Editor’s note: This is the third in a weekly series exploring the diverse music scenes in Athens.
When people think jazz, they tend to think back to the ’20s when big bands and swing jazz dominated the music scene with iconic artists such as Louis Armstrong. Little thought is given, however, to the new style of modern jazz.
“It comes back to the argument of what is jazz,” said Matt Urminski, bassist for Elemental Groove Theory. “To many people, jazz is the sort of thing where they hear it and know that’s jazz or that’s not jazz, but it’s a very subjective thing.”
The Ohio University School of Music has four jazz groups where students perform the standards of the genre or take classes pertaining to the history or theory of jazz.
The school also tries to collaborate with high schools, the Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium and Uptown bars with events such as Jazz Fest in order to better connect with the community.
“We do a lot with a little as far as the jazz program here,” said Matt James, director of jazz ensembles for OU. “We don’t have a lot of faculty to teach it but there are a lot of programs for students to take advantage of.”
However, there tends to be a disagreement between the classical jazz performed by the school and the groups that play Uptown on weekends.
Jack Gould, saxophonist for Sassafraz, said that this debate has been ongoing between the older traditionalists who want to bring jazz back to what it used to be, and a new generation that is more progressive.
“They say we need to go back and keep playing old jazz, but they are not into pushing forward,” Gould said. “The younger people are trying to push the boundaries, saying ‘I don’t want to play what John Coltrane or (Charlie Parker) Bird played; I want to be Bird.’ ”
The modern style of jazz is a mixture of all kinds of genres. Sassafraz fuses in rap and funk, Elemental Groove Theory mixes in rock, and The Paul Elisha Band and Mojoflo have a soulful style, but all these bands play up the jazz.
“If I don’t hear that traditional jazz sound, it’s hard to distinguish it as jazz,” said Paul Elisha, lead singer of The Paul Elisha Band.
He said that none of the bands who regularly play Uptown — including his — are not true jazz and that they would all probably admit to that. The scene in Athens is rather a modern take on jazz-funk and other incarnations of the genre.
Elisha also added that Athens does remarkably well in the jazz scene given the size of the town, and it’s hard to compare Athens to a big city like New York that has the capacity for traditional jazz groups.
But Urminski said that all you need for music to be jazz is a lot of improvisation and artists playing off each other.
“There is a certain amount of planned chaos that happens,” Urminski said. “No one knows exactly where it’s going to go, but good musicians can find the path to get there.”
wh092010@ohiou.edu
