At the Willis Sound recording studio, 20 minutes outside of Ann Arbor jazz students experienced the feeling of creating a record.
“I thought it was fantastic,” the CHS jazz teacher Jack Wagner said. “I was excited to see the kids get excited about the situation. I was excited to see their excitement when they went back into the booth and listened back to themselves.”
After the May 13 concert at the Ark, the program went into full focus preparing for the trip to the studio. The classes spent collective hours with metronome work to strengthen their rhythm and tempo consistency. The effort to sound great as a cohesive group became the main concern of the classes in the weeks leading up to the recording.
Wagner described taking a group of anywhere from 18 to 20 kids to the recording studio over the course of nine hours. Each of these kids was in one of three bands, Red in Blue, Tonal Disregard and Oto.
“Sister Sadie”, “Detroit”, “Effie” and “Nardis “ were four of the songs that Tonal Disregard band member Oliver Jacobson played at a recording studio on Sunday, May 26. The songs played by Jacobson’s combo are set to be released on CHS Jazz’s latest album, along with two other Jazz IV combos. The stakes were high for the young musicians, as even a single mistake would be amplified with each re-listen to the recording.
“I would say that it was stressful,” Jacobson said. “I was pretty scared of making a mistake and forcing everyone to get mad at me and restart.”
All three combos finished their sessions with a variety of completed recordings and a proud sense of accomplishment and community. The album will be available soon and is a milestone in the CHS Jazz program and a look into what the jazz program is all about.
Some of the members of Oto, one of the Jazz IV band combos set to play at Willis Sound, rehearse as a quartet in preparation for the recording. The quartet consisted of Nathan Leung, Shanon Kawata, Keegan Malestein and Will Militzer.
“I was blown away by how they didn’t get freaked out by the pressures that that moment can offer a lot of people,” teacher Jack Wagner said. “They had ice water in their veins.”
