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With the end of the academic year rapidly approaching, music students at the University of Manitoba are keen to show what they have learned over the past year. For students in the Desautels Faculty of Music’s jazz program, that demonstration of new knowledge and skills will come in a variety of forms over the next couple of weeks.
“The thing I’m always looking for is how much ownership the students have taken over the material and how they’re running with the ideas that we all give them,” said trumpet instructor Jon Challoner in an interview on Morning Light about how he looks at evaluating student success. “That’s the thing that is really inspiring to see, particularly at the end of the year.”
The end-of-year events for jazz students get started on April 3 with a presentation by the University of Manitoba Jazz Orchestra at the Desautels Concert Hall at 7:30 p.m. In addition to featuring pieces by master composers like Hermeto Pascoal and Mary Lou Williams, students have also contributed their own original compositions and arrangements to the proceedings.
"Every year, we find that by the time we get to the end of the year, students have written a lot of music,” Challoner explains, “and sometimes, they’ve already written it for a full jazz orchestra.”
One special element in this year’s student compositions was the way in which the pieces reflected the wide cultural diversity of the orchestra’s musicians. “I realized that we had all of these student and alumni compositions that all sort of dealt with the cultural backgrounds and personal backgrounds of the students,” says Challoner, who highlights music from Brazil, the Philippines, the Caribbean and Ukraine that will add to the evening.
The wide array of ideas, cultures and interests within the jazz department will also be reflected on April 7 at 1 p.m. at the U of M’s Music Library in the first-ever Jazz History Colloquium to take place at the school. Challoner notes that the idea for this event was born out of a similar idea to the jazz orchestra show to give students more opportunities for self-directed learning and expression.
“I didn’t want these projects to just, you know, be sent to me and get marked and then go into nowhere. I wanted to find a way to document them and present them,” Challoner elaborates. “We’re mostly looking for students to find something they connect to and then go as deep as they can into a very, very small and very directed subject.”
In the midst of all of this, jazz students are also preparing for their small ensemble concerts, which will take place on April 9 in the Desautels Concert Hall and the previous day at the Centre Culturel Franco-Manitobain as part of their Mardi Jazz series.
“By the time we get to the end of the year, we see an enormous amount of growth in student compositions [and] student arrangements,” says Challoner of the small ensembles, which operate on a partially self-directed, partially advised basis. “They’ve all learned their ensemble and what makes it original, and so, I always really like the end of the year concerts with the small ensembles at school.”
A complete list of happenings in the Desautels Faculty of Music’s jazz department can be found at the school’s website.
