UTD Faculty Concert: How Insensitive

On Saturday night, the UTD faculty and staff played different songs they had been working on for the students and to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the school. While I enjoyed pretty much all of it, I really enjoyed Jobim's How Insensitive. The song itself is a slower jazz tune with the melody handed over to the electric guitar, in this case a hollow-bodied one.

In my discussion of music, performers, audience, and time and space, I will go in a bit of a backwards order. The time and space, like most formal concerts was during the night of a weekend. As usual with these concerts, it was played in an acoustically treated large room with a stage and a large amount of seating. The audience also acted as normal in this type of concert, just clapping in between songs as the main focus in this type of performance is on the music, with a small focus on performers.

The performers themselves all did quite a bit of pulsing along with the beat of the music but otherwise were pretty much completely stationary. The music itself on the other hand was extremely complex. It started out in a very slow groove, with the guitar providing relatively slow melody in parallel octaves, with others playing jazz accompaniment. After a few bars the guitar started doing much faster runs in jazz scales, and the drums went from the quite rim clicks to more complex patterns on the ride cymbal as well. This faster energy continued at this same tempo until the end of the song.

As a quick side note, the concert made me realize i dont know enough jazz, which is very close to blues in many ways, so I am pursuing learning jazz guitar thanks to the UTD faculty and staff.