Hidden underground on Sunset Boulevard is an intimate supper club called the Catalina Bar & Grill. This is where devout jazz fans go to see a great show in Los Angeles. Since it opened its doors in 1986, the venue has hosted countless jazz greats such as trumpet virtuoso Dizzie Gillespie, percussionist Max Roach, and nine-time Grammy-winning composer and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.
Tonight, four young UCLA musicians will follow in these legendary footsteps and perform on that same stage. The Macha Quartet is made up of third-year jazz studies students Mark Einhorn on saxophone, Terry Goldberg on drums, Charlie Domingo on bass and Adam Shumate on piano.
Goldberg and Shumate met when they were placed in a combo together their freshman year. They started playing with Domingo last year, and eventually Einhorn joined in. This year, the four of them requested that their professor put all of them in a combo together, allowing them to get school credit for their songs. They come up with original arrangements of jazz standards such as Miles Davis’ 1950s hit “Walkin'” and Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” from the 1930s musical “The New Yorkers.”
All four say that what they love about playing jazz is the interaction between musicians.
“It’s really cool to be playing with people you’re really close with,” said Einhorn, who has been playing jazz since sixth grade. “Jazz requires a lot of emotion, and you get a sense of someone’s inner self through their playing.”
Einhorn wanted to play drums, but he was too tall, so his teacher got him hooked on saxophone. His height may have made him ill-suited for drumming, but it was good for basketball, Einhorn’s other great love. While playing on his high school basketball team in Calabasas, he was offered a scholarship to play at Florida State University, but a shoulder injury forced him to change his plans, which he thinks benefited him in the long run.
“The faculty (in the UCLA jazz program) blew me away,” he said.
The jazz studies program used to be part of the music department, but is now a concentration within the ethnomusicology major ““ a situation that not everyone is happy with. Jazz studies students get just four hours of private instruction per quarter, as opposed to the 10 hours that music students get, according to Domingo. However, things have been improving since the Herb Alpert Foundation’s $30-million donation in November 2007 and the subsequent creation of the Herb Alpert School of Music. The new school encompasses UCLA’s departments of ethnomusicology, music and musicology and entails a shift from an emphasis on music history and theory to a more balanced approach to practical knowledge and music scholarship.
The members of the quartet agree that the professors are the program’s main asset. Most of them have enjoyed very successful performing and recording careers, and are now lending their expertise to teaching a new generation of jazz talent. Lecturer Clayton Cameron and Professor Kenny Burrell have been especially important mentors for Macha.
“Kenny has amazing ears,” Domingo said. “He’ll pick up on little details you’d never think to change, and it’ll make an awesome improvement.”
Domingo, who is from Boston, fell in love with jazz during a summer camp stint at the Eastman School of Music between his junior and senior years of high school.
“My senior year was a crash course in jazz,” he said. “I stumbled my way into a UCLA audition, and I guess they liked what I did.”
Besides the appeal of UCLA’s faculty, Domingo came to Los Angeles because he plans on pursuing a career in music after graduation. So tonight’s show, which will feature his original arrangement of “Pure Imagination” from “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” represents an important first step to breaking into the scene. The venue also places the quartet in the company of the greats who have played there. Goldberg, who grew up in Los Angeles, has long been familiar with Catalina’s reputation in the city’s jazz community.
“It’s a great sense of achievement to be playing at the greatest jazz venue in L.A.,” he said. “People would kill for this gig.”
In middle school, Goldberg started playing saxophone in the jazz band but switched to drumming because he “thought the guys who played drums were way cooler.”
Though he’s come a long way since then, performing still gets his adrenaline pumping.
“It gets me so excited when there’s an audience,” he said. “It’s part nervous, part excited.”
Einhorn agreed.
“It’s very stimulating, it makes us play way better,” he said.
With this opportunity, the members of the Macha Quartet are excited to perform together for the first time on an off-campus stage, and they hope UCLA students will join them tonight in this historic Hollywood venue.