BIGGEST FAN?: The Voice of the Steelers – Pittsburgh’s Bill
Hillgrove – will be in the audience March 6 to watch The Four
Freshmen, who are appearing at the Bromeley Family Theatre in
Blaisdell Hall at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford as part
of the Bradford Creative and Performing Arts Center season.

Hillgrove, a member of WTAE-TV’s Action Sports Team, as well as
the play-by-play voice of Pitt football and men’s basketball, is
the ultimate Four Freshmen fan.

“When I was in high school in the late 1950s, a friend played
one of their records for me,” Hillgrove said, “and it grabbed my
ear.”

He saw the group for the first time in 1957.

The Freshmen – with their original lineup intact – was playing
that night at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Music Hall. “I’m guessing I’ve
seen them over 30 times since then,” he said.

Once in a generation, he said, there’s a group that has the
vocal chops, the right material and the musicianship to make an
impact and span generations like the Four Freshmen, he said.

As the group changed over the years, the Freshmen continued to
weave their blend of folk, pop and jazz. Hillgrove followed their
career, playing their cuts when he was a DJ on WTAE radio from 1967
through 1975.

He claims the group’s current lineup of Bob Ferreira, Vince
Johnson, Brian Eichenberger and Curtis Calderon is vocally the best
of the band’s various personnel change in its 60-year
existence.

This current line up delivers the smooth harmonies and clean
jazz pop lines that has become the group’s signature sound, he
added.

In fact, Hillgrove isn’t alone in recognizing the timelessness
of their sound. The band was recently named Vocal Group of the Year
by Jazz Times magazine.

There’s no easy way to segue from the Four Freshmen to football,
but as long as the Voice of the Steelers is talking, a lot of area
football fans are eager to hear his assessment of the line up:
“They got (nearly) everybody back, but they’ve got to patch up the
offensive line. But they should be good.”

He’s hoping that Roethlisberger and company perform well, but he
has no doubts about how the Freshmen will deliver in Bradford on
March 6: “”They’ll blow you away!”