Date Posted: Aug 1, 2016 –

Last week, after years of lobbying for a deeper involvement in jazz at Yale School of Music by interested undergraduates, Dean Robert Blocker has announced Yale is moving in the direction endorsed most recently by the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective, a vocal student coalition. Blocker has assigned Prof. Thomas Duffy to reconstitute the Yale Jazz Ensemble open to all students and has hired Wayne Escoffery to teach an improvisation course. The Collective are “confident” that this initiative marks the start of a transformation in Yale’s music curriculum and an expansion of opportunities for performance and academic study of jazz at Yale.

The Yale Jazz Messengers are a quartet of undergraduates and recent graduates of Yale University who came together because of their common love for jazz and their lack of opportunity to explore their musical passions within their own school. Dismayed by the absence of a formal jazz program at Yale, these four musicians became leaders of the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective, a student run organization that creates a space for jazz performance and appreciation on campus. Throughout the year the YUJC runs a biweekly concert series, hosts jam sessions and masterclasses for students, and lobbies for a jazz curriculum within the university. The group also puts on the Jazz Festival at Yale each spring.

Litchfield Jazz Festival, having heard of challenges facing these avid jazzers and knowing musicians are never happier than when they are playing, invited the Yale Jazz Messengers to appear on the 21st annual Litchfield Jazz Festival’s Second Stage at Goshen Fairgrounds, Goshen, CT, on August 7.

Vita Muir, the festival’s founder and director was keen to boost the spirits of these young musicians, hence the inivitation.  “Ordinarily, slots on our Second Stage are reserved for students of Litchfield Jazz Camp.  But this was a special situation and needed addressing in a creative way.”

Muir finds the music department at Yale curiously out of step with trends in music now. On a national level, the foundation Chamber Music America who distribute grant funding and awards to musical groups and individuals, have included jazz as a co-equal segment of chamber music for over two decades.

The CMA website poses the question “What is chamber music?” and answers it this way:

“..chamber music (is) music composed for small ensembles, with one musician per part, generally performed without a conductor. The term once referred only to Western classical music for small ensembles, such as string quartets. But today chamber music encompasses myriad forms, including contemporary and traditional jazz, classical, and world genres.” And, they put their money where their mouths are.

“Other university and graduate programs, even Ivys like Princeton, have jazz as a regular part of their music curriculum,” Muir said. Muir herself is a recipient of a number of CMA awards including their CMAcclaim award which brings national recognition to individuals, ensembles, or organizations whose work in chamber music has had a significant cultural impact on a local or regional community.

A member of the Yale music faculty, Thomas C. Duffy, who has himself worked as a volunteer with jazz students at Yale, was quoted in a New York Times article by Philip Lutz (8/28/15) as saying, “The (music) department would have to adjudicate whether they want chamber music credit to be given to jazz groups.” The dean of the Yale School of Music, Robert Blocker, took it a step further away from what is familiarly called America’s original music and was quoted in the same article saying, “We train people in the Western canon and in new music.”

So where does this leave the Yale undergraduates interested in jazz? “We want to push Yale as a university to ultimately welcome jazz as a curricular offering alongside classical music in both the music department and the School of Music,” according to Alexander Dubovoy a recent graduate and first president of Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective.

Dobovoy, a pianist from the San Francisco Bay area, will appear with Yale jazz colleagues, for their first appearance as the aptly named Yale Jazz Messengers.  The group includes New York born guitarist Jack Lawrence, who, coincidentally studied as a youngster at Litchfield Jazz Camp, the festival’s educational arm. Jack advocates for the preservation of jazz in New York and on the Yale campus and has worked at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.  He was coordinator of the 2017 Jazz Festival at Yale. The group’s drummer Colum O’Connor, is a Brooklynite of Cuban heritage who has played major New York clubs as a member of Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Latin Fat Cats. Bassist Hans Bilger rounds out the group.  Bilger grew up playing country and bluegrass with his family band in Brooklyn. He graduated from Yale this year with a degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Jack Lawrence, the group’s unofficial spokesman, says “I am very excited this is happening!”  Muir seconded that.

The Yale Jazz Messengers will appear on the Litchfield Jazz Festival’s Second Stage on Sunday August 7 at 1:30.

For tickets and information visit call 860-361-6285 or visit www.litchfieldjazzfest.com.

Yale Jazz Collective website