The Cultural Affairs Commission is back with another quarter of its Kerckhoff Coffee House Concert Series, in which student performers take the stage each Monday night to perform for a public audience on campus. Opening tonight will be fourth-year jazz studies student and vocalist Nina Hadzi-Antich with the accompanying guitar of third-year jazz studies student Robert Andrew Jr. “Chili” Corder. The duo will be performing a combination of classic jazz songs and jazz variations on contemporary music. Vocalist Hadzi-Antich spoke with Daily Bruin’s Brendan Hornbostel about building a set around an audience and the strength of the duo’s simple lineup.
Daily Bruin: How do you describe the music that you’ll be performing for the concert?
Nina Hadzi-Antich: Basically, (Corder and I) have performed around the west side (of Los Angeles), Santa Monica area for about a year now, and we do a lot of jazz standards, but we also have been doing jazz covers of popular songs. So it’s kind of a mix of the old and the new in a way. But definitely, our music is jazz.
DB: When you’re putting together a set, whether for this concert or another performance, how do you mix the jazz standards with the jazz covers of contemporary music?
NHA: Well, where I get the song ideas from is (mostly) my own studies, because I am a jazz studies major … I might come across an old standard I’ve never heard before and just really want to perform it. And a really cool thing that we do is we reharmonize tunes. Jazz standards have a specific kind of chordal progression, and it’s very easy to play with by adding … extensions of the chords, just changing the chords where it’s still the same song but it sounds very different.
And for popular tunes, generally speaking, they’re not as complex as jazz tunes are. So it’s easy to mold them into a jazzy kind of setting, by just simply changing the chords.
DB: What kind of venues do (you) usually perform in? And how does the Kerckhoff Coffee House compare?
NHA: The venues that we have performed at have mostly been bars. … Now we’re trying to get into a couple of places in Beverly Hills where they have live jazz music with dinner. We’re trying to break into that Beverly Hills scene. … We haven’t done coffee houses. This is like our first performance on campus, so we’re really excited for it.
DB: How is the preparation different from performing in bars to performing in a coffee house on campus?
NHA: Basically the same approach. One thing that we do is we have a loose set structure of the songs that we want to perform, and we also have other songs that we know. And we feel the crowd. You play a song or two and you see, ‘Are they digging it? Are they not digging it?’ And based on the response, we’ll pick our set that way. It changes all the time.
If you have a crowd that is mostly young people, they might not want to hear a bunch of jazz standards, they’re going to want to hear a cover. But if you’re playing for an over-50 crowd, jazz standards will definitely be more appealing. But it’s all about feeling your audience and trying to serve them as best as possible.
DB: As a singer in a guitar-and-vocal jazz duo, do you find it more freeing or restrictive than a traditional, larger ensemble setting?
NHA: I prefer a smaller setting, because it’s really focused only on two people. It’s not focused on an entire band. Only two people need to solo … It’s a very personal setting, and I feel like it’s a great way to express myself in a small setting like that.