Saturday, Dec. 18, 2021 | 2 a.m.
As students in the UNLV Jazz Ensemble settled into their practice, their temporary stage, a classroom-studio on the second floor of the Ham Fine Arts building, was replete with stiff music stands and plastic chairs.
The occasional purr of a trumpet or drone of upright bass drifted through the air as director and conductor Dave Loeb, commanding the room’s attention, clapped his hands into their first song, “2/3’s Adventure.”
The Latin-inspired track swayed from a bursting preamble to an undulating foundation, on which players take solos, and back again. In January, “2/3’s Adventure” will be the group’s opening piece on another stage — the famed Lincoln Center in New York.
The ensemble was selected to perform Jan. 10-11 at the Jack Rudin Jazz Championship.
The 26-student ensemble, alongside Loeb and Nathan Tanouye, associate professor of jazz and commercial music and co-director of the ensemble, will fly to New York and play three pieces in under the required 17 minutes: “2/3’s Adventure,” “Rockin in Rhythm” and “Appassionata,” an original composition by second-year graduate student Patrick Hogan.
Competing alongside the local players are students from Brigham Young University, California State University, Fullerton, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, Michigan State University College of Music, North Carolina Central University, Temple University, University of Kansas, University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and University of North Carolina Greensboro.
The groups will be judged by jazz musicians Ayn Inserto, Camille Thurman, Jeff Hamilton, Randy Brecker and Wynton Marsalis. In addition to their big-band compilation, eight students will participate in a combo performance of “Saint Vitus Dance,” composed by Horace Silver and arranged by Hogan.
Tanouye said the championship would be a prime educational event for the group, which will partake in workshops and receive mentor sessions from a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, which is directed by Marsalis. This is the second year of the competition but a first-time nomination for UNLV, Tanouye said. After all the schools perform, judges will select the top three bands to play another round of their sets before appointing the champion, he said.
“There’s a lot to look forward to for this competition,” he said. “We just need to keep their … game faces on the whole time.”
As the group shifted to Hogan’s “Appassionata,” swooning saxophones and Hogan’s own voice electrified the room. Gently, the sound retreated, and Hogan leaps into instruction, honing on the timing of the conclusion and consulting with Loeb.
“We’ll all be stressing about it endlessly until we’re actually there and performing,” Hogan said, fidgeting with his navy fedora before placing it on the piano that he played through rehearsal. “I find that this band, regardless of whether we’re over-rehearsed, under-rehearsed, or just-right rehearsed, this band usually steps up when it’s time. When the backs are against the wall, this band rises to the occasion.”
Loeb said several students, including Hogan, worked freelance gigs in addition to their performances with the ensemble and classwork at the university.
“He is a major artist,” he said of Hogan.
“Appassionata” is similar in style to jazz legends Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, a connection Loeb said he hoped judges would observe in the piece.
Their first play of “Appassionata” at the rehearsal was just the second time running through the piece, said Max Marquid, a graduate student and baritone sax player.
While getting his undergraduate degree, Marquid performed at Lincoln Center, though this will be his first time performing at the Jack Rudin Jazz Championship, he said.
Since then, Marquid said he has learned that identifying precisely what the players can improve on in early practices strengthens their sound closer to the performance.
“This will be the first time I’ve really gotten to travel with this band,” Marquid said. “I’ve been to New York once before and to be able to get to go again, it’s very exciting.”
During the ensemble’s final piece, “Rockin’ In Rhythm,” the sax, trumpet and trombone sections left their seats to play, but senior Amy Crosley was positioned on the xylophone, her third of three percussion instruments she will play in the set. In “Appassionata,” she uses jazz brushes to soften a snappy snare; in “2/3’s Adventure,” her hands are on the bongos.
While rehearsal does not stop often, it does for the nitty-gritty — for the one mistaken note, plucked out by Loeb or Tanouye and smoothed into the correct one, Crosley said.
“Dave and Nathan have such a clean ear,” she said. “There are some points where they’ll hear a chord and be able to pinpoint exactly who’s a little sharper, who’s a little flat.”
Senior sax player F J Rodriguez said “2/3’s Adventure” is a departure from typical Ellington-style songs and articulation, both of which he said he had been studying to prepare for the competition. He sees it as a modern take on the familiar jazz sound found in “Rockin In Rhythm,” for example, he said.
“I think it’s very important to have the music be authentic, to be able to re-create it and then be able to manifest it in your own way,” he said. “Traditionally, Ellington is more based in swing and stuff like that, so having “2/3’s Adventure” kind of be a different style, I think it’s important for us to also explore that.”
