Despite the complications presented by COVID-19, the Jazz band has still been able to function. During the hybrid schedule, the members meet every Tuesday and Thursday morning. All of the members were in the blue group, so it was easy for them to meet.
The current members include Jonothan Wu ‘22, who plays piano, Mathew Chen ‘23, who plays bass, William Anderson ‘23 who plays vibraphone, and Rohan Mitra ‘22 who plays drums. The band currently plays Tank, and is working towards getting Autumn Leaves in the fall band concert.
In order to make their songs online for the concert, Mitra, a 2 year veteran, and band leader says, “We got a fancy editing software that we are using to make the videos go together, and then we are separately recording our sound. It’s basically how they make a music video.” Reflecting on learning songs online, Mitra says that “we have lead sheets, which basically show what is called the head, but the rest of it is just a solo…so it really helps to play live.”
For auditions, students would send in a video of them playing music and Mitra says that “it worked, we had to deal with recording and people not having good microphones, but we could tell just from peoples computer mics.”
Despite many facets of the jazz band having stayed the same, there were no wind instruments allowed due to the school restrictions. Mitra hopes that in January they can start including wind instruments such as saxophone and trumpet once again.
