As I entered Finney Chapel last Saturday night for the Oberlin Jazz Ensemble’s concert, I was excited to hear a performance that was neither an orchestra performance nor an organ recital.

However, as the concert progressed, I was surprised and disappointed by the lack of energy among the performers.  Even in works as exciting as Charles Mingus’s Haitian Fight Song and Muhal Richard Abrahms’s Fanfare III, in which one would expect the players to be jumping out of their seats, electrified by the music, the ensemble sat quietly reading their charts.

Director Wendell Logan epitomized the low energy of the performance.  For virtually the entire evening, he stood still on stage and occasionally tapped his foot or pointed to an instrumental section.  He thanked the audience for coming in such a way that implied that, as Logan stated, they “had better things to do.”  Worse, he admitted that even he “didn’t want to come [to the concert].”

With regard to the music itself, the best moments were in works such as Haitian Fight Song and Dizzy Gillespie’s Con Alma.  In these works, one could begin to taste the wild and sexy spice inherent in the music. 

Unfortunately, once individual players came forward to improvise, the quality of the music generally diminished.  Most solos were more experiments in sound effects than truly artistic expressions.  Many players focused on the upper and lower extremes of their registers. The result was a collection of awkward noises lacking any sense of taste or intelligence.  There were, however, some exceptions, which included sophomore Kassa Overall’s dynamic drum solo in Haitian Fight Song, as well as the sentimental solos of senior trombonist Alex Asher and freshman pianist Sullivan Fortner, Jr. in Lover Man.

Yet, the lack of exhilaration that characterized the Oberlin Jazz Ensemble’s performance cannot be wholly attributed to the performers.  The audience on Saturday night was extremely small — totaling only about 100 people.  It is no wonder, then, that this group of young musicians was not stimulated enough to perform with the emotional spirit that jazz demands.  Jazz is, after all, a musical style that feeds off of the excitement in the audience.

Perhaps, then, if the Oberlin community supported the Oberlin Jazz Ensemble by coming to more of their performances, the greatness of this ensemble would be realized.