A Month of Lists - Non-Traditional Jazz Instruments

The Jazz Band had a great time yesterday at the Evanston Jazz Festival. The students played very well, we had a great hometown crowd of parents and siblings, and the adjudicators really dug what we were doing, calling us "very sophisticated." They also challenged us to play without sheet music and to get some gigs in the public. Afterwards we went to a workshop with Victor Goines and Orbert Davis that was excellent, especially since we got to hear them play in a quintet. After a hearty dinner at Buffalo Joe's, we returned for the evening concert with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. This is a group that starts with a jazz quintet and adds flutes, clarinet, oboe, bass clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, and a string quartet. It was an interesting show with some outstanding extended solo work by Victor Goines on tenor sax.

Anyway, the whole day made me think of another list: all of the non-traditional jazz instruments we've used over the years in the DHS Jazz Band. Since we don't have the typical big band with 5 trumpets, 5 trombones, 5 saxes, and rhythm section, and since we create all of our own arrangements, we can have any instrument that we want in our group. Here are some of the ones we've featured since 1988:

• piccolo (as recently as last night)
• flute (from Paula Derdiger in the 1990s through Emma Burrows and Lauren Smith in the 2000s and Rahm Silverglade and Jett in the 2010s)
• clarinet (We actually had two at the same time a while back. Zander Meisner went on to the traveling cast of Cats, and Nick McConnell discovered one of the largest black holes ever found.)
• Eb contrabass clarinet (played by Justin Davidson, an all-stater)
• oboe, English horn, and bassoon (coming this spring!)
• horn (Zev Saffir, before he switched to the one below, and Rahm last year for "Boplicity")
• mellophone (when Zev decided that the horn was too "slippery" for jazz)
• euphonium (two offensive linemen, Carl Buettgen and current DHS English teacher, Brandon Geuder)
• tuba (TJ, again in "Boplicity")
• marimba (for a Pat Metheny tune, "Open Your Eyes You Can Fly," and in last year's ill-fated "mallet forest")
• tam-tam or gong (used to make the world's largest ride cymbal for Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" at Jazz in the Meadows)
• chimes and timpani (can't remember when)
• banjo (a few times by the likes of Steve DiDomenico and Logan Bloom for various New Orleans numbers)
• violin (nationally-recognized soloist and organic farmer, Adam DeGraff, and local prog-rock guitarist Jared Rabin)
• cello (I'm pretty sure Mark Murphy played cello on a ballad I wrote for the band in the early 90s)

Honorable mention must go to:

• harp (Brian Pflaum in a chamber jazz piece written by artist-in-residence Geoff Shell)
• oud (played in Monday and Tuesday Afternoon Jazz by Gordy)

Instruments we've never used, but I've wanted to:

• accordion (we never did get Aaron Zemach to play accordion in a tune)
• viola (just so I could write in alto clef)
• kora (an African harp, not commonly played by DHS students)
• mbira (an African thumb piano, see above)
• organ (not just an organ patch on an electric keyboard, but a true Hammond B3 with foot pedals and rotating Leslie speaker)
• cuica (a Brazilian friction drum used in samba music)

Maybe somewhere in one of our sender schools, there's a fourth grader who rocks out on accordion while listening to John Coltrane albums...