Did you know the Engineering faculty has its very own student-led jazz band? I was given a chance to sit down and find out about the exciting events coming up for this contemporary big band.
Q: Could you introduce yourself ?
I’m Matthew. I’m from With Respect to Time, Waterloo’s engineering jazz band. Currently, I’m in the role of media outreach. Before that, I conducted for about two years.
Q: You have an exciting event coming up, the Battle of the Bands, what is that?
The Battle of the Bands, that’s something I started planning back in January because I was actually going through all of your guys’ archives searching for any mention of us, which is how I found out that it’s our 20th anniversary. And alongside that, I found an old video on YouTube from, I think like 2012 or 2008. It was a long time ago of us doing a battle with U of T at their student union pub. It’s called SUDS, I think.
I thought it’d be so cool to get tons of different schools together. I reached out to practically every school within the GO Bus network. And then our conductor last term, Ricky, reached out to the rest. This term we have U of T’s Eng Jazz, Mac’s Eng Jazz, and Trent coming. Laurier sadly can’t make it, which I was pretty sad about.
Q: So you guys have an end of term coming up, could you tell us about that?
We do it every term, I think since the band started, so 2005. We’re going to be holding it in the Bombshelter Pub. We’re going to be playing through all our usual songs. We might have a band at the halftime show. We’ve been doing that every now and then, but we’re not fully certain. It’s also recorded; all of our past ones are on YouTube.
Q: What else does the band do?
Other than that, we do a bunch of different stuff throughout the term. We try to keep it fresh, keep the band like 50% music, 50% social. Trying to keep in mind that people are engineers. So this term we’re doing weekly watchthroughs of Cowboy Bebop because our main song is Tank, the intro to that anime. It’s free for anybody to attend after practice.
Also, we’re probably going to be doing karaoke this term at Revive, based off the suggestion from GradComm. We’re going to try and do that with the Water Boys (of the A Cappella Club). Having people there that are singers should help. They gifted us a mixing board, so that’s nice.
Q: How big is the club, by the way?
This term right now it’s around 30 to 40. But for registrations, we had to close the form after 80 because our practice room can’t fit more than that. A lot of interest in joining the band, which is great. It means I’m doing my job as outreach! But it’s also sad because we never want to actually turn away people.
Q: What sort of people are you looking for in the club?
Obviously, if you play high school level jazz music, that’s sort of the level that we’re looking for. We have had people ask, can you teach us? And it’s sad that we don’t have the resources. We also try to not turn away any instruments. However, if you join with, say, a piccolo, you might have to rewrite some of the music yourself. Speaking on that, we have been trying to rapidly expand our exec team. We used to just have a conductor and an admin. Now we have an admin, 2 conductors, and then as volunteer roles we have audio execs. We are trying to get videographers and looking at getting composers. If you’re interested in learning how audio stuff works, we’re always looking for people to help with running that during the show, actually getting the sound that goes on YouTube and then mixing it afterwards, making sure that it sounds nice. Having someone controlling the camera would be good too.
Q: Where and when do you guys meet? How much of a commitment is it?
We practice every Sunday, 4:30 to 7-ish, and then we perform for the end of term concert. We ask that if you can’t make it to the end of term concert and most of the practices, then that’s sort of like not the best fit for the band. That’s all the commitment that we asked for. It’s based around having a timetable of engineers.
Q: What are the concerts like? Jazz can sometimes be seen as something quite formal.
Although it is the engineering jazz band, our shows are made up of students, and our conductors are students. If you think back to your high school jazz program or club, the type of music that was being played is the stuff that your 50 year old conductor would listen to. Sure there’s some hits, but you listen to what somebody’s listening to on their headphones, it’s not always the Beatles.
There’s more modern stuff mixed in. We have the hits, like Tank from Cowboy Bebop. We’re doing Snake Eater from Metal Gear Solid 3. We’ve done Bob-omb Battlefield. And most of our hits are the more modern stuff that people like us like. So although we are the Eng Jazz Band, it’s more of a jazz in the sense that that’s the instrumentation that we use. We do play jazz, but it’s mostly, I’d say, just big band music. We don’t really stick to the, I’d say, your grandpa’s jazz, even though I’m definitely a big fan of Frank Sinatra.
If Matthew’s captured your interest as he has ours, you can find out more about the club on their website (engjazzband.ca)!
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