Undergraduate / Common Application Main Essay about Peer Interaction In Jazz [3]

"When we get to this line, play as quiet as you've ever played in your life."

"Chris, you have to play to balance with the section. Right now I think you're too loud."

Advice from my teachers? Sure. But in this case, my teachers were my band mates.

Throughout my school career, I've always been challenged to be better. Of course, teachers offer a constant flow of advice and criticism, but the words I've taken most to heart have been those of my peers. And because of that, I've never made more progress in any class than I did in one six-month stretch of school last year. I'm not talking about getting better at essay writing or raising my test scores, or even understanding calculus (I still don't get it sometimes). The progress I speak of came as the lead alto saxophone player in my high school's jazz ensemble, and it was driven largely by my peers.

Every year, the Garfield band sends audition tapes to Essentially Ellington, the most prestigious high school jazz competition in the country. An initial pool of nearly 100 applicants is narrowed to 15 following a blind adjudication by a panel of judges. The day we were read the acceptance letter to the 2009 festival was a combination of unrestrained jubilance tempered by our awareness of the magnitude of the task at hand. "Listen to me closely," our conductor cautioned. "It's time to work." With a sly smile he slipped an unfamiliar sheet of music on to each of our stands. It was the saxophone soli to Perdido, as arranged by Clark Terry, a trumpet player in the Ellington band. "I dug this out of the back room. We're going to add it on to our arrangement." I saw daunting strings of eighth notes and triplets dancing along the page. It was definitely time to work.

From that point on, every day in jazz was a sectional. Gone were the days of playing cards in the practice rooms, forever replaced by thorough and endless repetition. The four other saxophone players and I would sit in a circle of music stands, facing each other to maintain a balance of sound between our instruments. Our initial relationship with the music was rocky. We consistently missed the same notes in the same places, and our comprehension wasn't improving.

So we took it slowly. I would count off the piece at half-tempo, the soaring eighth notes now walking along at a more manageable pace. "Stop, stop," one of us would say, holding up a hand. "I think we can play with greater dynamic contrast leading up to the bridge." "Articulate more obviously in the fifth measure," another would interject. This sort of discourse arose again and again, more ideas coming with each successive playing of the piece. Sometimes we would "loop" the part, starting over immediately after finishing, until we were so sick of the notes that we wanted to tear the pages in half. Without fail, however, we sat down again the next day to work out the arrangement again.

The reason this sort of interaction worked for me is that advice from peers triggers something deep inside me, something that can't be reached by a teacher's comment in red pen. Advice from peers is personal, and there's something about getting a tip from someone who is trying to reach the same goal as myself that makes their criticism really stick.

As our saxophone section stood up on stage under the lights at Lincoln Center in New York City after an eight bar intro from the rhythm section, the music no longer scared me. After so much time together, the wrinkled sheet and I had grown to accept each other. I no longer found myself with my eyes glued to the page. Our saxophone section confidently looked into the lights of the Rose Hall stage and just played.

Not to brag, but we swung.