The intermittent melody of the piano filled the Schoenberg Hall classroom as fourth-year jazz studies student Julian Le worked on his latest assignment.
Le will depart for Europe along with two other jazz studies students, second-year trombonist Jonah Levine and third-year bassist Owen Clapp, to begin their tour as UCLA jazz ambassadors.
These three Bruins will be giving private and public performances in Lyon, France, Tirana, Albania, and Geneva, Switzerland and will be joined by drummer and former UCLA exchange student Philip Maniez, who is in his first year of graduate studies at the Paris Upper Conservatory.
Levine said that this European tour came about after meeting and playing music with Maniez at UCLA last year.
“(The tour) started out as more of a casual thing, but then we started talking about it more seriously and seeing if it was possible. Over the summer, we worked hard on getting gigs and contacting as many people as we could,” Levine said.
The trio managed to put together a proposed program for the trip and have received sponsorship from the Herb Alpert School of Music and Friends of Jazz at UCLA. The European tour will run from Tuesday through Dec. 23.
According to Clapp, the group will be performing a selection of American jazz classics and some holiday selections, as well as original compositions by each member of the group.
“We are actually playing at the American embassy in Albania during a Christmas party for the ambassador. We will be playing some of Duke Ellington’s arrangements of Tchaikovsky’s “˜The Nutcracker Suite,'” Clapp said.
Le said that the group will also try to document its experiences online during the trip using sites such as Tumblr, Facebook and YouTube to chronicle its attempt to bring jazz music to an international audience.
“We have heard from a lot of our professors that the French crowd is very enthused about jazz, so we are excited to be able to play for that type of audience for the first time,” Le said.
In addition to their musical performances, Clapp, Le and Levine will also be teaching and giving workshops for high school music students.
According to Levine, the jazz ambassadors have already had some experience with teaching jazz that will help them during this European tour.
“One of the first gigs we ever did together was for a class, where we played a few songs and then answered a lot of questions from the students,” Levine said.
Le said that their experiences teaching music privately will also come in handy during the instructional portions of the trip.
Each of these musicians said that they became interested in pursuing jazz from a very young age, which fuels their interest in working with future generations of students.
According to Le, this trip will be an opportunity to bring American jazz to Europe and help younger students delve deeper into the practice and study of this genre.
“Music is really what you make of it,” Le said. “There is a lot of opportunity out there, and we are making the effort to get out, travel and take it to another level.”