Sinatra & the Wonderful World of Oz

WILSON  Wizard of Oz Suite
BASIE One O'Clock Jump (Instrumental)
VAN HEUSEN Come Fly with Me
GERSHWIN I've Got a Crush on You
PORTER I've Got You Under My Skin
ARLEN One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)
HOWARD Fly Me to the Moon
GORDON You Make Me Feel So Young
MARKS All of Me (Instrumental)
VAN HEUSEN The September of My Years
DRAKE It Was a Very Good Year
RODGERS Where or When
DENNIS Angel Eyes
VAN HEUSEN My Kind of Town
RODGERS The Lady Is a Tramp

"Songs that don't just play — they glide, swing, and linger."

Sinatra & the Wonderful World of Oz: Big Band Meets the Yellow Brick Road opens SCSO's 18th Season with style, swing, and a whole lot of personality. Your Jazz Orchestra, led by Andrew Cleaver and featuring guest vocalist Mark Romeo, brings together two unforgettable worlds: the wide-eyed wonder of The Wizard of Oz and the effortless cool of Frank Sinatra. Phil Wilson's jazz reimagining of Harold Arlen's iconic score sets the journey in motion with color, heart, and adventure, before the program transforms into something truly special — a live recreation of Sinatra at the Sands, the legendary 1966 Copa Room performance widely considered the greatest live recording Sinatra ever made. Guest vocalist Mark Romeo joins the Jazz Orchestra for the full program from that iconic night, including Come Fly with Me, I've Got You Under My Skin, Fly Me to the Moon, It Was a Very Good Year, and My Kind of Town — songs that don't just play; they glide, swing, and linger. With Romeo channeling the Chairman and the full richness of live jazz orchestra behind him, this opening concert feels like stepping into another world — one that's a little more stylish, a little more magical, and impossible not to enjoy.

There's a moment early in this concert when something unexpected happens. The music starts, and you recognize it immediately — these are the melodies from The Wizard of Oz, songs so familiar they feel like childhood itself. But what the Jazz Orchestra is doing with them is anything but familiar.

Phil Wilson's suite, recorded with Germany's NDR Big Band, doesn't treat Harold Arlen's iconic score as a nostalgia exercise. It reimagines it — pushing the harmonies somewhere more adventurous, driving the rhythms into bop territory, and giving the Jazz Orchestra's soloists room to step forward and make the music their own. Wilson, a Berklee legend nicknamed "The Wizard of Tone," built this suite around the expressive possibilities of the big band as a collective voice, passing the spotlight around the ensemble rather than anchoring it in one place. The result is music that feels simultaneously like something you've always known and something you've never quite heard before. "Over the Rainbow" swings. "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" crackles with energy. The familiar becomes fresh, and the Jazz Orchestra — tight, precise, and fully committed — is the engine driving all of it.

Then something interesting happens in the transition. The Oz material fades, and the band settles into a different but surprisingly natural groove — because it turns out that the world Phil Wilson was exploring and the world Frank Sinatra inhabited are built from the same materials. Big band jazz. Sophisticated arranging. Music that demands both technical precision and genuine feeling. The Yellow Brick Road, it turns out, leads straight to the Copa Room of the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas, January 1966.

That's the specific night the second half of this concert recreates. Sinatra at the Sands — recorded over a week of performances with Count Basie's orchestra and a young Quincy Jones conducting — is widely considered the greatest live recording Frank Sinatra ever made. Sinatra himself called it "possibly the most exciting engagement of my professional life." He was fifty years old, at the absolute peak of his performing powers, and the Basie band behind him was playing like a freight train that had learned to swing. The result was something that couldn't be manufactured in a studio: a room on fire, a performer in complete command, and music that made everyone in the Copa Room feel like they'd hit the jackpot just by being there.

Mark Romeo steps into that moment — not to imitate Sinatra, but to honor what made that night matter. The phrasing. The timing. The ease with which the Chairman could turn Fly Me to the Moon into pure joy and It Was a Very Good Year into something that actually aches. With Andrew Cleaver leading the Jazz Orchestra through Quincy Jones's electrifying arrangements, this is as close as you'll get to being in that room — sixty years later, on Florida's Space Coast.

What makes this opening concert remarkable is that it works as a single afternoon rather than two separate shows bolted together. The Wilson suite and the Sinatra at the Sands program share a sensibility — American music at the height of its ambition and confidence, played by people who understand what's actually at stake in a well-turned phrase or a perfectly placed note. Neither half is a compromise for the other. If anything, the contrast makes both stronger.

This is also, it's worth noting, the concert that opens your orchestra's 18th season — and it makes a statement about what kind of season this is going to be. Not safe. Not predictable. Willing to let an entire Jazz Orchestra loose on Harold Arlen and then hand the microphone to a Sinatra interpreter backed by that same band at full flight, recreating one of the most celebrated nights in American musical history, and trusting that audiences are ready for something that rewards their attention.

They will be.