NU-JAZZ FUSION ROCKS CENTENNIAL HALL!

(UA band director Jay Rees fronts his own jazz group)

Every musician with serious chops knows the drill – concentrate on playing, or turn to teaching. Jay Rees studied jazz at the University of Miami then headed straight for the left hand coast, taking along his bass to get lots of recording studio work and “do the young struggling musician thing in Los Angeles.”

Then Rees took his game to the next level, becoming director of the marching band at the University of Arizona in 1995. Before you could wave around that conductor’s baton too many times, Rees had his 200-plus uniformed student musicians marching mightily to a rock ’n’ roll beat, playing music by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins and Pink Floyd. Many in the football stadium agreed this band had become The Pride of Arizona for the 21^st century.

Earlier this year, the Collegiate Band Directors National Association (“Like the NCAA, but for college bands,” said Rees) named UA’s marching band one of the nation’s Top Five.

“They don’t rank the bands numerically,” Rees added, confident his band is the best.

Still…Rees was a musician before he was anything else. The desire to be a player never really goes away. So an idea began glowing in the back of his mind. What if there was a band of great players who could also teach workshops and clinics.

Basically, they would be a group of musicians that could do it all. Memories drifted back from college and those early years in L.A. He remembered hanging out with guitarist Frank Browne and drummer Andrew Hix, both now finding great success as musicians and clinicians in their own right.

“I called them first, and they were for it,” Rees said. Then he started looking around.

Kelland Thomas is a professor with the UA music faculty, famous for his amazing jazz chops on sax. Chad Shoopman, a UA grad from the 1990s, is a trumpet playing mainstay for Disney World in Orlando. He is also a respected brass teacher in the Orlando area. Those guys got the next calls from Rees.

Percussionist Michael Faltin and Rees’ own son Evan on piano and keyboards completed the lineup as all the other pieces of Rees’ dream began coming together.

“I started working on the music in 2008,” Rees said

“I had a grant to bring the guys here to teach, so that the students could also watch and learn how we recorded an album.”

By September this band was in the recording studio, calling itself Sylvan Street and mulling over what to name the joyful jazz noise they were making.

Start working on your own definition Sept. 10 when Sylvan Street appears in concert at the UA campus big house, Centennial Hall. Joining Sylvan Street for this event are special guests Moises Paiewonsky, trombone, Robin Horn, drums, and Jeff Haskell, piano.

The performance is billed as “Nu-Jazz Fusion Rocks Centennial Hall!,” the capper for another student-based outreach program. Rees says more than 400 high school students have been invited to attend a day of UA outreach classes in jazz performance on Sept. 10, given by the members of Sylvan Street. Then the teachers get on stage for the concert, proving they are also players.

“It’s a concept we’d like to take on the road in the future,” said Rees. The concept begins with morning and afternoon jazz classes, followed by a concert at night. Rees wants to call these events “A Day of Jazz.”

“We are talking about it to people in Houston and San Diego,” he added.

As for what the music of Rees and Sylvan Street really sounds like, you know how all musicians hate any kind of label.

“We didn’t try to have a specific sound,” Rees explained. “We wanted to avoid being pigeon-holed.

“There is some rock-fusion in it, but there is also a standard jazz ballad.”

The official combination of ingredients listed in the Sylvan Street liner notes is “jazz rock Latin funk.” Bending a bit to marketing pressure, Rees says they decided to call it Nu-Jazz, which Wikipedia describes as a blend of jazz and other elements such as “funk, soul, electronic dance music and free improvisation.”

Other writers have referred to Nu-Jazz as fun jazz, because of its emphasis on the songs rather than the instrumental solos.

Sylvan Street’s concert in Centennial Hall on Sept. 10 at 7:30 p.m. is open to the public. Tickets are $9, $7 and $5, on sale at the Fine Arts Box Office, 520-621-1162. For details, www.music.arizona.edu