The Tech Jazz Singers was started in the fall of 1995. Rosemary McNaughton '97 had been in a vocal jazz group in high school and was disappointed not to find one here at MIT. Solomon Douglas '96 had never been in a jazz choir before, but wanted to. So, the two of them got together with Josh Goldberg and Janis Stipins (two of Solomon's bandmates in the MIT Jazz Collective), and decided to start one up.
Originally they thought they'd just do a small choir, maybe five voices and a rhythm section. They sent e-mail to several carefully-chosen mailing lists asking for volunteers. The response was tremendous! So great that they expanded their concept; instead of just five singers there would be twelve to sixteen.
Open rehearsals were held at the end of the summer to give people a chance to try out vocal jazz and for us to hear their voices. A core group of people emerged who consistently attended; to these people a few more were added throughout the semester, and by our first concert in Decemeber we had thirteen singers, three instrumentalists, and a director.
Solomon did a lot of arranging and transcribing, but the bulk of our initial repertoire came from outside sources. We got a lot of great arrangements from a friend of Solomon's who was in the jazz choir at Willamette University (the Willamette Singers). The director of vocal jazz at UNH, Chris Humphrey, sent us some arrangements too. Professor Edward Cohen (of the MIT music department) gave us an arrangement of Ellington's ``Satin Doll'' that he wrote. We're also doing Billy Strayhorn's ``Take The `A' Train,'' which he wrote and arranged for the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1941. We're using his original arrangement, with words written by Jon Hendricks to all the sax, trombone, and trumpet parts.
We were featured in the Arts Page of the December 6, 1995 issue of Tech Talk; you can read the text of the article online.
Our first public performances were in December 1995: on December 8 in Kresge we joined the Festival Jazz Ensemble for the MIT Jazz Bands concert and performed a short set, and on December 10 in Kresge Little Theater we did our own winter concert, alongside the MIT Jazz Collective, whose members all belonged to the Jazz Singers as well.
Our concert went well; we did ``All Right, O.K., You Win,'' ``Airegin,'' and ``Farmer's Market,'' arranged by David Cazier, as well as ``Beautiful Dreamer'' arranged by Ron Harris, ``Emily'' arranged by Gene Puerling, and the above-mentioned arrangement of ``Take The `A' Train.''
Last updated - Jan. 14, 1996