Not Your Parents’ Jazz Band

The Jazz Ensemble at Grinnell is not your typical college jazz band — it’s much more. Students learn to play by ear, improvise, and create their own arrangements. And the band includes instruments rarely heard in college jazz bands, such as clarinets, harps, strings, and more.

“We have a very eclectic group of music-makers,” says Associate Professor of Music Mark Laver, who is also director of the Jazz Ensemble. It’s partly by necessity — Grinnell is a small college, and sometimes there aren’t enough musicians to fill all the chairs in all the different ensembles.

But that creates more opportunities than problems, Laver says. “We pretty quickly turned what initially felt like a real obstruction into a rich opportunity.”

Laver says this “problem” presented an invitation for him to think more holistically about the large jazz ensemble tradition in the world outside academia. The Grinnell Jazz Ensemble performs music from many different parts of the jazz tradition.

For instance, in spring 2023, visiting scholar Christy Jay Wells taught a swing dance class before a Jazz Ensemble concert so audience members could dance their way through the music of Chick Webb, who famously led the house band at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s. The band has also recently performed music by Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus, both of whom worked with large eclectic ensembles.

“We do a lot of improvising in the group — much more improvising, I think, than is typical for collegiate jazz bands,” Laver says.

“We also do most of our learning by ear,” he says. Again, this was by necessity, but it opened a wealth of opportunities. Most collegiate jazz bands buy the same music from the same music publishers, written for the standard jazz band instrumentation: four trumpets, four trombones, five saxophones, and the rhythm section. That just didn’t fit the available musicians at Grinnell.

So, Laver had to develop a different way of learning and performing for his ensemble. First, Laver chooses the music for the upcoming concert. Next, he either learns it by ear himself or assigns it to a student, who will learn the piece by ear and then teach it to the group. “It’s a great way to cultivate that skill, which is widely neglected in music education,” Laver explains.

Many students are hesitant about playing by ear, at least at first, Laver says. “There’s this kind of mystique around learning by ear,” he explains. “[Many people believe that] it’s something that you have, or you don’t, and that’s not true.”

Laver adds, “There are very concrete ways that you can practice that skill and get much better at it. The rapid improvement students make feels a little bit magical in a way, but it’s because they’re practicing something and getting better at it.”

Playing by ear diversifies the musical genres the band can engage with. Laver says it also means that more musicians playing different instruments get to participate. For instance, he currently has two double reeds in the ensemble — an oboe and a bassoon. “I don’t want to overstate it, but It might be unprecedented in jazz history,” Laver says.

For prospective students: if you love jazz, Grinnell just might be the perfect place for you — especially if you rarely see yourself represented in typical jazz ensembles!