The Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective is a loose assemblage of well connected jazzbos that flex for an annual festival. Usually held in the spring, this one took over the final weekend of the longest month of the year. I’ve seen such luminaries as Randy Weston (at Toads!), Dave Holland, Jason Moran. Recently, the emphasis has been on emerging talent, young lions so to speak. Nate Smith and Kinfolk, Dezron Douglas, and this years offering, Patrick Bartley are all new to the scene.
The afternoon show starts with a set by the students. Piano, bass, guitar, drums, clarinet, and dueling saxes made up the septet. A disparate group of nerds might birth a future lion, more likely a behind the scenes, Yale-educated, inhabitant of the music teaching or business world. A capacity crowd at Sudler enjoys their offering.
The beauty of highlighting emerging talent is to see new directions in jazz. Dezron Douglas shared the stage with Phish and Patrick Bartley has the notion of fusing video game music with jazz. A self-deprecating intro has Bartley describing his slacker youth as a video game obsessed anti-student. His suffering grades would inhibit entry to such a prestigious school but, here he is. He polls the audience as to their familiarity with video games. 62 year old me is in the minority, with absolutely zero knowledge or interest in the genre. The set is fascinating as the quartet blows through Pokémon, Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, and others. Having no baseline for the tunes, I am pleasantly surprised by how complex the renditions are. Mario has a distinct tradjazz feel while Final Fantasy feels like a film score. The other players were also jazz visionaries. William Schwartzman on piano, Wallace Stelzer on bass, and Dom Palombi on drums capably handled their roles. Turns out that Patrick is Grammy-nominated and has played with Wynton Marsalis, Jon Batiste, Emmet Cohen, Herbie Hancock, and Carole King. Lead jazz nerd seemed Asian-American and met up with Patrick in Japan, a hotbed of video game music I assume. There has always been a push-pull relationship between tradition and the notion of “music” with jazz roots. I am happy for the existence of the YUJC who continually shine a light towards the future.
