Start page
Home
News
History
Photo gallery
Concert calendar
Playlist
Demo CD
On the air !
Contracts
Wanted
Sponsoring
Short history of the bigband.
The history of our band goes way back to 1899, so long before anybody had heard of a "bigband". In that year a music and theater ensemble with common direction was founded in Melle-Vogelhoek and Merelbeke-Flora, near the city of Gent in Belgium. It was only in 1932 that the ensemble split up and the orchestra part became independent. Until the middle of the 1980s the music of the orchestra was mainly the typical "harmony" music. From that time on, other types of music like swing and dixieland were introduced under impulse of Elie Van der Jeugt, who was the musical director at that time.
When Ivan Valck took over this function in 1991, the harmony ensemble was transformed into an authentic bigband with trumpet, trombone, saxophone and rhytm sections. This configuration is maintained until today. It was only from 1991 on that the group performed under the name "The Mellvids".
Since 1997 the band was lead by another professional director, Franck Milton, and since end 2004 the direction is in the hands of Florence Bellière, a professional trumpet player. Under her direction "The Mellvids" perform the finest pieces of well known masters as Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, and so on. But besides this we also let revive the music of the Belgian big band scene of the middle of the 20th century with e.g. music of Bert Paige (nickname for Albert Lepage), who was a member of the famous Dutch orchestra "The Ramblers".