Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly gets a unique airing for big band and choir, as the new cohort of jazz students at Guildhall perform together on the Milton Court stage.

Featuring some of Fagen’s best-loved compositions including Maxine, IGY (What A Beautiful World) and Walk Between The Raindrops, this performance is the first opportunity for the new cohort of jazz students at Guildhall to collaborate and perform together on the Milton Court stage.  

Heavily jazz-influenced and partly auto-biographical, The Nightfly evokes the mood of Fagen’s suburban childhood in late 1950s and early 1960s America; late-night jazz disc jockeys, new world visions and post Second World War optimism. At the time of the album’s release, Fagen remembered that jazz music offered him an escape in his adolescence: “When I saw ‘E.T.,’ I realized that the E.T. in my bedroom was my Thelonious Monk records. Everything that he represented was totally unworldly in a way, although at the same time, jazz to me seemed more real than the environment in which I was living.” 

The first half of the programme will feature two percussion-led ensembles coached and directed by Guildhall Jazz professors, Ines Loubet and Adriano Adewale.