The vanguard of summer: Students explore jazz through research, original music

“One, two, three, four!” With a snap of the fingers and a quick beat tapped out on piano keys, six Furman University students begin rehearsing an original jazz arrangement, notes melding in harmony.

The music swells, filling the air with dynamic tunes punctuated by a note of laughter and the scribble of a pencil as they pause, workshop a measure and start again. The sounds belie the bright rehearsal room and invoke the feel of a New Orleans jazz club — dimly lit and cozy — as the ensemble’s layers of sound harmonize.

The musicians – pianist Miranda Hartnett ’26, trumpeter Charlie Smith ’25, drummer Joe Bricker ’26,  Ethan Ropp ’26 on bass and two saxophonists, Jacob Banasiewicz ’27 and Augustus Hedden ’27 – are conducting summer research at Furman with the music department, composing and arranging pieces to rehearse and eventually record and perform throughout the 2024-2025 academic year.

Smith, who’s majoring in music performance, has been playing jazz since the summer after sixth grade and plays in every Furman musical group he can: this jazz ensemble, the orchestra, the marching band and the brass quintet.

A popular misconception is that jazz lacks rules, but Smith said the method to the music isn’t random improvisation. Jazz songwriters pen melodies and layer chords under them “to make the melody make sense,” Smith said. “When people are improvising, that same harmony is being played and you are matching ideas to the harmony.”

For Smith, jazz means freedom: “the ability to be creative that you can’t really find in other forms of music. Even if I’m playing things I’ve already practiced, I’m choosing how I play them. It’s really individualistic.”

This group of students is one of several ensembles that rehearse during the academic year, but are the only ones conducting research over the summer. Matt Olson, the Charles Ezra Daniel Professor of Saxophone and Director of Jazz Studies, and Matt Dingledine, music lecturer at Furman and co-founder of the Greenville Jazz Collective, are sponsoring the program and working with students to refine their tunes.

Olson said the smaller jazz combinations are a laboratory for students to improvise beyond written compositions. “One of the things that is the hardest for young students to do is to feel comfortable trying to write music,” he said. This research allows them to experiment and explore, with “the freedom and the space to safely take the risks that are involved in writing new music.”

He said composing is a challenge. “It can come easy, if you’re lucky at the right moment,” Olson said, “but oftentimes, you’ve got to really work at it and you have to be in the right headspace at the right time thinking of the right thing, and the right ideas have to come together and make sense.”

Every week, each student brings an original tune or a rearranged piece for the group. Smith said each player will explain it, play it through and give feedback, asking questions and suggesting changes.

Smith said he’s loved playing and composing with this jazz ensemble and getting to know each musician as a friend.“When you’re playing a lot with someone, it gets to the point where you don’t really have to say anything,” he said. “At some points you just communicate musically, which is a super important thing to me.”

Olson and Dingledine share listening assignments and join a rehearsal once a week, offering feedback without the pressure of results beyond experimentation. “This is very much about them growing and learning,” Olson said. “I’m trying to make sure that we preserve the purity of the experience for the students.”

He said a unique element of jazz is swing, “a rhythmic feeling” which Olson describes as an “undulating feel that is the underpinning of the music” where the eighth notes become uneven depending on the context, tempo and players of a piece. “Jazz music has this esoteric, unexplainable component to it that makes it interesting,” Olson said.

Smith said he hopes this project will reinforce the vitality of jazz today. “It’s great to see Furman students who may not really know much about jazz at all. When you think of jazz you think of the super old, like 1960s, 1920s,” Smith said. “We’re just trying to show that jazz is still around and young people are still playing.”