Yale Students Campaign for All That Jazz
By PHILLIP LUTZ AUG. 28, 2015
A jam session on the Old Campus by members of the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective included Alexander
Dubovoy on keyboard, Sam Frampton on guitar, Jake Backer on bass and Michael Hoot on saxophone.
Credit Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective
Michael Hoot and his compatriots value their hard-won seats in the Yale Jazz Ensemble, a Yale University-sponsored big band. So it did not sit well when Thomas C. Duffy, who as university director of bands had led the ensemble for 34 years, suspended its operations for the coming year — and possibly beyond — citing a loss of rehearsal space and a lack of qualified brass players.
“The students I know who played in the band and are involved in jazz were really let down by that,” said Mr. Hoot, a saxophonist. But Mr. Hoot, who will be a junior this year, is not taking the situation lying down. He and his fellow band members hope to reconstitute the ensemble as a student-led activity, just one example of what they, along with sympathetic faculty members, are doing to promote jazz on the New Haven campus.
“Yale can do a better job of jazz studies,” said Brian Kane, an associate professor in the music department and an adviser to the student activists.
Mr. Kane, who teaches a course in jazz harmony, is one of two professors in the music department who regularly teach jazz; a smattering of jazz courses are offered in other departments. None of those courses offer performance instruction.
The Yale School of Music, a graduate conservatory, has supported jazz by hiring Willie Ruff, a scholar and musician who has taught musicology and theory and run a concert series since 1972. It has also supported Mr. Duffy in his work with the jazz ensemble, an extracurricular activity. Both Mr. Ruff and Mr. Duffy are professors in the school of music. But those are the exceptions. “Our mission is real clear,” said Robert Blocker, the dean at the Yale School of Music. “We train people in the Western canon and in new music.”
In an attempt to broaden Yale’s musical mission, the student activists have revived a group, the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective, and set themselves ambitious — some say quixotic — goals.
“We want to push Yale as a university to ultimately welcome jazz as a curricular offering alongside classical music in both the music department and the School of Music,” said Alexander Dubovoy, a senior and the current president of the collective.
The collective, he said, has been building a community of like-minded students. At present, he said, the group’s registration list counts about 50 student musicians, a number that should grow after Thursday, when it recruits freshmen at a music-filled orientation featuring student-run combos and a jam session.
The event, to be open to the public, will be in the Saybrook Underbrook Theater, a basement space in a Yale residential college, where the collective hosts about five meetings a semester that bring together up-and-coming professionals and students. The collective also stages on-campus minifestivals featuring established names like the pianists Vijay Iyer and David Hazeltine. Over three years, the festivals have doubled annual attendance to 600.
Translating such numbers into course changes is another story. Mr. Dubovoy said his plans for the school year might include lobbying for a certificate in jazz studies, drawing on elements of the program at Princeton, where students qualify after completing four related courses, taking part in educational outreach and performing in one of the music department’s jazz groups.
But Yale does not offer classes in jazz performance. With the suspension of the jazz ensemble, it does not sponsor extracurricular jazz bands. Nor does it offer lessons for credit with practitioners of the jazz repertory, though qualified undergraduates can take lessons with classical musicians through the School of Music.
Studying through the School of Music is “something I personally would love to do,” said Mr. Hoot, the incoming president of the collective.
“That’s tough for jazz since the graduate school is so classically oriented,” he said. “I’m a saxophone player, but the School of Music doesn’t even have a sax teacher.”
Mr. Blocker said that hiring a saxophone teacher had been discussed, but that discussions focused more on finding a teacher who specialized in the classical repertory. “A teacher who teaches that,” he said, “is not likely to be the teacher who’s going to be teaching or talking about the performance practices of John Coltrane.”
Given the entrenched structure for resource allocation at Yale, Mr. Duffy said it was “highly unlikely” that the collective would achieve its curriculum goals through lobbying. He suggested that the students start by signing up for the music department’s course in chamber music performance. “The department would have to adjudicate whether they want chamber music credit to be given to jazz groups,” he said.
Whatever tack the students take on curriculum matters, he said, would be separate from his deliberations on the jazz ensemble, whose fate as a university-sponsored endeavor he will be exploring while the renovation of Hendrie Hall, where the band had rehearsed, was being completed. That has been scheduled for next year.
He said he had encountered a shortage of qualified trombone and trumpet students, a situation he observed at other Ivy League schools trying to muster a big band. While he offered to lend music to the collective as it tried to reconstitute the jazz ensemble, he said he would be “stunned” if they could sustain 17 top-flight section players throughout the year.
Mr. Hoot acknowledged the “immense amount of work” that would be required. Nonetheless, he can find some precedent for success in the history of entrepreneurial big bands at Yale; in earlier decades, the bands landed dates on New York City stages and even recording contracts — a history Mr. Ruff said today’s collective was embracing. “I’m having the time of my life,” he said, “watching them trying to recreate at least an appreciation for the music that drove all this.”
The Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective Freshman Welcome Concert is at 7 p.m. on Sept. 3, Saybrook Underbrook Theater, 242 Elm Street, New Haven. Free admission. Information: 608-320-6092 or yale.edu/jazzcollective.
Source