, a sizzling blues band, a saucy cocktail combo, a deadly serious novelty act, a Latin orchestra, and one of America's dance bands par excellence. It's all in a night's music for Brave Combo, often in a synergistic fashion that includes everything from klezmer surf rock to rocking cha cha to what The Washington Post calls "mosh pit polka," as well as to the hokey pokey and the chicken dance. And zyedeco, acid rock, Muzak, bubblegum, cumbia, classical, and the twist, to still not exhaust the list. This plethoric multitude of musical styles and flavors is frequently mixed, matched, and melded, into delicious, new concoctions by an imaginative team of musical gourmet master chefs.

In 2004 Brave Combo launched its silver anniversary year with the ultimate cultural sanctification by making one of its most prestigious appearances, of many, to date. On March 21, 2004, they played Oktoberfest in the beloved American burg of Springfield on an episode of "The Simpsons." As followers of both Brave Combo and the long running animated hit should not find surprising, "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening is a devoted Brave Combo fan. "They prove you can be hip and still be happy," says Groening. "Really, Brave Combo should have their own cartoon."

This mission statement has yielded more than two dozen albums that range from Japanese pop to Latin American dance tunes to the orchestral classics to more permutations on the polka than you can shake a beer stein at. They have marched in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade underneath Woody Woodpecker, recorded with the late Tiny Tim, and played such private fetes as David Byrne's wedding and the 200th episode party for "The Simpsons." The Brave Combo trail also includes festivals of all stripes, rock clubs, colleges, roadhouses, dances, state fairs, cultural centers (including the annual Midsummer Night's Swing at Lincoln Center in New York City) and more - basically anywhere there's a stage and an audience willing to open up their minds and dance.

Along the way they've won the admiration of such fellow visionaries and iconoclasts as Groening, Byrne, Garrison Keillor, and Harvey Pekar, as well as audiences of all ages, persuasions, and musical tastes. Brave Combo has charmed countless listeners and won avid devotees as they play some 150 dates a year that include everything from the Labor Day weekend West Fest Czech polka festival in Central Texas to being perhaps the world's finest (okay, maybe only) St. Patrick's Day polka band. They've taken their polka-plus-more sound multiple times to Japan and Europe, including appearances at such Continental festivals as Roskilde (Denmark), Printemps de Bourges (France), Steirischer Herbst (Austria), Storsjoyran (Sweden), and Lowlands (Holland).

Brace Combo's vivid music can be heard in the films David Byrne's True Stories, Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions, Late Bloomers, Fools Rush In, Envy, The Academy award winning The Personals, and Fox Television's "Bakersfield P.D." In addition, 1994 U.S. Olympic Ice Dancers, Elizabeth Punsalan and Jerod Swallow have skated to their music during numerous competitions and Brave Combo has been frequent guests on such public broadcasting shows as The Lonesome Pine Special, Fresh Air, All Things Considered, The Next Big Thing and A Prairie Home Companion, whose host Garrison Keillor calls them "entertainers who just won't take no for an answer." The Brave Combo that has accomplished all that and more is a five-piece veritable orchestra that originated and is still based in Denton, TX. Carl Finch, founder, released their first records on the band's own Four Dots Records. He has also produced artists like Little Jack Melody And His Young Turks, Trout Fishing In America, Santiago Jimenez Jr., and Mingo Salvidar, compiled the Rhino Records collection Legends of the Accordion, and released on Four Dots the debut album by Sara Hickman, Equal Scary People, that helped win her a major label record deal