One of the World’s Greatest Trombonists Comes to Ocean Grove This Thursday for a Free Concert That Closes Imperial Brass’s 35th Anniversary Season

The Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove is one of the most acoustically distinguished spaces in the state of New Jersey, and one of the most under-acknowledged. Built in 1894, the massive wooden hall seats up to 7,000 people beneath a barrel-vaulted ceiling joined by iron trusses — a structural and acoustic achievement that was, at the time of its construction, one of the engineering marvels of the Victorian camp meeting revival movement and that remains, more than 130 years later, among the finest performance environments in the northeastern United States. On Thursday, July 2, 2026, at 7:30 p.m., that hall will receive something it is exceptionally well prepared to accommodate: a 30-piece professional brass band performing at full volume alongside one of the most accomplished trombone soloists in the world, in a free concert that closes the 35th anniversary season of one of New Jersey’s most distinguished musical organizations.

The program is the Summer Stars Classical Concert Series, presented annually by the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association. The performers are Imperial Brass and their special guest soloist, Joseph Alessi — Principal Trombone of the New York Philharmonic, faculty member at The Juilliard School, Grammy Award winner, and the musician most responsible for elevating the contemporary status of the trombone as a concert instrument in American classical music. The concert is free to the public. These four facts — a world-class venue, a world-class soloist, a 35-year-old New Jersey ensemble at the height of its powers, and no admission charge — constitute an evening worth reorganizing your week to attend.

Joseph Alessi: The Standard Bearer for American Trombone

Before understanding what Thursday’s concert will sound like, it is necessary to understand who Joseph Alessi is within the specific world of classical brass performance — because the title “Principal Trombone of the New York Philharmonic” understates the scope of what he has built over four decades at the pinnacle of his profession.

Alessi was born in Detroit and raised in San Rafael, California, in a family so deeply embedded in the professional musical world that his earliest memory is his mother — a soprano in the Metropolitan Opera chorus — singing to him as a child. His father, Joseph Alessi Sr., was a professional trumpet player. His grandfather came to the United States from Sicily and became a cornet soloist at a New York theater. Music in the Alessi household was not avocation. It was the family trade. He graduated high school at 16, auditioned successfully for the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, and appeared as a soloist with the San Francisco Symphony before he was old enough to vote. He entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia — one of the most selective conservatories in the world — in 1976 and spent three of his student years there simultaneously playing as interim second trombone with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the same institution where he would later win the job permanently and hold it for four seasons.

Before joining the New York Philharmonic, Alessi served as principal trombone of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. In the spring of 1985, at 25 years old, he was appointed Principal Trombone of the New York Philharmonic — holding the chair designated the Gurnee F. and Marjorie L. Hart Chair — a position he has now occupied for 41 years. That career span alone would define a significant musical legacy. But the positions held are only part of what has made Alessi the reference point for trombone performance in the United States and internationally.

His solo debut with the New York Philharmonic came in April 1990, performing Paul Creston’s Fantasy for Trombone. Two years later, in 1992, he gave the world premiere of Christopher Rouse’s Trombone Concerto with the Philharmonic — a work that was subsequently awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Music, one of the most significant recognitions in American composition, directly connected to Alessi’s premiere performance. He has since given world premieres of works commissioned for him by Kazimierz Serocki, Melinda Wagner, Bramwell Tovey, William Grant Still, and the late Chick Corea, whose Trombone Concerto was Corea’s final completed work, written expressly for Alessi and premiered in 2021. The scope of compositions that exist because Joseph Alessi could play them is, in itself, a significant contribution to the repertoire.

His recording of George Crumb’s Star-Child won the Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 2001. His discography extends to more than fourteen solo albums on Summit Records, Bridge Records, and other labels, alongside collaborations with the Canadian Brass and four trombone quartet projects — the New York Trombone Quartet, Four of a Kind, the World Trombone Quartet, and Slide Monsters. He joined the Juilliard School faculty in 1986, one year after joining the Philharmonic, and his students now occupy principal and section trombone positions in major symphony orchestras across the United States and internationally. Since 1999 he has conducted the biennial Alessi Seminar, a trombone workshop that draws practitioners from around the world. In 2002 the International Trombone Association awarded him its highest honor, and in 2014 he was elected president of that organization.

What all of this means in practical terms for Thursday’s audience is this: the person playing trombone solos in Ocean Grove is not a celebrated performer visiting New Jersey. He is the person most responsible, over the past four decades, for defining what the trombone is capable of as a concert instrument, for building the repertoire that future generations will play, and for training the next generation of orchestral trombonists who will hold principal positions for the next forty years. Thursday’s concert in Ocean Grove is not a local engagement for a major artist. It is a genuine occasion.

Imperial Brass and the Partnership That Produced “Bone-A-Fide Brass”

The relationship between Alessi and Imperial Brass is not a new one manufactured for this anniversary season. It goes back decades, cemented by a 2007 CD recording on the Summit Records label titled Bone-A-Fide Brass — one of seven albums the organization has produced and released since 1995 — that brought Alessi and the ensemble together for a full program of trombone-centric brass band repertoire. The recording is part of a documented institutional relationship through which Imperial Brass has, over its 35-year history, partnered with some of the world’s finest brass musicians. Music Director Ronald Waiksnoris has described Alessi directly as one of the greatest trombonists in the world and identified the occasional financial support of patrons as what has made these world-class pairings possible for an organization operating in the community arts space.

Imperial Brass was founded as The Rutgers Alumni Brass Band by Steve Dillon and Jon Korsun, both Rutgers graduates, alongside the late Glenn Freeh, who served as the band’s business manager for 25 years and as an enthusiastic arranger of brass band literature before his death in 2017. A scholarship fund in Freeh’s memory now supports promising brass and percussion students, embedding the organization’s history in its ongoing developmental mission. The band operates in the tradition of British-style brass banding — the competitive, community-rooted ensemble culture that has been central to British working-class musical life since the nineteenth century and that the North American Brass Band Association has been actively promoting in the United States since its formation in 1983. The NABBA’s 2026 competition in Fort Wayne, Indiana, drew more than 1,500 performers from nearly fifty bands. Imperial Brass participates in that tradition while also maintaining an active performance schedule that in 2026 has included the Gettysburg Brass Band Festival in Pennsylvania, the Mid-Atlantic Brass Band Festival at Rowan University in Glassboro, joint concerts in Delaware and Westfield, and events in Montclair and Wyckoff, New Jersey.

Waiksnoris came to Imperial Brass in 2016 after 24 years as music director of the Salvation Army’s New York Staff Band — one of the most respected brass band positions in the world, whose occupants tour internationally and maintain the institution’s central position in the global brass community. When he joined Imperial Brass, he found a band with minimal performance activity and set about building it into an organization with the schedule and the national connections that its musical quality warranted. The expansion that followed — roughly 10 events per season, international festival appearances, collaborations with major soloists — reflects the specific organizational ambition that Waiksnoris brought from the NYSB and has applied in New Jersey for the past decade. The 35th anniversary season that closes Thursday is the product of both the organization’s founding commitment and the decade of building that Waiksnoris has directed.

For Thursday’s Ocean Grove concert, Alessi will perform a piece drawn from the 2007 Bone-A-Fide Brass collaboration: “The Green Bee,” a jazz-inflected setting of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee — the orchestral interlude from the 1900 opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan that has become one of classical music’s most recognized demonstrations of technical velocity. The transformation of that particular piece into a jazz vehicle for solo trombone, performed by the trombonist who has spent four decades exploring what the instrument can do, is the kind of programming decision that tells an audience something specific about the evening’s character: technically ambitious, musically adventurous, and designed to demonstrate exactly why brass music rewards the attentive listener who has never paid close attention to it before.

The Great Auditorium: A Hall Built for Exactly This Kind of Sound

The Great Auditorium at 21 Pilgrim Pathway in Ocean Grove was constructed in 1894 at the heart of the Victorian-era Camp Meeting movement that made Ocean Grove one of the most distinctive communities on the Jersey Shore. The Camp Meeting Association acquired the land in 1869 and proceeded to build what became one of the most intact examples of Victorian camp meeting architecture in the United States — a community organized around seasonal religious gatherings that drew tens of thousands of visitors and that required, among its other infrastructure, a hall large enough to seat the assembled congregation.

The Great Auditorium was the answer: a structure of extraordinary scale for its era, seating up to 7,000 people beneath a barrel-vaulted wooden ceiling supported by iron trusses. The scale was not merely logistical — it was acoustic. The all-wooden construction and the geometry of the vaulted ceiling create an acoustic environment that amplifies and sustains sound in ways that complement the specific qualities of large brass ensembles. Waiksnoris has described the hall’s acoustic properties in practical terms that reflect genuine affection: having 30 brass players in that room, he has said, means you can play as loud as you want and the sound remains not just acceptable but excellent. That is a specific and valuable quality in a performing environment. Brass instruments at full volume in an acoustically hostile space produce fatigue in listeners and clutter in performers. The Great Auditorium does the opposite — it receives that volume and resolves it into something that rewards the ear rather than taxing it.

The hall has hosted significant performers and significant events throughout its 130-year history, and it has been designated a National Historic Landmark — one of only a handful of New Jersey venues to hold that designation. Its current condition reflects decades of stewardship by the Camp Meeting Association, and its programming through the Summer Stars Classical Concert Series represents the organization’s ongoing commitment to making the venue a living musical institution rather than simply a preserved architectural artifact.

The Program and What a Brass Band Actually Sounds Like

For those encountering Imperial Brass or the British brass band tradition for the first time, some context about what the ensemble represents is useful in preparing for Thursday’s experience. A British-style brass band of 30 players — the configuration Imperial Brass employs — is an entirely brass instrument organization: cornets, flügelhorn, tenor horns, baritone horns, euphoniums, tenor trombones, bass trombone, tubas, and a percussion section. There are no woodwind instruments. There are no strings. The entire sonic range of the ensemble — from the top of the soprano cornet’s range to the bottom of the contrabass tuba’s — is produced by brass instruments and the overtone-rich, physically resonant quality of vibrating metal combined with air.

The result, in a space with the acoustic properties of the Great Auditorium, is a wall of sound that has no equivalent in orchestral music. It is simultaneously more homogeneous in its tonal blend — because all the instruments share the same physical principle of vibrating columns of air within metal tubing — and more differentiated in its dynamic range than many casual listeners anticipate. Brass bands can whisper, in the right acoustic environment, in ways that draw listeners in. They can roar in ways that produce physical sensation in the chest. The Thursday program, combining traditional marches, classical arrangements, and popular music alongside Alessi’s trombone solo features, is designed to demonstrate that full range and to make the case for brass band music as a vehicle for genuine musical expression rather than simply virtuosic spectacle.

The admission is free — a direct result of the support of Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association patrons and arts grants that have made the Summer Stars concert series accessible in 2026 without any financial barrier to attendance. That accessibility is worth acknowledging as a commitment: a performance of this caliber, in a venue of this distinction, with a soloist of Alessi’s stature, would carry a ticket price at most comparable concert settings. Ocean Grove’s investment in making it free is an act of civic generosity toward the Monmouth County community and toward the summer visitors who make the Shore towns their July home.

Getting to Ocean Grove and Planning Your Evening

The Great Auditorium is located at 21 Pilgrim Pathway in Ocean Grove, New Jersey 07756 — the historic Camp Meeting community adjacent to Asbury Park on the Monmouth County Shore. Ocean Grove is accessible by NJ Transit’s North Jersey Coast Line from Penn Station in New York, with the Long Branch or Asbury Park stations both within reasonable distance of the auditorium. By car, Ocean Grove is approximately 55 miles south of New York City and readily accessible from the Garden State Parkway.

The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 2. No tickets are required. Arriving early to secure seating in a hall with 7,000 seats is not logistically necessary, but the Great Auditorium’s interior — the wooden vaulting, the ironwork, the scale of the space — rewards early arrival for those who have not seen it before. It is one of the most architecturally significant interior spaces in New Jersey, and the combination of the building and what will be happening inside it Thursday evening constitutes an experience that the Jersey Shore, with all its considerable summer attractions, rarely provides in this specific key.

This is the 35th anniversary season finale of a New Jersey institution. It features one of the most decorated musicians the American classical tradition has produced in the past half century. It is free, it is outdoors in spirit even when inside, and it takes place the evening before Independence Day in a hall built in the same decade as the battles being commemorated at Washington Crossing and Monmouth. On July 2nd, in Ocean Grove, the brass will play.

Three Artists, Five Genres, One Night: The Middletown Arts Center’s Summer Nights Concert on July 23rd

The Thursday evening concert series that takes place in indoor theater venues across New Jersey during the summer occupies a specific and underappreciated place in the state’s music culture. It is not the festival, with its logistics and its crowd dynamics and the distance between performer and audience that open air creates. It is not the bar show, with its ambient noise and its divided attention. It is the room — a dedicated space with sightlines and acoustics and the understanding, shared between performer and audience, that what is happening on stage is the reason everyone is there. On Thursday, July 23rd at 7:00 p.m., the Middletown Arts Center at 36 Church Street brings that specific kind of evening to Monmouth County with a Summer Nights Concert presenting Reina Williams and The Remedy as headliners, with Renee Maskin and Patrick Bamburak opening. Admission is a $10 donation, with all proceeds supporting the arts center itself.

Three distinct artists. Five genres explicitly named in the billing — reggae, hip-hop, soul, folk, Americana, and indie rock — though even that list undersells the range of what the evening will contain. And a venue whose indoor theater configuration gives every performance a focus and intimacy that the summer festival circuit, however compelling, rarely matches.

Reina Williams and The Remedy: Two Decades of Work Arriving at a New Chapter

Reina Williams has been building toward this moment for the better part of twenty-five years, and the evidence of that work is specific enough to be cited rather than merely asserted. The singer-songwriter, bandleader, producer, and recording artist now leading Reina Williams and The Remedy out of New Jersey has assembled a biography that moves through the hip-hop world of Baltimore, the professional recording studio environment, national television, industry licensing, and major award recognition before arriving at the current phase of her career, which is producing the most substantial live show she has ever led.

She grew up in Baltimore and came of age as an artist in the city’s hip-hop scene during the 2000s — writing and performing to beats she produced herself while also producing music for other artists. During this period she worked as a recording engineer at Oz Recording Studios, a position that brought her into proximity with artists including Alicia Keys, Usher, and Lil Mo. The professional formation that takes place in a recording studio — the intimate understanding of how recorded sound works, how production decisions shape the emotional register of a track, how the relationship between a vocal performance and the instrumental arrangement can be manipulated to specific ends — is visible in Williams’ subsequent work as a composer and songwriter. She has composed and co-written more than 400 songs and cues, with licensing relationships with BMG Production Music, BMG UK, and APM placing her work in television and film contexts that most performers never access.

The recognition markers in Williams’ career are worth enumerating because they span different industries and different standards of evaluation. In 2010, Baltimore Magazine voted her the city’s Best Solo Artist. The same year, GO Magazine included her in its annual “100 Women We Love” feature. In 2011, she appeared on FOX’s The X Factor, where her performance at Prudential Center in Newark — the same venue that hosts major touring acts on the national arena circuit — drew praise from Simon Cowell that he expressed in terms that Cowell, not known for gratuitous enthusiasm, reserved for performers who genuinely distinguished themselves. In 2014, her song “Ooh Damn” received the Best R&B/Soul Song honor at the 9th Annual OUT Music Awards.

Now based in New Jersey and leading The Remedy — a full band whose purpose is to transform her studio-crafted compositions into live experiences — Williams is releasing new music as well. Her EP What Life’s Like, featuring the band and including new material alongside reworked versions of existing songs with Leslie B3 organ and keys, released in July 2026 on Bandcamp and streaming platforms. The project represents, by Williams’ own account, the first time in twenty-five years of writing, producing, and recording that she has released a proper studio EP with the full band behind her — a milestone that gives the July 23rd concert an additional dimension as a live introduction to a new chapter of a long-developing artistic project.

The genre description that follows Reina Williams and The Remedy — reggae, hip-hop, soul, R&B, EDM, rock — is both accurate and slightly beside the point. What Williams produces is conscious music, in the specific sense that term carries in the reggae and hip-hop traditions: music oriented toward emotional and social uplift, toward the kinds of shared feeling that live performance makes possible and that purely commercial music does not prioritize. Her live performances have been described consistently, across two decades of audience responses and press coverage, as experiences that create genuine connection between performer and room. The indoor theater configuration of the Middletown Arts Center is precisely the environment in which that kind of connection is most achievable.

Patrick Bamburak: The Rock Hall Archive and a Career That Defies Easy Summary

The opening set on July 23rd begins with Patrick Bamburak, whose career trajectory is one of the more genuinely unusual in New Jersey’s music community. The term “veteran recording artist” is accurate as far as it goes, but it does not capture the specific range of what Bamburak has done or the industry stature that some of those accomplishments have achieved.

Bamburak is a founding member of bait-oven and Funhaus, two bands that established his place in the regional indie rock circuit, and his solo recording work has continued alongside his activity as a touring musician, songwriter, producer, and actor. The discography milestone most worth noting is the 2024 acceptance of his media production work into the permanent audio/visual collection of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archive — an institution in Cleveland that maintains the most significant collection of rock and roll primary source material in existence. The specific material preserved includes episodes from Indie Café 2wo, the interview program that Bamburak produces and co-hosts on NEWHD New York Streaming Radio, including interviews with Seymour Stein — the co-founder of Sire Records and one of the most consequential figures in the history of independent music distribution — and Sylvia Reed, the second wife of Lou Reed, whose own place in the history of rock and roll needs no elaboration to a music-literate audience.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archive does not accept material casually. The institution’s standard for permanent collection is the long-term historical significance of the material, which means that the curatorial staff evaluated Bamburak’s interview work and determined that it meets the threshold for preservation alongside the primary documents of the music’s history. That judgment is not a minor credential.

His most recent solo album, Digital, released on API Records and available across major streaming and download platforms, features a duet on the track “No Wise” with Marc Jonson — a singer-songwriter whose career spans decades of New York’s independent music scene and whose collaboration with Bamburak connects two distinct traditions within the city’s broader folk-rock community. Bamburak also hosts Patrick Bamburak’s Night Music on NEWHD New York Streaming Radio, broadcasting Fridays from 10 p.m. to midnight — a program that extends his presence as a tastemaker and curator in the music world beyond his own recording and performance work.

His set at the Middletown Arts Center on July 23rd will operate within the Americana and indie rock range that anchors the evening’s opening, providing a grounded, song-centered start that sets a tone without front-loading the show’s highest energy.

Renee Maskin: Asbury Park’s Songwriter of the Year Comes to Middletown

The third artist on the July 23rd bill, Renee Maskin, occupies a specific and significant place within the New Jersey music ecosystem that extends well beyond the geography of the events where she most frequently appears. Maskin is rooted in the Asbury Park music scene — a community that has produced disproportionate national talent relative to its size and that functions as something close to a testing ground for serious singer-songwriter work on the East Coast — and her reputation within it is the kind that develops through years of consistently excellent work rather than through any single breakout moment.

She was named Songwriter of the Year by New Jersey Stage Magazine in 2023, which is the state’s most significant music journalism recognition in that specific category. The artists she has opened for — Jon Langford of the Mekons, William Tyler, Del Amitri, Tyler Ramsey — collectively represent a cross-section of the roots rock, alt-country, folk, and Americana traditions that have been the most creatively fertile zones in American independent music over the past three decades. These are not household names for a mass audience, but within the community of musicians, critics, and listeners who follow independent music seriously, they are reference points for a specific set of aesthetic values: craft over spectacle, song over production, emotional honesty over commercial calculation. Maskin’s selection as a touring support act for artists at that level is a measure of what the people who book those tours heard in her work.

Her former band, Lowlight, toured in support of The Pretenders — a credential that connects her directly to one of the most enduring bands in rock and roll, and to a touring circuit that operates at a scale significantly above the club level where most independent artists spend their careers.

The album she is currently preparing for release this fall, If the World Is Ending, has produced its first single in “Western Shores” — a track whose title suggests the geographic and emotional displacement that characterizes the best work in the folk and Americana traditions. The Middletown Arts Center show falls during the period when Maskin is building toward that release, which means the July 23rd performance arrives at a moment when the material will be both new and fully developed — the ideal circumstances for a songwriter’s opening set.

The Venue, the Cause, and the $10 Ticket

The Middletown Arts Center at 36 Church Street is an award-winning facility that has established itself since its 2007 opening as the primary destination for quality arts programming in Middletown and across the broader Monmouth County region. Operated by the Middletown Township Cultural and Arts Council, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the center is owned by the township but programmed by the nonprofit — a structure that gives it access to municipal infrastructure while maintaining the artistic flexibility that a nonprofit arts programming organization requires.

The center’s theater space — where the July 23rd concert will take place — is an indoor venue with the acoustic properties and the sightline clarity that make it a significantly better listening environment than most rooms where independent music is performed in New Jersey. The decision to hold a summer concert indoors rather than staging an outdoor event reflects a pragmatic understanding of what New Jersey summers actually produce: humidity, unpredictable weather, and the ambient noise that outdoor spaces generate regardless of what is happening on stage. Inside the MAC Theater, the music gets the focus it deserves.

The $10 donation admission structure accomplishes something that ticket pricing rarely achieves: it keeps the barrier to entry low enough that cost is genuinely not a factor for most attendees, while the framing as a donation to the arts center rather than a ticket purchase makes the financial transaction feel aligned with the spirit of the event. Every dollar from the evening’s attendance goes directly to the MAC, supporting the programming, facilities, and community access work that makes events like this one possible. For anyone who has benefited from what the Middletown Arts Center provides to the community — and across seventeen years of operation, that is a substantial and expanding group — the July 23rd concert is an opportunity to participate in sustaining it.

The evening begins at 7:00 p.m. Tickets will be available through the Middletown Arts Center’s website at middletownarts.org. The venue is located at 36 Church Street in Middletown, New Jersey 07748, adjacent to the Middletown NJ Transit rail station on the North Jersey Coast Line, with parking accessible in the vicinity.

For Monmouth County residents and anyone willing to make the trip from elsewhere in New Jersey, the July 23rd Summer Nights Concert at the MAC represents the specific kind of evening that the state’s music culture produces best — three artists with substantial individual accomplishments, a set of genres whose combination creates something genuinely eclectic rather than merely random, and a room that is the right size for what everyone on that stage does. The genre range alone — from Maskin’s folk and Americana through Bamburak’s indie rock to Williams’ reggae-hip-hop-soul synthesis — would justify the evening. The caliber of the people delivering it makes it worth circling on the calendar.

Tonight at the Middletown Arts Center: Brian Ostering Brings Elvis’s Early Years to the Jersey Shore in a Show Built on Family and Memory

There is a specific quality that separates a tribute performance from a genuinely meaningful one, and it has nothing to do with how closely the performer resembles the artist they are honoring. It has to do with why they are doing it — the personal stakes behind the decision to step onto a stage and invest themselves completely in music that belongs, in some essential way, to someone else. For Brian Ostering, the front man and bassist of the Bayshore-area band The Wag and the driving force behind tonight’s Elvis Spectacular at the Middletown Arts Center, the stakes are unambiguous. This show is a tribute to his father.

The Elvis Spectacular — officially subtitled “The Early Years” — takes place tonight, Saturday June 27th, at the Middletown Arts Center, 36 Church Street in Middletown, with doors opening at 6:00 p.m. and the performance beginning at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are $20 and are available at the door and online through The Wag’s website. It is the first time Ostering has mounted an Elvis-themed show, and the decision to do so came not from a desire to expand his performance portfolio but from a desire to honor a specific inheritance — the love of a particular artist’s music, passed from a father to a son over decades of listening and playing together.

The Story Behind the Show

Ostering’s father was a musician. He was also, by every account Ostering has given in the weeks leading up to this show, a devoted Elvis Presley fan who performed Elvis’s music in his own bands — a working musician who carried that repertoire not as a novelty or an occasional tribute but as a central part of his own musical identity. What parents pass to their children through music is rarely just a catalog of songs. It is a set of aesthetic values, a way of hearing the world, a sense of what popular music can mean when it is at its best. Ostering absorbed all of that from his father, and the Elvis Spectacular is his way of publicly acknowledging it.

The personal weight of the show deepened significantly in May of 2003, when Ostering took his father on a trip to Graceland — the Memphis estate that Elvis Presley made his home and that has been maintained as a museum and pilgrimage site since Presley’s death in 1977. His father’s health was beginning to decline, and Ostering made the decision to take the trip before circumstances made it impossible. The two days they spent in Memphis became one of those experiences that only reveal their full significance in retrospect. They visited Sun Records, the studio on Union Avenue where Elvis Presley recorded his first sessions and where the sonic vocabulary of American popular music was fundamentally altered in a handful of sessions in 1954. They went to Graceland multiple times. They heard a gospel group perform. His father ate the famous peanut butter and banana sandwich — a culinary detail that has followed Elvis’s legend from the beginning and that Ostering’s father apparently found legitimately satisfying. Ostering has described the trip as something he is deeply grateful to have undertaken when he did.

The Elvis Spectacular is built from that trip, from the music that connected two musicians across a generation, and from the particular form of grief and celebration that a son undertakes when he performs music his father loved in front of an audience that shares some portion of that love. It is not a nostalgia act in any shallow sense. It is a live act of remembrance.

Brian Ostering and The Wag: Twenty-Five Years of Jersey Shore Music

Anyone who has attended live music events on the Jersey Shore over the past quarter century knows The Wag, even if they know the band primarily by the experience of seeing them rather than by name. The four-piece unit, which Ostering fronts alongside three other vocalists who rotate lead duties throughout any given show, has built its reputation on a specific and difficult-to-manufacture quality: the ability to play pop rock music with an enthusiasm and technical sophistication that makes the audience feel good in a way that takes genuine musicianship to produce. The band has been described as “the happiest band in New Jersey” — a characterization that sounds like marketing but that anyone who has seen them understands as straightforward description.

The Wag has made the Middletown Arts Center something close to its home venue over the years, producing annual Spectaculars there that have established a loyal audience across Monmouth County. The Beatles Spectacular and the Christmas Spectacular are the flagship productions in that catalog — shows that Ostering produces and performs with the care and attention to detail of someone who treats a regional venue concert as seriously as a national touring act would treat a theater engagement. Tonight’s Elvis Spectacular follows in that tradition of self-produced themed concerts built around specific artists and eras, but it is the first time the Spectacular format has been applied to Elvis, and the first time Ostering has stepped into this particular musical territory.

The show he has built for tonight focuses on the early years — the period from approximately 1954 through the early 1960s that produced the recordings that changed American popular music: the Sun Sessions, the RCA recordings, the string of singles that introduced rock and roll to a national mass audience and made Elvis Presley one of the defining cultural figures of the twentieth century. “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “That’s All Right,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Heartbreak Hotel” — these are not simply songs. They are the artifacts of a specific moment in American cultural history when the energy and vernacular of rhythm and blues crossed into mainstream popular music and nothing was quite the same afterward. Ostering’s decision to focus on this period rather than the Las Vegas-era material reflects both a personal aesthetic judgment and a recognition that the early recordings, stripped of the sequined jumpsuit mythology, are simply the best work Elvis Presley ever produced.

The Band Behind the Show

Ostering assembled a specific group of musicians for the Elvis Spectacular rather than his regular Wag bandmates, though there is significant overlap in the personal relationships that connect them.

Joe Lisa, who handles guitar duties for the show, has been a consistent presence at Wag productions for years, serving as the show’s violinist for the Beatles and Christmas Spectaculars. For the Elvis Spectacular, Lisa moves from violin to both electric and acoustic guitar — an instrument better suited to the twang and the driving rhythm of early rock and roll. The transition speaks to Lisa’s versatility as a musician and his willingness to adapt his contribution to the specific demands of the repertoire.

Behind the drum kit is Vincent Livolsi, described by those who know his work as an award-winning drummer. Livolsi’s history with Ostering predates The Wag by a substantial period — the two were bandmates in Ostering’s first original band, alongside Ostering’s cousin Mike. The decision to bring Livolsi in for this particular show has a certain biographical logic: the musician who was present at the beginning of Ostering’s performing career is also present for a show about beginnings — the beginning of rock and roll, the beginning of the musical relationship Ostering shared with his father.

Backing vocals will come from two people whose presence gives the show an additional dimension of intimacy. Alicia Van Sant, a fellow Wag bandmate, brings the harmonic sophistication that Wag productions consistently feature and the vocal experience that a show with demanding backing vocal parts requires. Alongside her will be Tiffany Ostering-Dibble — Brian’s sister, who is making her stage debut at tonight’s performance. A sister stepping onto a stage for the first time at a show dedicated to a father’s memory carries a weight that no amount of production design can manufacture. It is the kind of detail that makes a tribute concert something more than a tribute concert.

Elvis Presley and the Meaning of the Early Years

The decision to title tonight’s show “The Early Years” is worth dwelling on for a moment, because it reflects something specific about what Brian Ostering is honoring and why that material in particular holds the place it does in the history of popular music.

Elvis Presley recorded his first commercial session at Sun Studio in Memphis on July 5, 1954 — the session that produced “That’s All Right,” a cover of an Arthur Crudup blues song that WHBQ disc jockey Dewey Phillips played fourteen times in a single evening after adding it to his rotation. The response generated phone calls from across Memphis asking who the singer was, and Elvis Presley became, overnight, a regional celebrity. Within two years he had signed with RCA, recorded “Heartbreak Hotel,” appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and established himself as the most controversial and commercially successful entertainer in the country.

What made those early recordings so important — and so permanent — was not primarily the vocal talent, though the talent was extraordinary. It was the synthesis: the combination of country music structure with rhythm and blues feel, the mix of emotional directness with physical energy, the sense that a specific performer had found a way to say something that resonated so broadly it effectively created a new category of popular music. “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Blue Suede Shoes” — these songs still work, more than seventy years after their release, because the fundamental energy in them is not a product of their era. It is simply good rock and roll, performed by someone who understood instinctively what rock and roll was supposed to feel like.

Brian Ostering’s father heard that in the music when it was new. He played it in his own bands. He passed that hearing on to his son. Tonight in Middletown, that son is going to perform it in front of a room full of people who, in one way or another, have their own relationship to those songs — and who may not know, watching Ostering on stage at the Middletown Arts Center, that what they are witnessing is a conversation between a musician and his father carried on through the medium of music that outlasted them both.

Attending Tonight’s Show

The Elvis Spectacular takes place tonight at the Middletown Arts Center, 36 Church Street, Middletown, New Jersey 07748. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. and the performance begins at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are $20 and are available at the door beginning at 6:00 p.m. or online through The Wag’s official website. The Middletown Arts Center is located adjacent to the Middletown train station, with parking accessible near the venue. This is a single performance with no announced plans for a return engagement in the immediate future — Ostering has indicated that the show may come back if scheduling aligns, but tonight’s performance is not the first stop on a recurring tour. It is a specific occasion, tied to a specific date, built around a specific set of memories that belong to a specific family. The audience that shows up tonight will be part of that occasion in a way that a second or third performance could not replicate.