Joe McCarthy and his Latin Grammy award-winning New York Afro Bop Alliance Big Band (NYABABB) perform The Pan American Nutcracker Suite (PANS), their spirited and swinging Latin jazz reimagining of Pyotr IIyich Tchaikovsky’s immortal 1892, eight-part ballet suite and Christmas classic, The Nutcracker. The band joins The Yale Concert Band as they perform two, interspersed settings of Tchaikovsky’s beloved masterpiece at Yale University’s Woolsey’s Hall, 500 College Street, in New Haven, on December 6, at 7:30 pm.

The performance, which includes Afro-Latin rhythms from the NYABABB’s 2022 album also titled The Pan American Nutcracker Suite, is presented in the spirit of the season as part of Yale School of Music’s Ellington Jazz Series. PANS, a jazz/Afro-Caribbean reconceptualization of Tchaikovsky’s classic, co-created and arranged by drummer Joe McCarthy and Vince Norman, unites diverse musical traditions of the Americas and beyond. Each movement of the Pan American Nutcracker Suite will be followed by one from the traditional, classical arrangement performed by the Yale Concert Band, led by Thomas C. Duffy, in a presentation that juxtaposes two complementary versions of this timeless masterpiece.