Jazz is becoming the new standard

Music student Matthew Jenkin has UNSW’s G16 Jazz Collective to thank for his immense passion for performing jazz, a genre which was typically left out of his electric guitar repertoire during high school.

The 21-year-old who is originally from NSW’s South Coast confesses he is an “alternative-rock guitar player learning to play jazz”. He has smoothly transitioned from performing alternative-rock music in school to jazz and rock fusion after joining UNSW’s intermediate jazz performance group in 2015.

Matt has also started a new project with a group of UNSW students, Doll Holiday, which incorporates jazz-influenced styles often to create an alternate rock fusion.

“It’s my favourite class to go to” says Matthew of the G16 Jazz Collective, whose mentor is Sandy Evans, renowned saxophonist and award-winning composer. Since joining the group, which practices every Wednesday during the university semester, Matt has mastered a huge amount of jazz standards, discovered a number of unexplored jazz genres and gained confidence in performing this beautiful and complex genre of music.

“We play really diverse music, from 1910’s Dixieland jazz right up to really modern jazz pieces”. The Jazz Collective showcases their abilities each semester at UNSW’s Io Myers Studio, performing songs such as Chet Baker’s brooding It Could Happen to You and Dexter Gordon’s swing classic Fried Bananas.

The band usually consists of a drummer, bassist, pianist, three saxophonists, a vocalist and two or more guitars. The band’s size fluctuates each semester due to the variety of postgraduate and undergraduate musicians leaving and beginning the Performance Lab course, however Matt claims this never deters from the musical quality of the band: “it works really well because no one has an ego…there’s no shortage of people”.

Matt began playing guitar when he was 9 years old, with his father teaching him various Neil Young songs and encouraging him to attend guitar lessons weekly. During high school he was involved with a number of alternative-rock bands and he continued his study of music all the way to Year 12.

During his HSC, Matt performed a number of jazz-inspired pieces for his final performance and was nominated to perform at the Board of Studies’ Encore which is held annually at the Sydney Opera House. He remains passionate about the seemingly limitless subject of music and continued his studies at UNSW and is currently completing a Bachelor of Media and Music.

Being a part of the G16 Jazz Collective has been immensely rewarding for Matt and has helped him develop musical skills he previously could not obtain from the HSC’s music course. He says that learning ‘bebop’ jazz is the most rewarding thing he has learnt from Ms Evans and his band members. Bebop jazz is perhaps one of the most difficult genres of jazz music, incorporating mismatched ‘lucky notes’ which do not typically exist in music scales. Matt says that bebop is “like relearning the guitar”.

Despite learning so much from being a part of the G16 Jazz Collective, Matt says he still has a long way to go before mastering jazz, although having such an important input in the band makes his studies much easier.

Matt believes that “learning not to overplay and learning to work with other musicians” is one of the biggest lessons he’s learnt from the band.