On Thursday March 21st I attended a performance by the UBC Jazz Ensemble 2, an ensemble comprised of UBC students both in the school of music and students in other faculties who have a passion for jazz music. The ensemble is conducted by Dennis Esson, and is made up of 20 players, a mix of Saxophones, Trumpets, Trombones, Piano, Guitar, Bass, and Percussion. The large number of players in the ensemble allowed them to capture that ‘big band’ sound, being full and rich with the variety of instruments providing a broad range of musical textures to fully round out the sound and fully capture the different types of pieces they were playing. I always enjoy an opportunity to see Jazz performed, and this had the added dimension of appreciating UBC students display their hard work and musical skills.
The program consisted of the songs “Blues in Hoss Flat”, “Hit the Bricks”, “Perdiddle”, “Smoke gets In Your Eyes”, “Momentum”, “Horsepower”, and “Jackson County Jubilee”. The numbers were a mix of standards jazz tunes, and some more contemporarily composed numbers, with one song even being composed by the UBC professor Fred Stride. Most of the songs played were quite uptempo and joyful sounding numbers, with the first song “Blues in Hoss Flat” heavily featuring the trumpet section, which had a bright piercing sound, and the percussion section leading the ensemble in keeping the tempo driving forward.
I also enjoyed that many of the numbers featured soloists that were able to give their own musical interpretations within the different songs. The soloists were usually featured in the mid-sections of the songs, with the large ensemble playing the beginning and ending parts of the pieces. This reminded me of the concerto grosso piece by Bach that we looked at, and how the ripieno, the large ensemble, would play the ritornello, the main opening melody of a piece that would then only be fully repeated by the ripieno at the very end of the piece. The soloists occupy a similar role to the concertino, playing interpretations, or thematic ideas from the ritornello, but never repeating it in its full form. Jazz musicians often improvise these solos, and work with the melodic and key structure of the piece to add interest to the piece as a whole. The piece smoke in your eyes mainly featured a saxophone solo by a player who was very adept at adding emotion and interest to the melody, which I thought really made the piece stand out within the program.
Though we have not studied jazz in our class repertoire, I have an added appreciation of how music has been developed through time to lead to jazz music, even though it can seem so disconnected to what we have heard. In reflecting on this concert, I am reminded of how music changed during the 19th century and came to capture more of the emotion and identity of the composer, using unprecedented types of musical ideas. Composers such as Debussy and Stravinsky used tools such as the pentatonic and octatonic scales that had been unheard in western music to tell their musical stories, ideas of which we can hear in jazz music. The mix of using dissonance within the music to add crunchy musical textures, that add to the whole musical ideas of the pieces are what make jazz music exciting and wouldn’t have been made possible without its musical predecessors.