Take Five, Look Twice
I have a theory about school performances. We show up, we clap in the right places, and we leave having confirmed whatever we already believed about the people onstage. We are, as audiences go, profoundly unserious. Jazz Night at the American Club on April 17th asked me to reconsider that.
There’s a guy in my AP Chem class who, as far as I knew, existed mostly as a quiet half-presence a few seats ahead of me. The kind of person you have filed, categorised, and promptly forgotten. But on Friday night, at the Galbraith Ballroom, he stood up and showed me how mistaken I was.
I’ve walked past these musicians a thousand times. In the hallways between classes, at lunch, in the ordinary traffic of a school day that flattens everyone into their most legible version of themselves. I thought I had a reasonably complete picture of who they were. Two and a half hours later, I realised I really didn’t.
The annual tradition pairs Jazz Band and SAS Singers under the direction of Mr. Jay Longren and Ms. Nanette Devens. And let me be clear about the conditions: the ticket runs $80, the food is mediocre, and the venue is more of a banquet hall than concert hall. None of that stopped the room from filling year after year without fail. What does is harder to explain, and becomes clearer the longer you watch the musician’s faces.
No piece makes that clearer than “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” Alan Baylock’s arrangement of Charles Mingus’s original. It opens on a tenor saxophone solo by Nuea Puranamaneewiwat, and before the first phrase is done, you have stopped listening to the music and watching him. Eyes closed. A small furrow at the brow. The slow side-to-side rocking of someone completely elsewhere. The music casts the room in the 1940s film noir, all slow-motion tension and shadow, but what I couldn’t shake wasn’t the atmosphere. It was the face of someone who had genuinely forgotten the room. Forgotten the row of parents holding their phones aloft, forgotten the lights, forgotten us; he’d gone somewhere only he and his saxophone could reach.
Later, the ensemble entered less like a transition than a hazy thickening of the air. Instruments bled into one another, breath cohering into something gritty and velvet at once. The brass section leaned forward in union, and the soloists shut their eyes — the unspoken micro-signals of a group that has rehearsed itself to something close to a single body based between them.
The SAS singers brought the same intensity. You could see it in every singer onstage, in their scatting and dance moves, but no performance left such an impact quite like Trinity Leggett’s.
Trinity Leggett’s performance of “I Will Wait for You,” a Mark Taylor arrangement of Michel Legrand’s song from the musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, was without qualification the moment of the evening. Her tone was pure and warm, each note carrying a subtle vibrato that gave each phrase a quiet shimmer. She opened repeatedly into long, sustained notes, the kind of notes that hang in the air long enough for you to actually feel them. Her eyes closed as she leaned into them, head titled slightly upwards, her whole being given over to the notes she was belting out. Then, just as cleanly, the note resolved and for a second, a sly smile broke across her face. You could see, in that half-beat, exactly how much she was enjoying herself. I don’t use the word “effortless” because nothing about this was effortless (more on that in a moment), but it looked like joy, and joy is harder to perform than technique.
Yet, not every piece landed. “Jazz Police” and some of the funkier numbers felt like they belonged to a different room. Loud and loose, the rambunctious dynamic contrasted with the rich and warm, Fitzgerald-esque jazz I had come for. But perhaps that’s the nature of a student showcase. Jazz Night doesn’t cater to one taste because it isn’t supposed to. It is not a polished repertoire designed to please a paying crowd. It is a room where students try genres on, push into unfamiliar territory, and occasionally stumble a few times. The unevenness is not a flaw, but proof that something real is being attempted.
These performances were built in the cracks between AP exam prep, club commitments, and 6PM rehearsals on a school day that does not pause for music. “It’s the one night where everything we’ve worked for is performed for people who actually appreciate us,” says Brian Chen, drummer. “You stop thinking about the notes and just play.”
And that’s how you know what you’re watching on everyone's faces is real. Not talent, or not only talent. Raw passion, harder to fake and rarer to find, and which shows up the faces and body without fail. In the way a saxophonist curves away from the mic stand as if the music is pulling him out of his own posture. In a guitarist’s scrunched, squinting face mid-riff. In the love that hauled them to the band and choir room every day in the first place.
So go next year. Bring a friend, eat the mediocre food, pay $80, and for once, actually look at the people onstage. Jazz Night is the one evening of the school year where your classmates stand under proper lights and stop being who you’ve decided they are. It turns out you didn’t know them as well as you thought. That’s a good thing to find out.