Manhattan Transfer brings holiday show filled with jazz, pop

Friday, Dec. 1, 2006 | 7:23 a.m.

Who: Manhattan Transfer

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Artemus Ham Hall, UNLV

Tickets: $40 to $85; 895-2787

Manhattan Transfer brings its Christmas show to UNLV on Saturday.

The vocal group made music history as the first group to win a Grammy Award in both the pop and jazz categories in the same year for "Boys From New York City" and "Until I Met You (Corner Pocket)," from 1981's "Mecca for Moderns." In all, the group won eight Grammys, including for hit singles "Birdland," "Route 66," "Why Not!" and "Sassy," and albums "Brasil" and "Vocalese."

Tim Hauser, the only founding member left from the original late-'60s version of the group, recently talked to the Sun from his home in Los Angeles about jazz and the Christmas show.

On the state of jazz in the United States

It's discouraging, and it does bother us. I'm being honest. It is discouraging. A lot of the music that I used to listen to growing up really has been removed from the radio - I'm not talking about older music, just the style of it. In its place has been what I consider to be a lot of inferior music on every level.

Younger people get conditioned to hearing that kind of music, and it becomes normal to them, and they don't even know what they're missing.

On the popularity of jazz internationally

The Japanese, in my opinion, have the highest jazz IQ in the world. It's amazing when you go over there and see how many jazz publications there are, and the quality of the publications. And you go to record stores and see how much space in the store is devoted to jazz music.

We go to Europe and we're so popular over there. We played as far south as Ankara, Turkey, and as far north as northern Norway, and all but two or three concerts were totally sold out.

On technology and music

Satellite radio makes a lot of great stuff available. The Internet makes a lot of stuff available, and you hear a lot of great music in motion pictures. That's where I get hip to a lot of great stuff, through film.

Those are places where you can hear good music, new music, traditional music. But mainstream radio is like network television: It just sucks.

On the Christmas show

We've got two Christmas CDs out - the first came out in 1992 on Columbia and became a best-seller. This year we came out with our second Christmas CD, called "An A Capella Christmas."

We love it. Only two weeks out of the year we get to sing these songs.