Director of Jazz & Commercial Music and Associate Professor of Trombone Matthew Niess, D.M.A., and The Capitol Bones were headliners at the International Trombone Festival held in Salt Lake City, Utah, this summer. The group was the featured ensemble on jazz night. It also performed a feature concert at the Navy Memorial in downtown Washington, D.C., and at Reston Town Center this summer. The ensemble has been active for over 25 years and will celebrate that milestone with a concert at the Kennedy Center on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023, in the Terrace Theatre featuring their annual Christmas show, A Christmas Brass Spectacular with Darden Purcell, which includes music from “A Stan Kenton Christmas,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and Duke Ellington’s “Nutcracker Suite.”