The New School’s fall 2023 Jazz Ensemble Season has just begun, allowing students to showcase what they have learned this past semester. Ensembles at The New School take many forms, but all consist of students at the School of Jazz, are either directed by a professor or the students, and perform to a live audience to showcase what they’ve learned. New ensembles such as Guitar Duos, Indian Music, NYC Composers, Vocal Jazz, and Gospel Chorus are all slated to begin in the next week, finishing with a Coltrane concert on December 10.
Besides Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, “we run more ensembles than any other school in the country,” Dean of The School of Jazz Keller Coker said.
On Sept. 22, the first ever Psychedelic Rock and Soul Ensemble was held in Arnold Hall, a preview of shows to come in the season. Formed and led by New School Professor of Music, Dirk Freymuth, the group—composed of three singers, a rhythm guitarist, a trumpet player, two drummers, a bassist, a keyboard player, and an electric guitar player—led the audience through an hour of music made between 1966 and 1974. By the end, the group had an audience of 30-so people up on their feet dancing to covers of songs by Jefferson Airplane, Vanilla Fudge, Jimi Hendrix, and more.
Freymuth, a classically trained guitarist who specializes in Celtic music, has taught at The New School for almost five years. This year, he began teaching on a full-time basis at The School of Jazz– overseeing the audio production minor, teaching recording and production classes, as well as teaching music history classes and directing various ensembles. During the spring 2023 semester, Freymuth’s history of American pop music class included a week’s section dedicated to psychedelic rock and Woodstock.
Spurred by student interest, he began compiling songs to be used in an ensemble, inspired by the psychedelic scene— “something so unique, not just the music, but the whole cultural shift,” Freymuth said, who then decided to widen the horizon on the ensemble, not just limiting the music to psychedelic but also including soul music, an important corollary to the movement.
“Music was so much a part of [the movement],” he said. “There were a lot of things to it, and so I tried to find a wide variety of styles of artists, you know, that’s why I didn’t just call it a psychedelic ensemble. ”
During the concert, the band sailed through songs such as “I Call My Baby Pussycat” by Funkadelic, “Lucifer Sam” by Pink Floyd, “Maybe” by Janis Joplin, and “I Walk on Gilded Splinters” by Dr. John. The three vocalists—Mel Carrullo, Lily James Roberts, and Wanyana Njuki—harmonized beautifully, less concerned about copying the singers perfectly and more interested in following the band throughout the free-flowing, hour-long show.
“Dirk’s not a vocalist,” said Njuki, a fourth-year at the School of Jazz, “So he wasn’t super nitpicky, except on getting our harmonies right, so it didn’t sound gross and clash. Everything else was kind of our style.”
Njuki has been singing her whole life and has participated in ensembles at The New School in the past, including Motown and R&B. She stunned the crowd in a rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Spanish Castle Magic,” which she also auditioned with to get into the ensemble.
At The New School, ensembles count for class credit, but students are required to audition in order to get in. “Most students are in more than one ensemble,” Coker said, “when I say most, it’s like, two thirds are in more than one performing group.”
Being able to perform in an ensemble every semester can help create more of a community for the 10,000 jazz majors at The School of Jazz. The New School’s small ensemble model ensures that more musicians are able to perform, showing off what they learned in quartets, duos, and trios, performances that add up to about 90 each semester.
“That’s, in a way, how all of the elective ensembles at the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music function,” Coker said. “They continue to create and enlarge and reflect the interests of the musical community at large. It’s kind of built for this anyway, you know, everybody has the opportunity to participate.”
After auditions, the group started rehearsing right at the beginning of the fall 2023 semester for five weeks, three days a week, for two and a half hours each day. Since the concert was held so close to the beginning of the school year, the band only had eleven rehearsals, which meant that everyone was required to learn their parts as quickly as possible and be flexible to music and setlist changes.
Freymuth chose all the songs, which is typical in an ensemble, rearranging until he had a show as void of interruptions as possible, adding jams and transitions to curate more of a psychedelic concert feel.
“We really had to work on those transitions and connecting songs together,” Freymuth said, “and just knowing, you know, we’re going straight into this one straight into this one, which I had never done before.”
During the show, the band fed off the electric feel from the three singers who danced at the front of the stage. The show had only fully been practiced twice before the performance, but the band sounded like they had been playing together for years, smoking through a setlist performed to perfection. “I’m actually going to go and see if we can perform it at a club somewhere, because it’d be great to have a couple more cracks at it,” Freymuth said.
The ensemble finished after one performance at Arnold Hall. But Freymuth is currently working on a Laurel Canyon-themed show for next semester, and Njuki’s senior performance is approaching, which will include one of the drummers she met during this ensemble.
The Psychedelic and Soul Ensemble set a standard for breaking down barriers – to create ensembles that are not strict. “The directors, in particular,” said Dean Coker, “are always trying to get the ensemble so that it feels like a professional experience or it feels like a non-school experience at the same time.”
Thanks to Freymuth and the rest of the ensemble, for one hour on a Friday night, the fifth floor of Arnold Hall was transformed into a palace celebrating cherished psychedelic and soul music of a past generation, blissfully revived by the current one – setting up the fall 2023 season of ensembles sure to impress any attendee.
The New School’s fall 2023 Jazz Ensemble Season is on view from Nov. 27 through Dec. 13.