Newbury Park High School & Project Improv Part I

It’s thirty minutes before we leave for Newbury Park: thirty-six of us are packed into our small jazz rehearsal room, staring at the unbelievable amount of  equipment in disbelief. Three amps. Forty music folders. Two keyboards. A drum set. Two basses. Some of us take a slightly extended trip to the restroom. Some of us push up our sleeves and roll up the cords and cables, lock down the amp cases, count and re-count our music folders. By the time we get on the bus, it’s already groaning at the weight of our trumpets and trombones and saxophones, each wrapped up in comfortable cases. I rub my hands together to warm them up — there’s a slight imprint from the corner of the Yamaha S90ES on my left palm. As the bus rocks back and forth from the asperous freeway, I fall asleep.

This past weekend the two West Ranch High School jazz bands traveled a good hour to the Newbury Park High School Jazz Festival after months of preparation. Our set included Time Check, Dave Holland Does it Like This, Black Orpheus, and In a Sentimental Mood. Have a listen at some of our pieces from both the upper jazz band and the combo:

We left the NPHS Jazz Festival at the end of the night with a second place (WRHS Studio A Jazz Band), a third place (WRHS Lab Band), and another third place award for our new WRHS Jazz Combo. But for me, the greatest part of the festival was the people that I was able to meet — both student musicians from schools like Camarillo High School and Golden Valley High School to professional musicians like CalArts Jazz Program Director David Roitstein, Cal State Long Beach Director of Jazz Studies Jeff Jarvis, and Hemet High School Jazz Director/Idyllwild Jazz Summer Workshop Chairman Jeff Tower (he awarded several full and partial scholarships to this camp to many students at the NPHS jazz festival!).

In fact, David Roitstein was our clinician for the WRHS jazz combo. Meeting him was like meeting some sort of jazz celebrity — for the past three years, I’ve heard my jazz director talk about him; I’ve heard my jazz director’s son (Jeff Babko) talk about him; Even my jazz teacher has talked about him with great respect — he’s often started many pieces of advice with “this is what Mr. Roitstein would tell me to do…” Luckily enough, Mr. Roitstein put much emphasis on improvisation. “It’s something we do every day in conversation,” he told us. Of course, I was pretty skeptical. But after he had us trade fours several times with the Kind of Blue tune So What with the aim of repeating/reflecting on the solo preceding our own, Mr. Roitstein brought us a brighter light to improvisation.  After he told us to imagine having this musical conversation with ourselves, jazz improvisation has lately been starting to make much more sense. The concept of developing smaller, simpler ideas before starting a solo (and even while comping) has become an increasingly more valuable core to developing my own understanding of improvisation.

We were also awarded by an incredible performance by the Cal State Long Beach jazz band directed by Jeff Jarvis. Their set included Airegin, The Days of Wine and Roses (featuring their lead trumpet player), Songbird, Captain Hook, High and Mighty (written by Jeff Jarvis himself), Trumpets Forever, and Got a Match. My two favorites that night were The Days of Wine and Roses and Jarvis’s High and Mighty. Wine and Roses had this romantic, Bill-Evans-esque feel to it (probably because the last time I heard it was in a recording of the Bill Evans trio); it’s also a personal favorite of mine when a jazz band’s horns hits a no-rhythm-section a cappella part with goosebump-evoking perfection — and that’s exactly what happened with this tune. On the other hand, High and Mighty was an upbeat piece that Jarvis said was inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California. Personally, though, I saw that the piece reflected the entire city itself: Jarvis began the piece with morning-sunrise-like bell-tones (which, by the way, reminded me so much of Bernstein’s West Side Story) and progressed towards busy nighttime tones behind the tenor sax solo. What CSULB gave us that night, in fact, was exactly the subject of the conversation I had with a few jazz music students only a several hours prior:

Project Improv Part I

(From left to right: Carlos Rodriguez, Sean Doane, Brett Lopez, and another Camarillo HS student)

I asked Omer Benyamin, a tenor sax player from my jazz band, to help me seek out some high school students at the Newbury Park High School jazz festival — and I was able to talk to Carlos, Sean, and Brett from Camarillo High School about our own experiences and desires regarding jazz. All three students were introduced to music via an outside influence: for example, Brett was introduced in watching his sister play the clarinet, and Carlos was intrigued when he heard Mickey whistling on the old Disney cartoon Steamboat Willie. But Sean what asserted — and what we all seemed to agree on –  in regards to exposing jazz to primary school and high school students alike was something that I’ve known all along but never even thought to say: we all need to see someone amazing. Since jazz has an increasingly older audience as the years go by, it’s difficult for a young person with little exposure to jazz to perceive it as anything but music that’s, frankly, music for old people. But many of us know that this isn’t the case with today’s successful and young jazz musicians like Vijay Iyer, Hiromi Uehara, and Christian Scott — however, how is it possible for anyone still in high school to know anything about them?

Sean, Brett, Carlos, Omer, and I came to the general consensus that we want and need jazz musicians to reach out to us while we’re still in high school — we want them to perform for us and our high school friends; live jazz is physical proof that (a) it’s still alive, (b) it’s not just for an older generation, and (c) it’s actually a pretty fantastic style of music. We get this bubbly kind of feeling when we hear someone like  Miles Davis or Joe Lovano or David Sanborn on the radio — and as student jazz musicians, we want our friends to get and understand that feeling as well.

This is only the beginning of the answer to the question that I recently received from jazz musician Richard Frank of PTJazz: “How do we make jazz relevant and accessible to youth today?”

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: Red Clay/Freddie Hubbard/Red Clay