Jazz Fest Concert Report

The day was Saturday, February twenty-seventh, 2010, and I went to an all day jazz fest at the Missouri State University campus. When I looked it up I had the assumption that it was going to be concert of professional musicians, but when I got there I was surprised to find out that the musicians were high school students. This didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the program. I actually was stunned to hear how well these high school kids played. The Missouri State jazz band also played, but I seemed to enjoy the high school bands more because the MSU jazz band seemed too loud, not that the volume was loud, but there was too much going on and the high school bands seemed to play more smoothly.
Jazz is a direct descendent of the blues even though it has many different influences. Jazz started in America in the 20th century. It hailed mostly from New Orleans because of its wide ethnic diversity. Jazz blends everything from blues, swing, military bands, ragtime, gospel, and even sounds from Africa. Jazz has been through many changes since its start. It has branched out into many sub-categories such as acid jazz, Latin jazz, and fusion jazz, which blends jazz into everything from funk to rock. This variety of musical syncretism helps a large assortment of people to connect with the music and really enjoy it.
Traditionally jazz bands have a pretty wide array of instruments that make up the arrangement. Each band that I saw had a different set of instruments that they worked with. They were all similar though. All the bands had aerophones such as trombones, trumpets, clarinets, flutes, saxophones, and soprano saxophones. It is very traditional in jazz music to have horns; they give the music a more full sound. Most of them had electro-chordophones like electric guitar and electric bass. Traditional jazz bands would not have had electric instruments in them, but more and more the electric guitar and bass are being fused in with jazz music. They had regular chordophones as well, with the piano and stand up bass, which you will find in most jazz bands. The instrument that they all had in common was the drum set which is a combination of membranophones, the bass drum and toms, idiophones, the cymbals, and the snare drum which is both a membranophone and an idiophone. It is said that jazz was the first genre of music to incorporate a traditional drum set like we see in almost all popular bands today. There was one band that had a metal xylophone, which is an idiophone. This band also was the only band that used voices as part of their performance. They didn’t actually use any words; they just used their voices to complement the instruments.
The tone color of most of the jazz bands that I saw was smooth and inviting. This made the bands easier to listen to. They were polyphonic in structure, where all of the different instruments were playing different melodies. The rhythm that was used was in a quadruple meter. This was true for all of the bands. The only thing that I wished would have happened was that there would have been more improvisation instead of reading from sheet music. They were very structured in that way.
Many social institutions were represented in this concert. The campus of the university was the most prevalent one because that is where the concert was held. The high school and college bands themselves were social institutions: they had a conductor, who picked the music, and the musicians, who played the music. Then the social institution of the audience receiving the music of the bands was represented. The audience was mostly made up of parents, I’m assuming, and kids supporting their competition or their friends that they go to school with. This jazz fest was a competition which is also a social institution. These institutions helped to shape how the experience was received by everyone who attended, including me.
Each band had their identity. They all were dressed uniformly, each band having a different uniform, which made the bands separate in the visual aspect of the show. The identity of the composer came through in the music. In most cases the composer seemed fun loving and peaceful. One of the reasons that jazz is able to fuse with so many different kinds of music is because of the different ethnic groups that came together to create the genre. Yet the bands that I saw were pretty low in cultural diversity. Most of the people were Caucasian. If I were to guess what the performers’ economic status was I would say that the majority of them were upper middle-class because I’m pretty sure the performers have to buy their own instruments, and all of the instruments looked very nice. There was one thing that I noticed that struck me as somewhat odd, when the Missouri State jazz band performed. There were people whose ages varied greatly; some of them were as old as me and some of them, I would guess, were in their fifties playing on the same stage.
The section in the book that best coincides with the concert that I went to would have to be Indian Hindustani music. Both have a certain structure that they follow, but embrace improvisation as a key portion of a performance. Jazz and Hindustani music both blend together with many different kinds of music from all over the world to create new and exciting genres of music.
Overall I enjoyed the time I spent listening and watching the jazz concert. It was an interesting new experience. That I will always remember. I took my grandma with me to the show and she fell asleep in the stadium chair which was pretty funny. I said earlier that high school bands in my opinion were better than the Missouri State jazz band because the high school bands played a more traditional form of jazz. This made it sound a lot smoother.