Contact:  Rick Peterson, Associate Director of Public Affairs, 414/832-6590
For Immediate Release					April 15, 1997

Sacramento's Arau's Cited by Down Beat Magazine, Wins National Competition  


	APPLETON, WIS.  Once was wonderful.  But for Sacramento's Javier Arau,
two is twice as nice.   

	For the second straight year, the tenor saxophonist and senior at
Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., has been cited with a national award by
Down Beat magazine.  

	Arau was named college winner in the original/extended jazz composition
category for his piece, "Southland," in the magazine's 20th annual student
music awards contest.  Winners of the awards, which are known as "DBs" and are
considered among the highest honors accorded college and high school music
students, were announced in the May edition of the magazine.  

	Arau is the first two-time Down Beat winner ever at Lawrence, which has
won nine "DBs" since 1985, including one each of the past four years.  He was
honored in 1996 for outstanding performance in the jazz instrumentalist
category.

	"This year's award means a lot more to me," said Arau, a 1993 graduate
of Sacramento's Rio Americano High School.  "I consider the piece to be one of
my children.  It's a little more lasting than performing an improvisation like
I did last year.  Whatever I put down on paper stays that way."

	Arau, who wrote the eight-minute, big-band piece in early 1996,
described   "Southland"  as "a river with a placid surface, but then you have
this raging undercurrent."

	"Whenever I listen to it, I get the feeling of being in the South. 
It's very fast, but at the same time, it has a mellow, relaxed, floating
quality to it."  

	Ken Schaphorst, director of jazz studies at Lawrence, said the
exclusivity of the composition award makes Arau's recognition significantly
more meaningful this time around.

	"Last year Javier was one of several outstanding performance winners,
but this year he's the sole winner among all college division composers," said
Schaphorst, who has seen his students win Down Beat's extended composition
award three of the last seven years.  "He's a very talented composer who
deserves this kind of recognition.  It seems almost inevitable that an award of
this kind would happen for him."  	

	The Down Beat award is the second national honor for Arau this month. 
In early April, he and three of his classmates won first place in the Music
Teachers National Association collegiate chamber competition in Dallas, Texas. 
Competing against five other regional winners, including Brigham Young
University and the University of South Carolina, Lawrence's quartet won the
$3,000 first-place prize after performing a full 40-minute program.  

	"For a saxophone quartet to win a chamber music competition is very
unusual," said Arau, the son of Jose and Suzanne Arau, Sacramento.  "I had so
much energy and excitement built up inside of me that when they announced the
results, I didn't know what to do with it all so I just let out this scream."  

	A music composition (jazz emphasis) and economics major at Lawrence
with a 3.6 grade point average, Arau complements his classroom work by devoting
30 hours a week to composing and playing in the practice studio.  He performs
regularly with the Lawrence University Jazz Ensemble, the Lawrence Saxophone
Quartet, the Lawrence University Jazz Quartet and one of Lawrence's chamber
jazz ensembles.