Anyone who’s talked to me lately has probably heard me complain about the Jazz History course I decided to take this past quarter as an “easy GE.” It’s not a bad course, but the long lectures, sheer amount of reading required, and constant listening assignments (Airbuds recently informed me that I’m the #1 listener to Tom Turpin on the app) pretty much turned me away from the entire genre entirely. However, a singular assignment changed my view on jazz completely.
For this specific assignment, I had to attend and analyze a live jazz performance. This led me to leave my dorm and brave the pouring rain with two of my classmates, where we spent our Saturday night at Vibrato Jazz Grill, a restaurant and live music venue located fairly close to campus.
The performance that night was from The Amanda Castro Band, a band specializing in jazz pop, big band and vintage latin inspired performances. Although the venue had a $20 cover fee and a $45 per person dining minimum, watching the live performances from either the bar and the back of the venue was completely free, perfect for broke college students like us.
The band played an hour-and-a-half set with jazzed up renditions of popular music that everyone knew as well as jazz classics that I had recognized from class. To my surprise, I found out that having an extensive knowledge of jazz history and structure made the performance much more enjoyable and I found myself recognizing several patterns and songs from my lectures as they played.
Amanda Castro and her band were incredible, and the energy in the room was electric. Moments of audience interaction and times when everyone stood up and danced, made me sad to see the experience end. On the way back, my friends and I talked about how much fun the performance had been and how glad we were to have gone despite our initial fears of dreading having to spend time completing this assignment.
Later that week when I was working on my analysis I realized that my opinion of jazz had completely shifted. It’s one thing to sit in a lecture hall and analyze song form and 12-bar blues in listening assignments, but it’s entirely another to witness a live performance. I had been to concerts before, but those were for artists whose music I had already known and loved. Nothing compares to the energy of life performances, and that night at Vibrato Jazz Grill was not only entertaining, but transformative in how I viewed jazz and the class that I had been complaining about.
The experience made me realize how lucky I am to attend a university that prioritizes education outside of the classroom and how fortunate I am for that university to be in Los Angeles with its never ending plethora of new experiences and art surrounding me. Going to UCLA has allowed me to have experiences I would have never had back home. I can guarantee that in my hometown I would have never voluntarily gone out with my friends to go see a jazz band, and that even if I had wanted to I wouldn’t have been able to find a performance to attend. Thanks to my Jazz History course I can now say that I’ve had the pleasure of dressing up and enjoying a free live jazz performance in Bel Air and that I’m already thinking about going back for another performance.
Moments like this remind me why I chose UCLA in the first place. In my first quarter here I’ve already been pushed to so many new and exciting experiences that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else and with over three years still ahead of me, I can’t wait to see what this school and city has in store for me next.