November 4, 2004
Faculty to jazz up Meany
A jazz concert, like a traditional wedding, usually has four components: something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.
Although the program is still being planned, the jazz faculty recital from the School of Music, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 10, in Meany Hall, will probably meet all these requirements.
Tickets are $12 general admission, $10 for students or seniors. More information is available at 206-543-4880.
The title of the evening’s festivities is, “Jazz: Past, Present and Future,” giving the musicians wide latitude within which to work.
“I’m not sure yet what we’ll be playing,” says Vern Sielert, assistant professor and trumpeter. “We know that we’ll have a range of music, from older compositions and contemporary music.”
For the old and the borrowed, an example: Says Sielert, “Listeners might hear a Scott Joplin rag, played in traditional form and then going through its transformations, bringing us up to date.”
Sielert and Mark Seales, associate professor, are the chief planners. They have already tapped Don Immel on trombone, Tom Collier on vibes and marimba, Mark Ivester on drums and Doug Miller on bass to join them, with perhaps others to come.
The new: Sielert promises the performance will include at least one of his new tunes, “Metronga’s Tonk,” inspired by a club in New Orleans at which Louis Armstrong played early in his career. The piece, Sielert says, has “a new Orleans feel but with more modern harmonies.”
Sielert and Seales are both frequent performers on the local jazz scene. Sielert plays with the Jim Knapp Orchestra and the Emerald City Jazz Orchestra, among other groups. Seales appears frequently around the region with his trio, “New Stories.”
The concert will be preceded by remarks from Larry Starr, professor of music history.
“Jazz is uniquely American,” Starr says, “coming from the collision of African and European elements. They were brought together under intense and conflicting conditions, and that conflict was the crucible for the development of the music.”
Although he is reluctant to say art flows from suffering (“it’s not necessarily true”), Starr says the fact that artists were frequently frustrated in their ability to express themselves surely influenced the development of jazz.
“You could only play certain kinds of music in certain places,” he says, which placed the African-derived elements in “contentious dialogue” with European elements.
Jazz, Starr points out, has a compressed history, occupying roughly 100 years, in contrast to European classical music, which has developed and changed over many centuries. But it has reached the same point as classical music today — fragmented into different styles which are listened to by different audiences, a phenomenon accentuated by the availability of music on the Internet.
As with the musical performance itself, Starr expects to improvise much of his talk.
“This performance should be fun,” Sielert says. “It’s always great to be in Meany with a group of talented players.”
And the blue? As one local jazz icon has opined, “No jazz concert is complete until you play the blues.”
Count on it.
