Jazz Band Goings-On

We've been very busy in our early bird Jazz Band class as of late. We are preparing for the "Night of Saxophone" concert on Thursday, March 22 at 7:30 p.m. in the auditorium. In addition to our Supersax arrangement of Charlie Parker's "Au Privave," the students have chosen to tackle the bebop standard "Lady Bird" by Tadd Dameron. We're going to learn how to voice out an arrangement for our 8-part horn line.

Another fun project is our unit on jazz standards. We've split the band into two combos with rhythm section and three or four horns. For their first assignment, they each took a tune from the Great American Songbook and learned it for an in-class performance. The tunes they chose were "How High the Moon" and "All of Me," pop songs from the 30s and 40s. Traditionally, jazz musicians have cut their teeth on numbers like these as they learn to navigate chord changes and create arrangements.
Over the last 20 or 30 years, jazz musicians have started looking for new material to use as vehicles for arranging and soloing. The music of the Beatles became very popular, due to their strong melodies and interesting chord progressions. In 1996, Herbie Hancock released an album called The New Standard, which featured his jazz versions of songs from the likes of Peter Gabriel, Prince, Stevie Wonder, and Nirvana. Other notable jazzers tackling a more recent repertoire include a piano trio called The Bad Plus ("Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Iron Man") and pianist Brad Mehldau (Radiohead and The Beatles).
In the spirit of these 21st jazz musicians, our combos are working on their own versions of two modern rock songs, Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" from the 1986 album So and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by punk-pop band Green Day. You can hear these at our 3/22 concert as well as a Deerfield HS Music Night at Potbelly's in Deerfield (more info to come).
In addition to working with standards, each student chose a famous jazz solo to learn and perform. This is a great way to soak up some of the classic jazz language and expand one's personal vocabulary for improvisation. Over the week, I've heard the music of Wes Montgomery, Django Reinhardt, Louis Armstrong, James Moody, Gerry Mulligan, McCoy Tyner, Art Blakey, Clifford Brown, Michael Brecker, Johnny Hodges, Miles Davis, and Bud Powell. Talk about an all-star list! Most of the students were playing from transcribed sheet music, but two students actually did the transcriptions themselves, listening to the recordings and learning them by ear. Kudos to Joey and David for going the extra mile!