Today: Mar 28, 2024

Faculty members come together to put on jazz performance

Sofia Rositani  Reporter

The Art of Trio was a jazz-filled performance by professors David Chevan, and Rex Cadwallader at Southern. Despite this event not having a large mass of people come to the event, those who did go were pulled into the music.

Chevan and Cadwallader have been doing this event at Southern since 1993. They always have a guest performing with them whether it be a singer, saxophone players, drummers, or trumpet players.

Jazz originated in New Orleans in the late 19th century and early 20th century and was created through two other genres of music the blues, and ragtime. It is known as “America’s classical music.”

A few big jazz singers are Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington.

“It’s always different kinds of jazz, and we call it intimate jazz well, because three is a nice small number so it’s kind of like classical chamber music except we do jazz,” Chevron said.

The singer for the event was music professor, Irene Senedak. She said she has been performing since she was a teenager, but has been singing jazz for 15 years. Her favorite part about singing, she said, is being able to share musical ideas with people.

“It’s a great opportunity to perform and get to know faculty I never played with them before, so it was really a great opportunity to music,” she said.

However, jazz is a genre that is dying, according to Yale Daily News.

“In 2014, Nielsen reported that jazz garners a whopping 1.4 percent of music consumption in the United States. Jazz’s most recent and popular representations in ‘Whiplash’ and ‘La La Land’ claim it’s dying. And perhaps, this is true. For most people, jazz is sadly irrelevant,” it stated.

The event had a very low turnout, which the performers joked about even though they said they were upset about it.

Chevan and Cadwallader said they have been doing this event for years and each year the amount of people in the audience gets smaller and smaller. The only people who were in the crowd during the performance was a couple that is friends with the performers. Even though there were not many people there, they made the best out of it and performed popular jazz songs, including a French song for one of the last performances.

“I enjoy the challenges and the fun the challenges present so when I play with Rex,” Chevan said. “I know a song like a road map and he knows a song like a road map and I love the magic moments when we follow that roadmap in similar ways so he plays an idea and I’m finishing it or I hear something, and we play it arrhythmically together and neither of us has spoken to each other or just so in sync with one another and that just gets me so excited and so full of joy when those happen.”

He also said he works with so many great people that he constantly has those “wonderful” moments with them. Despite the low turnout, Chevan was optimistic. “I don’t play for the people who aren’t there,” said Chevan. “I only play for the people who are there.”

Photo Credit: Izzy Manzo

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