For years, college musicians hooked up to jam through the ubiquitous “musicians wanted” fliers you’d see around campus. More recently, Craig’s List put a minor dent in that practice (you still see those signs around), while players have devised all kinds of other paperless ways to find each other.
In New Haven, the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective sets up jam sessions, workshops and free bi-weekly concerts around town through their own website, which hosts a directory of members and bands, instruments, skill levels and preferred styles — anything from swing, standards and bebop, to experimental and, well, “all of it.”
And this weekend, Feb. 20 to 22, the Collective holds the Third Annual Jazz Festival at Yale, with performances by saxophonists Matthew Clayton and Jane Ira Bloom, trumpeters Takuya Kuroda and Josh Bruneau and the Rosetta Trio. It’s their big, free, yearly blowout, and it’s getting bigger every year.
“Yale doesn’t have a formal jazz program,” said Alexander Dubovoy, a junior history major and pianist from the San Francisco Bay Area who currently serves as president of the Collective. “This is a way to get to know each other. There’s a lot you can do with music here.”
While weighing different college options, Dubovoy briefly considered studying jazz in a conservatory setting, but ultimately decided against it. “I figured [liberal arts] would be a better decision for my music and me as a person,” he said. When he arrived on campus three years ago, he wasn’t sure how to find other jazz musicians. “There weren’t ambassadors at that time to tell people what the music scene was like.”
The Yale Underground Jazz Collective, Dubovoy said, had existed for years before Dubovoy arrived on campus, but not much was happening with it. “We kind of re-founded it my freshman year,” he said. “My whole time at Yale, there were groups of people who really wanted to make something out of the organization. There were so many musicians who wanted to build a community here. The human resources were there; it was just a matter of putting it together and convincing people who already play music to get involved.”
Pianists Vijay Iyer and Cory Henry and percussionist/composer Andy Akiho performed during the first two festivals, when musical happenings were scattered around campus. That’s still true, but less so: Clayton’s Friday night concert (8 p.m.) takes place at Saybrook Underbrook, a cozy basement theater space that holds 75; on Saturday, Kuroda (4 p.m.) and Bloom (6 p.m.) perform back-to-back at the School of Music’s Sudler Recital Hall (200 seats); while Bruneau’s Septet (8 p.m.) heads to the 9th Note, a jazz club on Orange Street.
The Rosetta Trio, with bassist Stephan Crump (a longtime member of Iyer’s trio), acoustic guitarist Liberty Ellman and electric guitarist Jamie Fox, closes the festival on Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Yale University Art Gallery.
“They’re an innovative group,” Dubovoy said. “They have a timbre we think will meld nicely with the visual art.”
