Out of the darkness: A practice room underneath Hales Gym.

For three decades, Oberlin’s jazz students have competed with rancorous aerobics classes and intramural basketball games when practicing or rehearsing in their secluded Hales Gymnasium home.

“We’re doing the best we can, but we need something similar to the Conservatory, with practice rooms, storage spaces and concert halls,” said jazz trumpet professor Marcus Belgrave.

But now, if the Conservatory’s new proposal is approved, they may get their wish.

The Conservatory is looking into renovating Crane Pool, which is on the northern edge of the Hales Gymnasium complex behind the Cat in the Cream, and converting it into a space that would be suitable for jazz studies.

The jazz department has two floors on the south side of Hales, having moved there shortly after its inception in the 1970s in order to avoid competing with classical musicians for space in the Conservatory. Since then, the jazz department has grown considerably.

“Right now we have 14 groups sharing three rehearsal rooms,” said bassist Nate Brenner. “There’s just not enough space.”

“We have a very significant need to improve the space for jazz studies,” Dean of the Conservatory David Stull said. “The jazz program is extraordinarily successful, with a world class faculty and a very high level of student enrollment and it really needs to have an appropriate space.”

But the project is still caught up in the preliminary planning stages.

“At this stage, the project itself has not been approved,” Stull said. “We are in the process of hiring an acoustician and an architect to give us an estimate of what this would actually cost.”

Assuming an architect is picked and funds approved, renovation would then commence on various parts of the building. The shell of the building itself would have to be renovated and the pool needs to be covered to create a platform. Numerous other issues, such as heating, air conditioning and peeling paint and plaster would have to be addressed.

Once those issues are resolved, the Conservatory is looking to buy a series of modular rooms, designed to be acoustically appropriate to the needs of the jazz department. This flexible space could be used to create rehearsal rooms, practice space or offices as needed.

“This is potentially a very good solution because just renovating the shell and buying rooms is the least expensive way to do it and it allows us to fairly easily design the space any way we see fit,” Stull said.

The modules have an additional advantage, transitivity.

“If there was a new building built by the Conservatory, the space could be reclaimed by just moving the modules out,” Stull said.

Stull, however, stressed that a new building was not going to be built in the near future.

“Right now, the Crane Pool area is the best space that we can imagine for the Jazz Department,” he said.

Most jazz students are excited about the potential move, if only because they view any change as an improvement.

“Everybody is happy about the move,” said saxophonist Samantha Yarbrough. “What we have now is unacceptable.”

“It would be nice to be nearer to the Conservatory, drummer John Wagner said, “but this is the next best thing to having a new building built.”

Although enthusiastic about the proposal, some students were cautious about how quickly the project would actually be completed.

“They’ve been talking about a new space for the jazz department since I was a freshman,” Wagner warned, “and I’m a fifth-year now.”

Stull was more optimistic.

“We’re very hopeful that this will happen sooner rather than later and that we will get a significant space need resolved,” he said.