Julliard Jazz Quartet Extravaganza

Jazz is such a wonderful genre of music. In my opinion, it is the ultimate musical style you can express emotions and feelings through orchestration and personal playing style. The boundaries of Jazz are extremely loose, leaving massive room for personal touch within the music. As a jazz musician I can vouch for these opinions. When I’m on stage about to improvise with either my guitar or saxophone, the moment before playing I realize what I do next is completely up to me. This is not very common in other genres of music. When I’m taking a solo, the voice of the instrument and my creative spark become one, and it is a truly epic experience.

When I found out we were going to see the Julliard Jazz Quartet, I became super excited immediately. I love going to see jazz, and a quartet comprised of Julliard’s Jazz professors would definitely prove to be interesting. I thought they picked a great variety of music, choosing songs that counteracted each others’ emotional overtones as well as musical style. I specifically liked the Thelonious Monk piece “Nutty” and the ballad “For Duke”. The saxophonist had a strong, smooth tone that bounced up and down arpeggios like it was nothing. The drummer was the obvious leader of the band, his syncopation rhythmically delicious and his intensity inspiring. The piano player was a grand accompanist, with a Monk-esque style that created beauty through dissonance. The bass player was damn solid, and his tone was comfortingly warm. He didn’t showboat like some Jazz bassists, and always kept the time, which is the most important task.

We discussed in class how the quartet thanked the crowd for coming to the show, showed their appreciation for our open minds and even went as far as to say “they love us”. To some, this might be a strange notion, that men you’ve never met in your life before could love you simply for listening. As a musician, I could not agree more with the quartet. Whether they like it or not, the audience is a very crucial player in the success of a performance. When you’re about to solo, you can feel the eyes of the crowd over you, and you can feel their anticipation in a glance. You try to come off as cool and collective, but inside you’re about to explode with emotion and passion. You feed off of the crowds’ a gasped mouths and widened eyes. their emotions become entangled with your own, and all of a sudden music is flowing through you and you’re not even sure where its coming from. That is why the quartet can so abruptly fall in love with the audience. Every performance is different than the last. Different people, different temperaures in the room, different clothes, different emotions and thoughts, different air humidity, different pasts and futures. This all plays into the success of a performance, guiding the music and its musicians through the here and now.