Conrad Jones left the Tucson Symphony Orchestra for Indianapolis in 2016, but every Thanksgiving since he has quietly returned.
He and his family rent an Airbnb and spend the holiday here.
“While I was here, I had a lot of family and friends visit and everybody loves the vibe and loves the city,” said the 29-year-old. “It’s just a great place to spend time together.
“If it were up to me, I would come every weekend just to hang,” he added.
He won’t get much hanging time this weekend when he returns to the TSO for the first time since he joined the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. He will share the spotlight with Van Cliburn-winning pianist Joyce Yang on Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a work that has a sizable role for trumpet.
“Just the process of being back and knowing that I will get to play with the orchestra again — it feels like you get to see your family that you’ve been away from for too long,” he said during a phone call Monday from Phoenix, where he was catching up with his former trumpet professor, who now plays in the Phoenix Symphony. “To say I’ve been looking forward to this since I first got the call for this gig would be like the understatement of the year. This has been on my calendar with a smiley face for longer than I would probably even need to admit.”
Ironically, this is the second time he will play the Shostakovich, not only this season but ever; he played it for the first time in September to open the Indianapolis Symphony’s season.
“It’s kind of a wild thing of doing it twice in one season after having never done it before,” he said. “It’s kind of a cool experience.”
He’s also looking forward to reuniting with TSO conductor José Luis Gomez, who was still going through the audition process during Jones’ brief TSO tenure.
“His first concert with us was, I think, my first season. Then he came back again in my second season to do the Schumann 3 ... and after I had left was when he got the official music director job,” Jones said. “I’m pumped. I can’t wait. I love working with him. We had such a great time just doing those concerts before he was music director.”
But as jazzed as he is to get back on the TSO stage, he is equally fired up about his time off-stage.
His must-do-while-in-Tucson itinerary — “Oh man, and do I have a list!” — includes hiking Sabino Canyon and eating his way through town.
“It’s a ton of food and hiking, in a nutshell,” he said, starting with a pit stop at his old Sonoran hot dog stomping grounds at a little tent in a dirt lot off Alvernon above Speedway, and lunch at Mariscos Chihuahua on North Swan Road.
“And then, all my friends in the orchestra are taking me to more new spots I never got to experience,” he said. “They’ve got all sorts of things planned.”
In addition to the Shostakovich, the orchestra will perform Mahler’s behemoth Symphony No. 5, which opens with a moving trumpet passage that will be performed by Hayato Tanaka, who replaced Jones as principal trumpet in 2017.
