The Jazz Department: Semester 1 (part 1)

For the sake of keeping posts to a reasonable length, I have divided this post up into smaller sections. Please stay tuned for further instalments.

I have been greatly enjoying the time that I have been given to study at the ANU School of Music Jazz Department. I have met a lot of interesting people, many of them with phenomenal musicianship, that at present, far surpasses my own. I quickly discovered that there is a lot of rivalry among the students, particularly those that play the same instrument. This is a healthy rivalry, in that the awareness of a particular students musicianship, ultimately encourages his/her contemporaries to dedicate more hours to playing their “ax”. I learnt that if I was going to succeed in the school, I would have to find a rival of my own. For the sake of privacy, I will name him, Mr. Rival. Every Tuesday afternoon we had Aural & Improv class. In this class we had the privileged of sharpening up our ears, learning about different soloing concepts, and finding out how much our playing had improved by playing, Autumn Leaves. This was particularly exciting. Our class consisted of 35 students, including 3 bass players. There was a double-bass player, and two electric players, one of which was myself. We would count in the tune, and every student would get to solo one chorus over it, while the rhythm section continued to play. Needless to say, after jamming on Autumn Leaves for 30 minutes non-stop every week, I got pretty good at the chord changes. This class would determine how many concert practices you played on. Frankly, the more times you screwed up on the changes, the less people would approach you. You had to be on your game for the entire lesson. I screwed up a couple of times, sometimes really badly. But most of the time (trying to say this as humbly as possible) I was on fire! By the end of the semester I had played in 7 or 8 peoples concert practise performances, however, I think Mr. Rival got a couple more than me! Improv was always a lot of fun, but sometimes a bit depressing. When I felt this way I knew that I had to lift my performance.

The Aural part of the class was intense. We had to recognise, and sometimes sing intervals up to a minor 10^th. The very first lesson, Eric (our teacher) got each student to hear, and then name a couple of intervals. This didn’t seem like it would take too long, but I knew Eric. When you get him talking, he won’t stop. We got through everyone, but it took about 2 hours, with no more than 10 intervals each! Anyway, when he got to me, I was pretty nervous. I hadn’t practised my intervals since college, and he was playing them very quickly. I didn’t do very well, but that was the easy part! Next he gave us an interval, and told us to sing the root, then double chromatic up, or down to the note. For example: For a perfect 4^th, we had to sing: C, Eb, E, F; or C, G, Gb, F. It was very difficult, but thankfully we didn’t have to endure it for too long. The end of Semester exam was a killer. The aural part consisted of recognising 90 intervals up to a minor 10^th, going up, down, and together. The test finally came to a finish, then Eric jokingly said that we had 40 more to do, and we all believed him! The Improv test was much easier, just improvise over Autumn Leaves for two choruses; in and out in 10 minutes. However, this test was one on one, and there was no list to say who was next. So, we had to wait until we were called. Some of us had over 3 hours of waiting. I pretty quickly went crazy, and began to do silly things!

Stay tuned for part 2. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me.

Talk to you soon,

Jared