From swinging rhythms to wild improvisations, jazz is an incredibly unique genre that allows musicians to defy rules set by the standard concert band. This opportunity to “break rules” is now available to students with the start of Emerson’s jazz band which had its first rehearsal Aug. 20. Due to high interest from students since the band’s beginning year, the band staff were compelled to make it a reality and also expand upon students’ skills.

Emerson’s Director of Bands, Bryn Roberts said, “We just feel like anything we can do to give students extra opportunities to play different styles or with different groups, whether its full orchestra, or the musical or the jazz band, we feel like those are positive things. It gives everyone hopefully something that they can be really into.”

Something that makes jazz bands unique, beyond just their recognizable style, are the specific instruments they use. These instruments include saxophone, trumpet, trombone, drums, vibraphones and even bass. This is the most significant difference between this and concert band, especially with the exclusion of woodwind instruments like flute and clarinet. However, that didn’t stop the school’s All-State bass clarinetist and Woodwind Captain, Anish Paduchuri, 11, from picking up a tenor saxophone and joining precisely due to that exclusion.

Paduchuri said, “I’m kind of getting bored doing the same thing every single day. Marching band, bass clarinet. It’s nice, but sometimes I want to play something new. I wanna learn, like go back to the beginner band days kinda. And in normal band we have all these different voices and colors compared to jazz band. Having those different instrumentation, that different color, lets you have more variety in the type of music you can perform and the style appeals to me.”

Participating in the jazz band will also give students the opportunity to expand upon a skill that’s rarely ever touched in concert band: improvisation. The skill consists of musicians performing and coming up with their own melodies or rhythms spontaneously and it is never really utilized in schools’ concert band music.

“Improvising is something that is important to do as a musician in general,” Paduchuri said. “In concert band we really don’t get to do that. But jazz, the big thing is feeling the music and understanding how the music forms, and improv is a really useful skill in order to be able to do all of that. Even the skills from improv they can transfer over to concert music, because if you understand what exactly’s going on with the chords of the music, or what’s going on with why the music’s written that way you can perform it better.”

However, improvisation isn’t the only new thing the new band offers since the smaller size of the ensemble will provide more opportunities to perform. With this in mind, Roberts hopes that the jazz band will be able to contribute to both the Emerson and McKinney community.

Roberts said, “One of our goals is that it is a good sort of ambassador to the larger Emerson community. It’s not always possible for the full band to play at some things, but this is a way a representative group can go out and perform and be a good ambassador. People really enjoy hearing a jazz band play, and they can play at a lot of events where it wouldn’t be practical for the full band to play.”

The first jazz band rehearsal is far from its last and it will leave a lasting foundation for years as students continue to grow their interest in the musical genre through the band program.
“We want to build a core group of students that are really excited about jazz specifically, then we can build on that,” Roberts said. “This is just getting that started and really establishing a love for jazz.”