Jazz Ensemble performs variety of styles during semester finale
The Troy University Jazz Ensemble held its final performance of the semester at the Studio in Downtown Troy on Tuesday night.
Throughout the night, the ensemble played a wide variety of pieces based on different styles of music that were jazz or jazz adjacent, like blues, big band and even soundtrack. Dave Camwell, professor of music and director of jazz studies, specifically chose this variety of pieces to not only make the music accessible to the audience, but also to provide more opportunity for the ensemble to perform solos throughout the night.
“I think the heartbeat of jazz, the real definition of jazz, is improvisation,” Camwell said. “You can play lots of things like Gershwin that are jazzy but isn’t actually jazz if you don’t have live improvisation going on.”
Camwell also mentioned that students are never forced to have a solo in a song, but they’re there to allow students to build their skill and have a good time doing it.
“We have certain people that either have experience, are brave and want to try it or like it and get hooked,” Camwell said. “You can see in the performance tonight, we have some people that really thrive in that environment.”
One of the students who took a solo was David Wagner, a saxophonist and freshman music education major from St. Clair County, Alabama. He says that while performing is a step outside his comfort zone, he’s still having a lot of fun.
“Originally I had something planned, and [when] I stood up and everyone was looking at me, everything goes away,” Wagner said. “I just love the blues, and it speaks to me.
“I’ve been listening to the blues for years, and it becomes a vocabulary.”
Not every piece was chosen solely to have the ensemble perform solos, however. Liz Osburn, a trombonist and junior music education major from Waycross, Georgia, says that she enjoys the big band-style pieces, and they inform the way she prepares for performances with the Sound of the South (SOTS), even if both ensembles are very different.
“I think it all comes together of just playing music, playing the horn and getting through your practice routine,” Osburn said. “[Also] looking more towards the bigger picture and focusing on smaller things towards each specific aspect.”
Two pieces, Mercury and Uranus, were adapted to jazz from Gustav Host’s Orchestral Suite “The Planets,” which Camwell thought were pretty inventive pieces, and they happen to be some of his favorites.
“It’s always cool to reinvent music from a different format, [in this case] symphony orchestra, and move it to a jazz and improvisational type of music,” Camwell said.
“I also thought it was interesting taking the Holst pieces and turning them into a jazz style,” Osburn said. “I think that’s something people don’t listen to much or get much exposure to, so I think it was really good to get that music out there.”
The Jazz Ensemble will perform in Opp, Alabama on Thursday and will have a live Jam Session at Fuse Coffee from 6-7:30 p.m.
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