Arts This Week: Swinging Into the Future: With UVA Director of Jazz, Sharel Cassity
By Ben Larsen
Dana Sun:
You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville. For Arts This Week, we talked with the UVA Jazz Ensemble drummer, Raghav Vasudeva.
Raghav Vasudeva:
My name is Raghav Vasudeva. I’m a fourth-year neuroscience major, English minor at UVA. I am in the Jazz Big Band. I’ve been playing drums for the last, like, I think, almost 10 years at this point, since I was like 12. I saw this guy that we had, like, a the middle school band did a concert at our elementary school, and there was this one guy with really long hair, and he was playing the drums, and he was like, whipping his hair around. And I thought that looked super cool. And so I was like, I asked my parents if they could get me a drum set for, like, a joint birthday and Christmas present. And they were like, sure. When I first got into drums, I really wanted to play, like, metal drums. Like I was super into, like, Metallica, Anthrax Slayer. That was my favorite stuff back then. I was in the jazz band in my middle school in like, seventh and eighth grade, and so that’s kind of my exposure to it. But when I really started getting into it was when I broke my leg, so I couldn’t use my right leg to, like, play the kick drum. So, in trying to find something that I could play, I started getting more into jazz music, where it’s like mostly right hand and left foot that are doing the heavy lifting. So I didn’t need my right foot as much for it. The reason I transferred to UVA, I was at NYU freshman year, and there were not a lot of opportunities for me to play drums. So I came to UVA with the intention of joining the Big Band or auditioning for it at least. My senior year of high school, I skipped class once to meet John Dearth, and I sat in on one of his jazz improv classes, and I think I saw the Big Band play that year, and I thought they were really, really crazy good. And so when I was thinking of schools that I might transfer to, UVA was definitely top of the list because of the opportunities to play drums. Big Band is different from the small group in the sense that I think there’s a lot more attention given to like, the interaction of the parts between musicians, like the written out parts, how the like saxophone section blends with itself and blends with the other the horns and blends with the rhythm section, whereas in small group, we’re thinking more about how the improvised elements are interacting with one another, instead of the ink on the page, how that’s being played and how that’s interacting. That’s mostly what Big Band’s focusing on. And there’s a lot more focus on the horns section, too. In small groups, you’re not really hearing people talk about play with this kind of sound. Its things are more open to interpretation in the small groups. With the Big Band, since it’s such a large number of people, everything’s got to be a lot more coordinated. When John Dearth was the director, it was kind of all over the place. We’d get just anybody who wanted to solo would solo. Sometimes he just like point at people and have him solo. With Professor Cassity as the director, it’s usually kept at two or three solos per song. She comes from a more, a much more academic Big Band background, and I think in the spirit of that, she’s keeping the structure of the band and the structure of the songs to be more concise, instead of going on forever and ever. We’re playing nine pieces. It’s all tunes that Professor Cassity has played with Big Bands in the past. She’s an alto player. She’s really killer. She came to our small group one time to play. But in any case, we’re playing Roy Allen, which is a Roy Hargrove tune, Sound for Sore Ears, Big Band arrangement of Night in Tunisia, a tune called Miss BC, a tune called Pennies from Heaven, a tune that she wrote, actually, called Surrender, playing an arrangement of Autumn Leaves. We’re playing a song called Backwards Step, and then we’re playing something called I Ain’t Got Nothing But the Blues. Out of those, I think my favorite’s Roy Allen, it’s got, like, a funk, chill, like backbeat thing going on, and I really like that. The concert is on November 22 at 8 pm. I am so excited for it. I can’t wait.
Dana Sun:
The UVA Jazz Ensemble presents: “Swinging Into the Future, introducing UVA Director of Jazz, Sharel Cassity, on Saturday, November 22 at 8 pm in Old Cabell Hall. Tickets can be purchased in advance at artsboxoffice.virginia.edu, or at the door one hour prior to the concert. Arts this week is supported by the UVA Arts Council in Piedmont, Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater, and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu. For WTJU, I’m Dana.
